Millennium Nucleus Mobility and Territories
– Movyt

The Mobility and Territories Nucleus (MOVYT) seeks to generate knowledge on mobility practices in the production of territories. The main objectives are to develop concepts, innovate methodologically and influence the design and implementation of urban and territorial policies and interventions related to mobility issues.

Our MOVYT Nucleus adopts a mobility approach to analyse a set of daily practices that group together diverse mobilities, including urban daily mobility, interregional commuting and transnational mobility. These mobilities have been insufficiently incorporated into the urban – territorial planning and intervention systems, generally neglecting the mobile dimensions of everyday dwelling experience. Our mobility perspective contributes to generate new ways of bridging urban and territorial policies and interventions with dwellers’ daily practices, in order to overcome traditional functional and individual perspectives on which urban and territorial planning is based, thus aiming towards an integral approach to territories. Our scientific research is organised in three areas: mobile ways of dwelling; innovative multi-methods in mobility studies; public policy related to urban and territorial planning and intervention.

MOVYT posits a multidisciplinary challenge. Mobile dwelling involves cultural, socio-organizational, physical and material dimensions. These have been conventionally tackled in urban studies in traditional disciplinary manners. Our proposal seeks complementarity in anthropological, engineering, architectural, urbanistic and urban planning perspectives and practices. Multidiscipline becomes concrete through the conceptual formulation and application of multi-methods that foster each other in the definition of object of study, their description and analysis.

The Nucleus is hosted by four institutions: Universidad de Chile, Universidad Central de Chile, Universidad Católica del Norte and Universidad de Concepción. Each institution possesses specific geographic areas of scientific influence that are incorporated as the territories where MOVYT participates: Northern macro-zone (Tarapacá and Antofagasta), Metropolitan Santiago and Bío-Bío. These territories are articulated in the proposal from a comparative urbanism perspective, that tries to construct comparisons based on similarities and differences, allowing for generalisations while at the same time maintaining diversities.

MOVYT articulates existing PhD programmes linked to the participating institutions, while it also proposes setting up a network of collaborators at a national level in the mobility field, searching to consolidate a mobility perspective and its application in diverse territories in the country. Additionally, MOVYT projects itself as a Latin-American reference point in the study of mobilities and territories, promoting collaborative work with researchers and international centres, particularly a those from the Latin American region.