The Shelter That Wasn T There On The Pol

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The Shelter that Wasn't There: On the Politics of Co-ordinating Multiple Urban
Assemblages in Santiago, Chile
Sebastian Ureta
Urban Stud 2014 51: 231 originally published online 3 June 2013
DOI: 10.1177/0042098013489747
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51(2) 231246, February 2014
Article
The Shelter that Wasnt There: On the

Politics of Co-ordinating Multiple Urban
Assemblages in Santiago, Chile
Sebastian Ureta
[Paper first received, April 2012; in final form, October 2012]
Abstract
The concept of assemblages has gained an important degree of momentum in urban
studies claiming to offer a new ontology for understanding cities as emergent and
fluid concatenations of multiple elements. Such a conception, however, has also
been criticised in relation to its supposed failure to deal effectively with the issue of
power and inequality in urban dynamics. This paper contributes to this on-going
discussion by exploring in detail the way in which power was embedded in one particular case: a bus stop shelter located in front of the Biblioteca Nacional in
Santiago, Chile. In so doing, it analyses the controversy arising when two large and
complex urban assemblages share component/s that each of them claims as exclusive. This situation made necessary practices of co-ordination in which a hierarchy
was established between the competing assemblages, involving important transformations in some of its components.
1. Urban assemblages, power and a

missing bus stop shelter
This paper is about a missing bus stop shelter. This shelter should be located in downtown Santiago, Chile. More precisely, it
should be located on Alameda Bernardo
OHiggins, Santiagos main avenue, a dozen
metres from the corner with MacIver Street.
As a replacement there is a single metallic
bus stop sign that indicates that bus lines
210, 412a and 418 stop there. Also, a
rectangular area closer to the street is

located several centimetres above the sidewalk level and covered by grey and white
striped tiles; yet the rest of the structure
roof, maps, seats, etc.is missing.
While telling the story of why this particular bus stop shelter is missing, the paper
will also tell another story; a story about coordination practices between assemblages
Sebastian Ureta is in the Departamento de Sociologia, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile. Email:
sureta@uahurtado.cl.
0042-0980 Print/1360-063X Online
2013 Urban Studies Journal Limited
DOI: 10.1177/0042098013489747
232
SEBASTIAN URETA
enacted by two Chilean public organisations.

The usage of this term is not casual. Deriving
from Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattaris
(1988) concept of agencement, in the past
few years assemblage has gained an important degree of momentum in the social
sciences (Bennett, 2005; De Landa, 2006;
Farias and Bender, 2009; Area, 2011 special
issue 43.2; City, 2011 special section in issues
2 and 34; Marcus and Saka, 2006; Ong and
Collier, 2008). In trying to elucidate the concept, an important starting-point should be
the recognition that
there is no single correct way to deploy the
term, nor does any one theoretical tradition
or style hold an exclusive right to it (Anderson
and McFarlane, 2011, p. 124).
Therefore, instead of a single and consistent

social theory, assemblages should be seen as
part of a more general reconstitution of the
social that seeks to blur divisions of social
material, nearfar and structureagency
(Anderson and McFarlane, 2011, p. 124).
When using the term assemblages, social
scientists are usually referring to multiple
things, from merely a particular research
focus to a completely new ontology of the
social (for a more detailed comparison, see
the table in Brenner et al., 2011, p. 231).
Following the strongest, or ontological,
sense of the term as proposed by Manuel De
Landa (2006) assemblages can be defined as
wholes whose properties emerge from the
interactions between parts (p. 4). Therefore
what defines assemblages as entities is not
their internal wholeness or coherence but,
on the contrary, what De Landa calls their
relations of exteriority (p. 10) or the way
in which the components of assemblages are
not exclusive to them but may be detached
from [them] and plugged into a different
assemblage in which [their] interactions are
different (p. 11); therefore the components
are autonomous; they have agency and
commonly belong to several assemblages at

once. Such exteriority also implies, centrally,
that the properties of the component parts
can never explain the relations which constitute a whole (p. 11). So assemblages are
never fully stable and well-bounded entities;
they do not have an essence, but exist in a
state of continual transformation and emergence. They exist as a process of putting
together, of arranging and organising the
compound of analytical encounters and
relations (Dewsbury, 2011, p. 150). In this
sense, the concept offers the possibility of
grasping how something . heterogeneous
. holds together without actually ceasing
to be heterogeneous (Allen, 2011, p. 154).
Several characteristics derive from this
conceptualisation. First, the notion of
assemblage
emphasises gathering, coherence and dispersion. In particular, this draws attention to the
labour of assembling and re-assembling sociomaterial practices that are diffuse, tangled and
contingent (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011,
p. 124).
Secondly, agency is not located only in key

actors, but largely distributed in several
components of the assemblage whether
human or non-human. Even in the case of
what has been considered the purest locus of
agencyreflective,
intentional
human
consciousnessis from the first moment of
its emergence constituted by the interplay of
human and nonhuman materialities (Bennett,
2005, p. 454).
Thirdly, and because of these multiple agencies, assemblages are always in between what
De Landa (2006, p. 12) calls processes of territorialisation (a relatively defined and stable
identity) and deterritorialisation (a mutable
state, undefined identity). Or, we can say,
they exist but do not exist too much, too
CO-ORDINATING ASSEMBLAGES IN SANTIAGO
solidly; existence is a constant accomplishment not a fact and must be constantly reaffirmed. For this reason
an emphasis is placed on fragility and provisionality; the gaps, fissures and fractures that
accompany processes of gathering and dispersing (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011, p. 124).
Finally, this relational ontology implies, on

the opposite side, that the notion of assemblage involves no outside (Farias, 2011, p.
369). An assemblage has no environment; it
is not submerged inside a general framework
such as a structure or ideology. Everything
that matters to the assemblage is related to it
in some way or other; for this reason they
call for a positive description of their
becoming, not external explanations
(Farias, 2011, p. 369).
From this perspective, cities such as
Santiago can be seen as the sum of multiple
assemblages of people, networks, organizations, as well as of a variety of infrastructural components, from buildings and
streets to conduits for matter and energy
flows (De Landa, 2006, p. 4). Such assemblages do not form wholes or totalities, in
which every part is defined by the whole,
but rather emergent events or becomings
(Farias, 2009, p. 15). Therefore, assemblage
urbanism changes the focus of enquiry
from stable structures that relate to each
other in unequal ways to the question of
why and how multiple bits-and-pieces accrete
and align over time to enable particular forms
of urbanism over others in ways that cut
across these domains, and which can be subject to disassembly and reassembly through
unequal relations of power and resource
(McFarlane, 2011a, p. 652).
Such a perspective allows us to move away

from a notion of the city as a whole to a
notion of the city as multiplicity, from the
233
study of the urban environment to the

study of multiple urban assemblages
(Farias, 2011, p. 369).
However, such a conception has also
been criticised, especially in relation to how
assemblage urbanism deals with the issue of
power and inequality in urban dynamics.
Following Sayer (1992), Brenner and
Wachsmuth et al. (2011, 2012) criticise the
assemblage approach for being based on a
naive objectivism or the belief that
the factsin this case, those of interconnection among human and nonhuman actants
speak for themselves rather than requiring
mediation or at least animation through theoretical assumptions and interpretive schemata (Brenner et al., 2011, p. 233).
For this reason, this approach offers no

clear basis on which to understand how,
when and why . some possibilities for
reassemblage are actualised over and against
others that are suppressed or excluded
(Brenner et al., 2011, p. 235).
Answering such criticism, the proponents
of this ontology claim to recognise from the
start that urban assemblages are structured,
hierarchised, and narrativised through profoundly unequal relations of power,
resource, and knowledge (McFarlane,
2011a, p. 655). The very possibility of emergence of a particular assemblage always
takes place in and through an ontology or grammar of power; a cosmos saturated by forces,
defined by trials and tests, by becomings and
encounters, capacities, articulations, enrolments
and alliances (Harrison, 2011, p. 158).
Given that inequality is not explained by the

recourse to structural argumentations, the
focus on urban assemblages is better prepared than traditional political economy of
cities to unveil the actual practices, processes, sociomaterial orderings, reproducing
234
SEBASTIAN URETA
asymmetries in the distribution of resources,

of power and of agency capacities, opening
up Blackboxed arrangements (Farias, 2011,
p. 370). Along with this emphasis on opening black boxes, the assemblage approach is
useful for critical analysis on the basis of its
parallel focus on potentiality, or how it
shows
not just the possibilities of assembly, but the
possibilities that remain unfulfilled: potentiality exists as a tension between hope, inspiration and the scope of the possible, and the
sometimes debilitating recognition of that
which has now been attained (McFarlane,
2011b, p. 222).
In this paper, I would like to contribute to

this on-going discussion by exploring in
detail the way in which power emerges in
urban assemblages through the in-depth
study of why there is a missing bus stop
shelter in front of Santiagos Biblioteca
Nacional. In doing this, I will change the
usual analytical focus on the emergence of
assemblages to the controversy arising when
two large and complex urban assemblages
share component/s that each of them claims
as exclusive. Following De Landa (2006
p. 9), we could say that such controversy is
between two contrasting totalisations of
each assemblage in which the component/s
under dispute is/are seen as being constituted by the very relations they have to
other parts in the whole. A part detached
from such a whole ceases to be what it is,
since being this particular part is one of its
constitutive properties. It is in the shifting
management of such controversies
sometimes involving a closure, sometimes
remaining open and unstablethat a key
materialisation of power and inequality on
urban assemblages emerges.
In analysing such an encounter I will
bring into the analysis one particular conceptual device that could be helpful to
enhance the way assemblage theory deals

with the issue of power in urban settings:
co-ordination. As Annemarie Mol (2002,
especially ch. 3) has explored in her study
of the treatment of atherosclerosis in a
Dutch hospital, the recognition that multiplicity is irreducible from ontology does
not mean that anything goes. In order for
entities to hang together across sites, a constant work of co-ordination between their
multiple enactments is required to prevent
distribution from becoming the pluralizing of a disease into separate and unrelated
objects (p. 117). Leaving aside the usual
realist recourse to refer to a preexisting
object, co-ordination becomes the practices through which the various realities of
atherosclerosis are balanced, added up, subtracted. That, in one way or another, they
are fused into a composite whole (p. 70).
As in any other displacement, moving
Mols conception of co-ordination from her
Dutch hospital to my particular case in
Santiago necessarily implies some adaptations. After all, Mols conception refers to
one multiple/single object (atherosclerosis)
being co-ordinated when moving along the
wards of a single hospital. In my case, there
is no one multiple/single object but, at least,
two and their mobilisation involves several
different locations, such as governmental
offices, documents, sidewalks of the city,
pictures, etc. As a result of this situation, coordination practices in the case under study
involve the performance of multiple assemblages of the involved entities in which the
components in dispute are presented as
being divided and/or shared in new ways. A
key point is that such assemblages are always
multiple, usually proposing quite different
arrangements and attributions of the entities
involved. Co-ordination in this case relates
to the different practices and techniques
involved in the stabilisation of one particular
assemblage over the others, a process in
which different tactics of power and
inequalities are very much present. Such stabilisation, however, is never definitive and
solid. Like any other assemblage, the selected
assemblage is in a process of constant emergence, always open to be transformed, challenged or discarded.
The missing bus stop shelter will be analysed as a humble casualty of the co-ordination practices between two urban assemblages
that emerged during the development of
Transantiago, the new public transport
system of Santiago.1 In the next section, I
describe these two urban assemblages: the
Biblioteca Nacional building and the bus stop
shelters, or Estaciones de Transbordo. Then
the paper will analyse the practices of co-ordination carried out when both assemblages
collided on the corner of Alameda Avenue
and MacIver Street. Finally the paper will
conclude by exploring the utility of the concept of co-ordination to the understanding of
the issue of power in urban assemblages.
2. Two Urban Assemblages of

Santiago
2.1. The Biblioteca Nacional building
According to its official description, the

Biblioteca Nacional of Chile was founded
in 1813, being one of the oldest in Latin
America. During its first century of existence, the library was located in four different buildings in downtown Santiago, being
forced to change locations in order to
house its ever-growing collections. In 1913,
on the occasion of its first centenary, the
construction of a new and definitive building started, located on a block facing
Alameda Bernardo OHiggins, Santiagos
main avenue. The first part of the building
was inaugurated in 1925.
Fifty years later, in December 1976, the
library building was declared a national
monument. Such a declaration had two
235
immediate effects. First, it located the building partially under the control of the Consejo
de Monumentos Nacionales (National
Monuments Council). Established in 1925,
the mission of CMN was to take charge of the
declaration of entities as monuments and,
once declared, to watch for their restoration,
repair, conservation, and signalling (law
17.288) directly or through intermediaries.
What was going to be even more important
for the controversy to be studied here was
Article 11 of this law that established that
any work of conservation, reparation or
restoration [of a national monument] must
be approved in advance by the CMN.
A second consequence of being declared
a national monument, derived from this, is
that the Biblioteca Nacional started to be
enacted in a different way, as can be seen in
the words of Leonardo Duran, an architect
from the CMN
The guidelines of the international agreements regarding restoration, the Athens charter, the Venice charter . several documents
where the general criteria on how to handle
patrimony are given . the international recommendations, say that it is always right
when interposing a newly built object, an
intervention of a new oeuvre over a patrimonial building, that this be the most neutral
expression as possible with regard to texture,
materiality, colour and expression; it must be
neutral and not affect the original building.
Here, Santiago is presented as a city consisting of buildings that are seen as part of
the heritage of the country and must be
protected. The criteria for such a protection
are taken, as affirmed by Duran, from the
charters adopted by the congress of the
International Museums Office in Athens
(1931) and the second International
Congress of Architects and Technicians of
Historical Monuments in Venice (1964).
The second charter, by far the more
236
SEBASTIAN URETA
influential, states that the main duty of

conservation organisations is to preserve
monuments in the full richness of their
authenticity. Therefore a monument is
presented as a relatively rigid entity, having
an authentic essence that must be protected.
Given this authentic essence, the daily
usage of the protected building could be
allowed but it must not change the lay-out
or decoration of the building (article 5).
In this same direction, no new construction, demolition or modification which
would alter the relations of mass and
colour must be allowed (article 6). This
protection does not relate to the monument itself but also the sites of monuments must be the object of special care in
order to safeguard their integrity and
ensure that they are cleared and presented
in a seemly manner (article 14). The
words of Duran, then, appear as continuing
this particular version of conservation by
arguing that any kind of intervention in the
building and its environment must be as
neutral as possible, in order to not affect
the original building.
2.2. Estaciones de Transbordo
Estaciones de Transbordo (transfer stations), as the bus stop shelters under study
were technically known, were part of a
public transport policy known as
Transantiago. The starting-point of such
policy was a document entitled Plan de
Transporte Urbano de Santiago or PTUS
published in 2000 (Correa et al., 2000).
The PTUS opening paragraph makes a critical judgement of Santiago by affirming
that
The deterioration of the quality of life in the
city of Santiago, caused by a rise in vehicular
congestion and environmental pollution,
along with the low levels of service offered by
public transport, is a cause of concern for the
government and all its inhabitants (Correa

et al., 2000, p. 1).
There was a clear connection between the

poor state of the public transport system
and a city where the quality of life had
deteriorated. Together with an ageing bus
fleet, such poor shape was evident in the
existent transport infrastructure, described
by the PTUS as highly deficient, especially
as the routes move away from the centre of
the city, becoming almost inexistent on the
periphery (p. 31). Along with the lack of
some very basic items of the public transport infrastructure in several areas of the
city (especially in low-income boroughs),
the rest of the system was characterised by
the high heterogeneity of the available
infrastructure.
As the main catalyst of a change in this
situation, the PTUS proposed a series of radical transformations in the way the public
transport system of the city had been organised previously. From one day to the next,
almost every single aspect of the public
transport system of the city was going to
change: buses, routes, payment system,
actors involved, information system, etc.
(for a detailed description, see Munoz and
Gschwender, 2008). The final aim of these
transformations was not only to improve the
public transport system, but to transform
the city as a whole. Here, Santiago was portrayed as a city that did not have the kind of
modern public transport system and infrastructure it deserved, especially in the context of the development of the country in the
past 15 years, and the plan was seen as a key
contribution to its transformation into a
world-class city (Maillet, 2008). Therefore,
the PTUS, like most policy proposals, was
centrally about what McFarlane calls potentiality or
the relation between the actual and the virtual
citybetween what ostensibly is and what
might be or could have beenand thereby

speaks both to the urban imagination, the
sense of possibility that the city can generate
(McFarlane, 2011a, p. 654).
It was, in all, an argument about the future,

about what could be.
In order to implement the measures proposed by the PTUS, at the time renamed
Transantiago, in 2002 the government created the Coordinacion de Transantiago (or
CdT) housing it at the Ministry of Public
Works, Transport and Telecommunications.
From the start, one of the main constraints of
the CdTs work was the limited public funding available to implement Transantiago, a
situation that directly affected the ambitious
infrastructural scheme proposed by the
PTUS. As a result, most of the devices that
involved a high level of investment were
rescheduled to be built over a longer period
of time than originally planned or reduced in
scale to fit into the available budget. In practice, by late 2006 when the plan was originally
scheduled to start2 the only piece of built
infrastructure that was certainly going to be
available would be transfer stations.
These stations, formed by a variable
number of single bus stop shelters connected
by ramps and alleys, occupied a central role
in the new network organisation proposed
by Transantiago. In the existing public
transport system, most bus routes crossed
the city from one end to the other, making
the need for users to transfer between different bus routes and/or to the underground
network quite low. For this reason, bus stops
were quite modest and almost invisible pieces
of urban infrastructure. This was related not
only to their poor shape and heterogeneity,
but also to the extended practice among passengers of accessing and leaving buses wherever they wanted along the route, only subject
to the goodwill of drivers in stopping the bus
(something that they usually did, because
their income was directly related to the
237
number of tickets sold). In these circumstances bus stops were merely one point more
among many others where the bus could stop
and not necessarily be the most used.
Yet in Transantiago, this arrangement
was going to change radically. Not only
could users combine different bus and
underground lines paying a single fare but
also, and more centrally, the reconfiguration of the bus network into a feeder-trunk
scheme made such combinations compulsory in order to reach most destinations. So,
transfer stations were not only bus stops,
but places where most of these compulsory,
and relatively new, connections between
different bus lines and/or the underground
network would take place. For this reason,
the CdT was looking for a piece of architecture with high visibility, which could, without the necessary intervention of other
agents, attract users and guide them in the
right direction.
The relevance of visibility was clear in the
call for tenders for the design of transfer stations published in September 2003. Besides
their functionality, the call stated that the
designs must transcend being only a transport infrastructure solution. They must
become an architectural and urban asset
(MOPTT, 2003, p. 25). In order to become
such an asset the design must not only show
a clear and precise architectural concept (p.
25) but also be an expression of permanency and modernity, using design as an element of high technology, showing the public
character of the station and becoming a
functional element of the transport infrastructure (p. 25). Thus, beyond their daily
visibility for users, and in the absence of
other major infrastructural devices, they
were going to become the most visible materialisation of the new urban assemblage proposed by Transantiago, a mixture of the
permanency and modernity that supposedly characterises transport infrastructure
in world-class cities.
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SEBASTIAN URETA
Such an emphasis was acknowledged by the

actors hired to design the transfer stations in
late 2003. After one year of work, they delivered a design in which, in accordance with the
presentation accompanying the plans
[Transfer stations have] an identity that sets
them apart from the rest of the urban furniture
and the rough municipal bus stops . the presence of the bus stops from TRANSANTIAGO
throughout the city will be clearly identifiable,
without being repetitive, being a contemporary
design in tune with the vanguard of the new
project which is the public transport system of
our city (archives of the CMN).
As the quote describes, transfer stations were

designed to be different, to stand out from
the rest of the urban infrastructure of the
city in order both to attract daily users and
to embody the discourse about modernity
and world-class status included in the PTUS.
However, and in contrast with the Biblioteca
Nacional building, such a visibility did not
look to preserve a version of the past, but to
materialise a future urbanity promised by
Transantiago.
Such a situation required a work of coordination between both organisations.3 Its

starting-point was a meeting in March 2004
at the CMN offices where actors from CdT
provided antecedents about Transantiago
and the transfer stations that they were planning to build. After studying this information, in June of that year the CMN sent a
letter back demanding, among other issues,
detailed plans of any transfer stations located
near monuments.
Along with sending the plans in
November 2004, the CdT sent a lengthy
letter providing the arguments behind the
particular designs of transfer stations. It concluded with the following two paragraphs
3. Co-ordinating Assemblages
The presence of the Transfer Stations of

Transantiago throughout the city will generate a new image. On the one hand it will
include a contemporary design that will be
in line with the vanguard of this new project,
the public transport of our city, it will present itself as a new urban referent at every
point and it will be perceived as a total intervention of the city and, on the other hand, it
is designed so that the pedestrian who in a
quotidian way makes transfers identifies with
his/her bus stops, because its different and
in some sense unique.
After the designs were accepted internally by

the CdT, the construction of the transfer stations started in several locations throughout
the city. Most of them were built without
any more hassle than that expected when
dealing with the obduracy (Hommels, 2005)
of the existing urban infrastructure. Some of
them, however, encountered a different kind
of obduracy, much harder to deal with. This
was the obduracy of national monuments
protected from any transformation in their
authentic disposition by the CMN. As a
consequence any transfer station located in
the vicinity of a monument would have to
be approved by them before being built.
Finally, it is relevant to point out that in the

diversity of contexts in which the Transfer
Stations [are located] and especially . in
front of Historical or Public Monuments, it
is sought to fully respect our patrimony,
adapting to the existent context with the
highest possible discretion, defining the type
of roof very cautiously. But it is of the interest of the project within its global context,
to maintain the spirit that every user can
feel identified by his/her bus stop, by his/her
Transfer Station, and, for this, it is relevant
to be able to differentiate in this case the
bus stops with the moderation that is
required by our Cultural Patrimony
(archives of the CMN; italics and bold in the

original).
In this extract we again can see the performance of a version of the transfer stations
as highly visible entities, an element of
contemporary design that materialises
and unifies the modernity promised by
Transantiago, besides its functional use as a
guide to passengers. The use of italics and
bold characters in the last lines of the paragraph show the importance that the CdT
gave to this particular version of the assemblage. Even in a context where national
monuments are located, the transfer stations should remain relatively immutable.
They should always keep a certain degree of
visibility to stand out in each one of their
concrete urban locations.
After checking the provided plans, the
actors at the CMN asked for several stations
to be relocated, something that the CdT
accepted and most of the controversial
issues were settled relatively quickly. There
was only one exception: shelter 7 from Santa
Luca transfer station that, in accordance
with the plans, had to be built in the middle
of the block occupied by the Biblioteca
Nacional.
At the beginning of 2005, the CMN sent
a letter to the CdT asking for the removal
of this particular shelter in order to avoid
an obstacle in viewing the patrimonial
building. Here we see a performance of
Biblioteca Nacional as an assemblage that
has to be protected. However, this protection did not refer to the material structure
of the building, but to its view. This is a
much more ambiguous claim. Strictly
speaking, law 17.288 talks about the CMN
having regulatory attributions regarding
the conservation, reparation or restoration of monuments, not about their view.
From the words of Duran, quoted earlier,
we can conclude that view was certainly
included by the members of the CMN in
239
the conservation attributes. Yet this did

not solve the problem; it does not clarify
what the view of the Biblioteca Nacional
exactly is and/or how it might be affected
by building transfer station 7 in its surroundings. Given the lack of any previously
set standards, the characteristics of this
view and how both buildings were going to
relate to it needed to be determined in the
process of argumentation itself.
Visibility, as any other component of an
assemblage, is always relational. It does not
belong to the object but is a relation between
itself and other entities in its vicinity.
Especially in a cityscape populated by multiple objects, to increase the visibility of one
(or to add a new visible one) normally
speaking means to decrease the visibility of
other/s. This is fine when the visibility of
such objects is not considered relevant, but
it becomes an issue when it is protected as
in the case of Biblioteca Nacional, or forms
a central component of its design and
attached function as happened with the
transfer station. In this case, we can see how
the territorialisation of an assemblage,
understood as the processes that define or
sharpen the spatial boundaries of actual territories (De Landa, 2006, p. 13), is directly
related to a certain deterritorialisation of
other/s. The territorialisation of the transfer
station as a highly visible entity in this particular location implied, from the point of
view of the CMN, the deterritorialisation of
the Biblioteca Nacional building as a monument with certain heritage views that must
be protected.
In their reply to this letter, in July, the
CdT argued that it was impossible to move
the shelter from this block given that it will
imply to significantly increase the distances
that the public transport user has to walk,
because there is no other position close by to
locate the bus stop. So, instead of agreeing
to deal with the issue in terms of a monument whose view has to be protected, they
240
SEBASTIAN URETA
maintained an assemblage in which the bus

stop in this location represented not only a
highly visible entity, but mainly a materialisation of the users right to accessible public
transport.
This move was acknowledged by the
CMN who, in a letter sent in August, argued
that this particular bus stop must be moved
for three reasons
I. The use of the sidewalk in front of the
main access to the Biblioteca Nacional
has currently collapsed, given its narrowness and the great influx of people.
II. For this reason to locate a transfer station precisely in this place will end up
causing a disorder in the flow and circulation of pedestrians, altering the space
of the sidewalk, the anteroom or atrium
of such a noble building.
III. To avoid that the view of the historical
monument be blocked (archives of the
CMN).
In this extract, the CMN brought new elements into the Biblioteca Nacionals assemblage. While in point III we can again see it as
a site of a heritage building whose view needs
to be protected, the other two points are much
more connected with the argument proposed
by the CdT. Instead of bringing entities to
argue about the validity of a view in itself as a
reason to move the bus stop, they portrayed
the area surrounding the building as also containing an important number of pedestrians
who were going to have problems in their
mobility due to the presence of the bus stop.
This strategy proved to be the wrong one
for the purposes of the CMN. It is in a city of
moving people where CdT moved more at
ease, having several kinds of technical device
from transport planning to bring in support
of their position. This was clear in the letter
in answer to the request of the CMN sent in
October. Using several different quantifications they argued that the flow of people in
front of the Biblioteca Nacional would not

be affected at all by locating the shelter in the
block and, besides, that it was impossible to
move it anywhere else. In order to mitigate
such a situation they offered to enlarge the
sidewalk by 1.5 metres.
Regarding the performance of the library
as an heritage building whose view should
be protected, their strategy was to minimise
the visual impact of the shelter. First, they
offered to divide bus stop 7 into two smaller
sub-shelters named 7a and 7b and move
them to the two extremes of the block in
order not to obstruct the central body of
the building. Secondly, they included an
image in order to visualise the impact of the
shelter on the view of the library, as shown
in Figure 1.
This was not merely illustrative. As a long
line of studies of scientific and technical
practices have shown, visualisations have a
certain agency of their own. First of all, they
are irreplaceable as documents which enable
objects of study to be initially perceived and
analyzed (Lynch, 1985, p. 37). However, this
is not their only attribute. Scientific and/or
technical visualisations are also endowed with
what Soderstrom (1996) calls external efficacy
or the persuasive power of representations
(p. 62). Given the complex technical processes
needed to produce them, these visualisations
are usually seen as more valid than other
forms of representation, especially by actors
outside the particular expertise that produced
them. For both reasons contemporary urban
planning has become highly dependent on
such devices to the degree that very few working practices are done without the active
presence of different kinds of visualisations, from plans to models (for a detailed
exploration of this issue, see Duhr, 2007).
Especially in controversial issues, visualisations are quite helpful because they render
what are highly positioned notions of space
. as universally applicable and desirable
(Lepawsky, 2005, p. 707).4
241
Figure 1. The CdTs visualisation of the proposed bus shelters, 7a and 7b, in front of the
Biblioteca Nacional.
Source: CMN Archives.
In this sense, Figure 1 can be seen as

offering a particular kind of visual assemblage of the space surrounding Biblioteca
Nacional. A first thing to note is the character of this visualisation. Instead of presenting a proper plan or model, they choose to
use as the basis for the visualisation an
actual photograph of the building taken
from the other side of Alameda, superimposing over it a computational representation of the proposed shelters 7a and 7b. By
doing this, they create a hybrid in which
both the existing building and the future
infrastructure co-exist, endowing a higher
degree of plausibility to their proposal. In
parallel, the inclusion of several other entities in the picture looked to weaken the
position of the CMN. Future shelters 7a
and 7b, especially the one on the right, are
also represented as partially hidden behind
several objects that currently block the view
of the Biblioteca Nacional, such as passing
cars and buses and trees growing on the
divide in the middle of the avenue. At the
top right-hand side of the library we can see
two new buildings and a piece of infrastructure also interfering with the view. In all,
the image represents the staging of a scenography in which attention is focused on one
set of dramatized inscriptions (Latour,

1990), in particular the happy co-existence
of the Biblioteca Nacional and the shelters,
especially given that the existing purity of
the view of the Biblioteca Nacional was
quite questionable.
However, this picture was the closest that
shelter 7 ever came to existing. As Latour
(1990) has stated, visualisations do not work
on their own. To be really effective, they
need to mobilise along with them several
other entities that contribute to re-enact
their facts in new locations. In this case, the
image in Figure 1 was presented only with
the arguments that the CdT has been stating
(and the CMN rejecting) all along. In the
end, the visualisation failed to convince the
CMN and in November 2005 they sent a
letter making the same argument as the one
in August, but using stronger terms and concluding that the bus stops must be moved
definitely.
The authoritative tone of this letter was
based on their inclusion in the controversy
of a metrology in which the positions of
both organisations could be finally balanced:
legal bodies. By doing this, they not only
established a common ground for discussion
but also, and centrally, a hierarchy. Such
242
SEBASTIAN URETA
hierarchy was based on the different weight

of the legal bodies behind each organisation.
While the CdT was supported by a quite diffuse presidential decree of 2002, that did not
even detail its legal attributions, law 17.288
supported the CMN in full. Even more, in its
eighth article, this law establishes that civilian, military and police authorities will have
the obligation to co-operate with the fulfillment of the functions and resolutions that
the council adopts in relation with the conservation, care and vigilance of National
Monuments. So, in any controversy involving the conservation of a national monument, even in the case of its ambiguous view,
the CMN was always going to have the last
word.
Notwithstanding, the position of the CdT
was not completely lost, as can be seen in the
following extract from their final letter on
this subject sent to the CMN in June 2006.
The National Monuments Council had asked
to move the bus stop to the next block from
MacIver Street, thinking of the important
influx of people on such a block and, the disruption that this was going to cause to the
entrance of such a building and the visual
blocking of a historical monument. . From
the above mentioned point, it can be concluded
that the central worry [of the CMN] is the
important influx of people that the sidewalk of
the Biblioteca Nacional is going to experience,
that sadly is going to exist with independence
of the bus stops being installed. Nevertheless, it
is possible to avoid the visual obstruction by
eliminating the bus stop shelter and only contemplating the construction of platforms and
the respective [bus stop] signals. (archives of
the CMN, underlined in the original)
Bringing the position of the CMN again

into the performance of the library as surrounded by flows of moving people (the
central worry [of the CMN] is the important influx of people .), they were able to
use their greater fluency in transport issues

to maintain the location of the bus stops,
concluding (possibly not without irony)
that such influx was sadly . going to exist,
with independence of the bus stops being
installed [there].
However, in locating the transfer stations
there, they could not ignore the performance of the Biblioteca Nacional as having
a view that must be protected by the CMN
and including law 17.288. In this respect,
the CdT ended up proposing the removal
of only the platform, but not the rest of the
structure of the transfer station in this particular location. In order to illustrate their
proposal, they added a new visualisation,
shown in Figure 2. Here we have a different
composition of the view of the Biblioteca
Nacional from that shown in Figure 1. This
time, the picture on which the visualisation
is based was taken standing on the divide in
the middle of Alameda Avenue, 50 metres
or so down the street. It was also taken at a
moment with less trafficthere is only one
small truck coming down the street. The
shelter from transfer station 7 is also missing and the only remnant of Transantiagos
proposed infrastructure is the pale red line
marking the area where the sidewalk would
be extended. As a consequence, the view of
the building appears to be much clearer,
with only a few palm trees and passing
pedestrians blocking it.
By doing this, and contrary to the CDTs
earlier claims about the immutability of its
design, transfer stations proved to be a quite
fluid entity (de Laet and Mol, 2000), being
able to adapt, to be transformed in order to
create a new assemblage including both the
transfer stations and the Biblioteca
Nacional. However, such fluidity was not
without costs. In order to form this new
assemblage, the station had to dispense with
most of its structure above ground level. By
doing this, it was able to keep being the
point at which pedestrians would turn into
243
Figure 2. The CdTs visualisation of the Biblioteca Nacional without the shelters.
Source: CMN Archives.
public transport users, but sacrificing its

related embodiment of the modern city
promised by Transantiago. Or, in other
words, Transantiagos modernity was deterritorialised in order for the library to maintain its territorialisation as a heritage
building whose view is protected. Therefore,
in this particular context, the view could
not be sharedas an element in common
between the Biblioteca Nacional and the
shelter of the transfer stationbut the totalising claim over it of the former prevailed.
Conclusions
When Transantiago started its operation in
February 2007, most of the 35 original
transfer stations were already built. Beyond
a few pieces in the media with architects criticising their shape in aesthetic terms, they
attracted very little public attention. Also,
they were effective in becoming highly visible
pieces of urban infrastructure, contributing
to the disappearance of the former practice
of drivers letting passengers on and off the
bus anywhere they wanted. Taking into consideration that almost no other aspect of the
plan seemed to be functioning as expected,

transforming Transantiago into one of the
biggest controversies in the country since the
return of democracy in 1990 (Munoz and
Gschwender, 2008), transfer stations could
be seen as one of the very few uncontroversial entities of the early implementation.
This success, however, was not complete.
Shelter 7 of Santa Lucia station proved to be
too visible, too remarkable, in a space where
visibility was already monopolised by
another entity. Under these conditions, the
path taken was to transform the station into
a fluid object, removing the shelter and
most of its elements above ground level, and
hence its visibility, thus allowing the coexistence of both entities in the same block.
At first, we can say that the CMN finally
won over the CdT, with the Biblioteca
Nacional remaining immutable/total while
the transfer station was forced to become
fluid. Yet this is only part of the story. As
explored by the practitioners of actor
network theory, the fluid character of entities, their capacity to change continually,
might also be an advantage. As affirmed by
de Laet and Mol
244
SEBASTIAN URETA
in travelling to unpredictable places, an

object that isnt too rigorously bounded, that
doesnt impose itself but tries to serve, that is
adaptable, flexible and responsivein short,
a fluid objectmay well prove to be stronger
than one which is firm (de Laet and Mol,
2000, p. 226).
Therefore, if we take contemporary cities as

constituted by shifting geographies, by
ever-evolving assemblages that relate to
each other in multiple ways, the immutability/totality of a building like the Biblioteca
Nacional does not constitute an asset; on
the contrary it is likely to lead to rupture,
difference, and distance (Law and Mol,
2001, p. 614). This is exactly what happened here, when the versions about the
city of the past and the one of the future
could not be put together into an assemblage that included both, ending up sacrificing one of them.
Along with exploring this particular case,
the analysis made in this paper looked to
contribute to the development of assemblage urbanism in several ways. First of all is
the issue of methods. Moving away from
grand analyses or urban trends, a focus on
urban assemblages leads us to investigate
previously neglected dimensions of capitalist urbanization (Brenner et al., 2011,
p. 231). Given its emphasis on the dynamic
and ever-shifting emergence of urban entities, assemblage urbanism tends to favour
the study of the very concrete practices
through which the urban is continually produced, no matter how small or context-specific. In particular, this article dealt with the
practices of co-ordination between two
organisations enacting contrasting assemblages of a very particular urban location. In
doing this, it focused on following the territorialisations/deterritorialisations occurring in the process, or the ways in which
each utterance made by the involved actors
implied the territorialisation of certain
assemblages and the deterritorialisation of

others. The documents and visualisations
produced by the actors involved in the controversy were studied as complex spatial
narratives on their own, ordering a variable
number of entities in the shape of a particular territory that included and excluded
certain assemblages. Such a focus reorientates the research not only as the analysis of
existing urban entities, but also as the study
of the multiple practices through which
urbanism is achieved as a play of the actual
and the possible (McFarlane, 2011a,
p. 652).
In the second place, the paper hoped to
contribute to current debates about the
(supposed) problems of assemblage urbanism in dealing with issues of power and
inequality. When we move from just
describing the performance of single assemblages to the co-ordination practices
between two (or more) of them sharing elements over which they claim exclusivity,
power and inequality appear in all their
force. Through the ensuing co-ordination
practices, the competing assemblages
become entangled in multiple hierarchical
relations. Such hierarchies are given by
their different position in metrologies
introduced as a way to balance their relative
weights, as seen here in the case of legal
bodies. It is exactly in these multiple hierarchies that a great deal of power in assemblages resides,5 enhancing or restricting,
even forbidding, the capacity of assemblages to territorialise in different times
and/or spaces, to re-enact in some ways
and not others. This kind of power itself is
always relational, it exists not as something
intrinsic to urban entities but always as an
exteriority of relations, using de Landas
term, or as the sum of unequal relationships in which a certain urban assemblage
becomes entangled.
Finally, the paper has hoped to contribute to the development of a more fluid
understanding of urban spaces. As the case

under study showed, urban assemblages are
always emerging, continually entangled in
relations of territorialisation/deterritorialisation. Even hierarchies themselves change
continually, readapting to the emergence of
new metrologies and the multiple assemblages whose relations they regulate. So
does power. Then the space constituted by
such assemblages, their power and hierarchies, should be seen as ever-shifting, even
if its pace is so slow that it appears as completely static. Even monuments such as the
Biblioteca Nacional, the epitome of urban
stability, are continually changing as they
come to be related to new entities and react
to them, even such humble ones as a single
bus stop shelter. Then assemblage urbanism
invite us to see spaces not as composed of
stable and well-bounded objects which
naturally embody power, but as fluid
entanglements of entities whose power is a
temporary achievement that must be continually reasserted through complex co-ordination practices.
Funding
In writing this article, The author acknowledges
funding from CONICYT and Marie Curie
International Incoming Fellowships (grant
numbers 11060348 and PIIF-GA-2009-235895
respectively).
Notes
1. This description is based on the material collected by the author while doing fieldwork in
Santiago between 2007 and 2009. Fieldwork
consisted mainly of (1) in-depth interviews
with actors involved in the design of
Transantiago and daily users of the system,
(2) gathering of several materials in the form
of research reports, papers, presentations,
etc. and (3) participant observation of practices of daily usage of the system. All the
names of the actors involved have been
changed in order to protect their anonymity.
245
2. After two delays, Transantiago finally started

on February 2007.
3. At no point had such co-ordination processes included any other public/private
organisation or transcended to the media or
the wider public, not even after Transantiago
started. For this reason the analysis will only
consider the CdT and the CMN.
4. Urban planning in Chile has not been indifferent to this trend. Since the late 1960s,
especially connected with the development
of the first university departments of planning and transport engineering, sophisticated
visualisation devices have been at the very
centre of urban planning in the country
(Gross, 1991). This trend was strengthened
after the return of democracy in 1990, when
a substantive group of academic actors came
to occupy key positions in the government
(Silva, 2008, ch. 6), bringing with them different kinds of up-to-date visualisation
devices that were actively used to demarcate
their area of expertise from other political
actors (for an example in the public transport area, see SECTRA, 2000).
5. However, not all of it. Power could also be
of other kinds, such as the power to completely exclude competing entities from any
comparison (as happens during dictatorial
regimes), denying even the possibility of
being balanced into a common metrology.
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