Attachment to the Route in Santiago de Chile's Center

The importance of walking seems to have been lost in the frantic pace of contemporary urban everyday life. Functional and fast walks that seek connection prevail over a scarce number of contemplative walks of the public space in which they are immersed. This article shows an investigation on the process of attachment to a daily route in public space in downtown Santiago de Chile, the area with the most density and high-rise constructions in the city. The process is described from a hermeneutical-phenomenological approach and a spatial analysis, identifying the factors that affect the pedestrian's attachment to their daily routes. For this, semi-structured interviews, walking interviews, and visual ethnography were applied. The results of the analysis show that there is no attachment to the daily route in dense environments in the first instance, something that would change when practicing a daily walk between home and work. Aspects of centrality and accessibility begin to be observed, and then an attachment to the act of walking is generated, from which emerges a significance of elements and physical and social characteristics of the public space, which result in an attachment to the route.