Perspectives and Experiences of Urban Inequality. A Visual and Participatory Research

The social production of space is a process marked by asymmetries and power relations that not only express various forms of injustice but also produce and reproduce them in their different dimensions, consolidating and legitimizing social inequalities (Soja, 2010). Space contributes to the creation of a hierarchical and unequal order, determining what kind of people and what types of practices are appropriate for different places, making some be considered “in their place” and others “out of place” (Creswell, 1996). Alongside the material and spatial dimensions that permeate urban experience, inequality is sustained by a strongly performative symbolic power that constructs legitimized subjectivities and despised otherness through processes of labeling and stigmatization that operate as limits and boundaries, anchoring people to certain spaces, places, and routes, while excluding them from others. This fixity (Bhabha, 1983), however, is not static or unchangeable, but rather constitutes a space of disputes, resistances, and resignifications through which belonging and senses of place are constructed and reconstructed (Bayón and Moncrieff Zabaleta, 2024).

The coexistence of different cities within a single metropolis, magnificently captured by Duhau and Giglia (2008) in Las reglas del desorden. Habitar la metrópoli (The rules of jumble. Inhabiting the metropolis), is reflected in various Latin American cities. Indeed, the metropolitan area of Mexico City (ZMCM), with its more than twenty million inhabitants, is an urban space of profound contrasts. Modern and exclusive commercial and residential areas, wide tree-lined avenues, and ostentatious cars and SUVs with bodyguards coexist with extensive popular peripheries where gray is the predominant color due to the homes in permanent construction and the absence of trees and green spaces, a widespread informal economy, precarious and insufficient provision of public services and urban infrastructure, and degraded public spaces (Bayón, 2015). In this scenario of urban fragmentation, the disadvantaged classes and the privileged classes live in their own city within the city, and it is in these contrasting social and cultural worlds that the urban experience is built. In this way, we observe that city and inequality are interconnected in a complex manner. On one hand, inequalities between social classes are evident in their unequal access to the city depending on place of residence, type and quality of housing, infrastructure, urban services, and access to public space. On the other hand, the way different classes experience the city on a daily basis—the symbolic weight of the place of residence, the time and means of commuting, the forms taken by social interactions in public space—is a constitutive process of the position that different social groups—shaped by class, gender, age, physical appearance—occupy in social and urban space (Segura, 2017).

A complex perspective is required to allow a better understanding of how the differentiated valuation of places and of those who move through them impacts everyday experiences, sociability and urban coexistence, and, in broader terms, access to the city and spatial justice. This is precisely the effort that has inspired the research project Ciudad y desigualdades. Experiencias urbanas, otredades y resistencias, en curso desde 2023 (City and Inequalities: Urban Experiences, Otherness, and Resistance, ongoing since 2023) [see box]. It is an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional, and international research project involving researchers from the Institute of Social Research at UNAM, the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS)–Mexico City, and the National University of La Plata in Argentina.

Urban experiences are approached here from a complex and intersectional perspective where the cultural analysis of class, human geography, and the most recent contributions of the sociology of stigma converge, along with debates about belonging, redistribution, and recognition. Using an audiovisual and participatory methodology through audiovisual narrative workshops, we work with various groups affected by discrimination, stigma, and negative classifications: young people from popular peripheries, people of diverse sexual and gender identities, particularly trans people, and women working in informal trade in the La Merced area, in downtown Mexico City. In the metropolitan area of La Plata (Buenos Aires province, Argentina), the work has focused on the southern outskirts, in the town of Villa Elvira, located near the urban center, where lower and lower-middle classes predominate, in a youth meeting space (“Casa Joven”), and it seeks to reconstruct the various social circuits of young people from popular sectors and their experiences of inequality in the city.

The methodology designed to explore urban experience constitutes a substantive contribution of this research, given its participatory and visual nature regarding the perspectives of various subordinate and marginalized groups on the city.

A VISUAL AND PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH TO UNDERSTAND URBAN INEQUALITY
The participatory methodology we developed aims to prioritize the experiences and perspectives of the participants regarding urban space. The production of photographs and videos was discussed and agreed upon in various sessions of the visual storytelling workshops conducted with each group, in order to prioritize their views on the experiences they encounter daily in different spaces and routes. We start from the centrality of self-representation and the need to make marginalized stories visible, a process in which all decisions and next steps are discussed and agreed upon with the participants (Holtby et al., 2015; Brown, 2024).

Audiovisual storytelling workshop with trans youth
Picture: Archivo del proyecto Ciudad y desigualdades. Experiencias urbanas, otredades y resistencias

Based on the recognition of power relations and existing hierarchies between “researchers” and “researched” individuals, participatory methodologies aim to reduce these power differences and equalize responsibility among the stakeholders in the research. In this regard, it is particularly important to involve participants in decisions about the representation of their stories, always being sensitive to their lived experiences and their representation needs (Holtby et al., 2015). The workshops focused on identifying and making visible the spaces in the city where they feel accepted, respected, and recognized, as well as those spaces perceived and experienced as hostile, discriminatory, risky, and dangerous.

Since the participants themselves have a deep understanding of their experiences and concerns, we aimed to listen to their voices and see through their own perspectives by co-producing audiovisual data. In the workshops, storytelling work was complemented with technical learning of tools specific to audiovisual production (video cameras, microphones). Within the framework of the project, three vlog cameras and microphones were acquired and distributed on a rotating basis among the different groups.

AUDIOVISUAL STORYTELLING WORKSHOPS: SPACES FOR EXCHANGE, PARTICIPATION, AND EMPATHETIC LISTENING
After discussing in each group about their experiences, feelings, and emotions in different spaces, the participants themselves decided what they wanted to show and how, which involves building an argument and selecting possible spaces and images that allow it to be made visible. Our role as researchers is focused on supporting and monitoring the construction of a visual narrative: what I want to say and show (make visible) and who I want to engage/sensitize/inform.

Still from the video “Recorridos,” about a young trans woman living in Ecatepec de Morelos
Picture: Archivo del proyecto Ciudad y desigualdades. Experiencias urbanas, otredades y resistencias

The group of young people from the eastern outskirts carried out their work in a public high school located in the municipality of Nezahualcóyotl, with twenty-seven adolescents residing in the municipalities of Neza, Chimalhuacán, and Los Reyes-La Paz. Two main activities were developed: a workshop on audiovisual narratives and the application of eighteen semi-structured interviews with young people aged sixteen to nineteen. All sessions were held at the school, and the workshop focused on producing audiovisual materials created by the adolescents themselves about their urban experience. Between October 2023 and June 2024, we conducted fourteen sessions, during which we used different strategies for group engagement and reflection, as well as training for the production of an audiovisual storytelling.

The adolescents, organized into groups, produced six videos, each between three and ten minutes long, about insecurity and the stigmatization of their neighborhoods (“No todo es como dicen”, de inseguridad y estigmas”; “Not Everything Is As They Say,” about insecurity and stigmas), mobility in the periphery and the long commuting times from home to school (Un viaje, todos los días; A Trip, Every Day), the lives of two adolescent girls in the peripheral city (Ciudades OTRAS adolescencias; Cities: OTHER Adolescences), the use young people make of public spaces in municipalities in the east (Alas libres. Jóvenes en el espacio público; Free Wings: Youth in Public Spaces), the contrasts between different places they can go to walk and eat (Sabores Urbanos. Plazas, mercados y puestos; Urban Flavors: Plazas, Markets, and Stalls), and urban art (¿Son malos los grafitis?: Are Graffiti Bad?) 
(See p. 354). The videos produced were presented by their authors at the Institute of Social Research in June 2024. The session was particularly satisfying, not only because of the active participation of the young people and the large audience attendance, but also because most of them had never had the opportunity to visit Ciudad Universitaria (central campus), in the south  part of the city. It was a very enriching, supportive, and empathetic experience. The researchers from Argentina participated in the session via Zoom [see box].

With the group of transgender people, consisting of four young people between sixteen and twenty years old, and two adults aged thirty-two and fifty-five, between October 2023 and August 2025, twenty-two workshop-meetings on audiovisual narratives were held, during which eleven videos were produced and two presentations of the audiovisual products were made at the Institute of Social Research, in November 2024 and September 2025.

The topics covered in the videos included, among others, experiences and friendly and hostile spaces in schools and universities; difficulties in accessing health services; fears and insecurities in bathrooms and public transportation; discrimination in recreational and sports spaces; dysphoria; cispassing (denial of people’s gender identity and imposition of cisgender norms on them); non-binary clothing; SOGICE experiences (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Change Efforts, commonly known as conversion therapies [see pp. 202 in this issue]); pride parades; transactivism; and peer groups.

Fotogramas del video Recorridos
Pictures: Archivo del proyecto Ciudad y desigualdades. Experiencias urbanas, otredades y resistencias

Regarding the group of women in informal trade, women market vendors from the La Merced area were invited to work on a visual storytelling proposal through photographs. In the meetings, it was decided to depict their struggles and ways of resistance, as well as abuses of authority and repression surrounding trade activities, and the organization of women traders to defend their working conditions.

In the city of La Plata, Argentina, eight sessions of visual storytelling workshops were held with young women from the outskirts, focusing on urban circuits of youth sociability. In the second half of September 2024, a short research stay was carried out at the National University of La Plata, including activities such as a research team meeting, a public discussion on the co-production of knowledge and the use of images in social research, and field trips.

Audiovisual narratives workshop, high school in Nezahualcóyotl
Pictures: Archivo del proyecto Ciudad y desigualdades. Experiencias urbanas, otredades y resistencias

In this process, and with all the participating groups, we have sought not only to highlight the symbolic violence of the negative classifications imposed on these groups and their performative effects, but also to show the forms of resistance and re-legitimization deployed by those who are systematically and routinely delegitimized by a markedly unjust and fragmented urban order, emphasizing the need to build urban coexistence based on social and spatial justice, solidarity, empathy, and respect for others.

Peer groups
Picture: Archivo del proyecto Ciudad y desigualdades. Experiencias urbanas, otredades y resistencias

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