Embodied Architectural Geographies of Consumption and the Mall Paseo Chiloé Controversy in Southern Chile

In recent years, the geographies of architecture have expanded to include the affective and emotive dimensions of everyday life and the politics of urban space. This article explores these embodied geographies of architecture in an emerging urban landscape that has the built environment at its core: the postdictatorship retail landscape of neoliberal Chile. By drawing on findings from ethnographic research around the role of affect and emotion in the controversial development of a particular shopping mall in southern Chile, we get a better sense of how retail capital expands into new territories and how it responds to and enrolls embodied geographies in the process. Although this process does include the expansion of a particular kind of spatial technology that works through affective architectural interventions, this article also illustrates how such an expansion relies on prevailing imaginative and emotional geographies in important ways. As such, this embodied architectural geography does not sideline human subjectivity but explores its complex relationship with the materiality of landscape and affective architectural space.