Urban Communication: Social Representations of University Actors about Local Public Transport

Abstract

How do university actors experience, perceive and desire public urban transport service in a medium-to-intermediate urban conglomerate in a sub-provincial territory in an intermediately developed country, with a notable predominance of an urban population and a broad public university education system? Urban communication is a complex subfield of communication studies that examines the ways in which individuals, groups and societies, traversed by the diverse urban dimensions of their daily lives in different cities, deploy the various modes, genres and media of communication to relate to each other, produce and share meanings as well as reproduce and change communication patterns. In heterogeneous and increasingly unequal societies, such as Argentina, urban local public transport systems operate in the dynamic tensions between state management, private revenue and citizen demands for a service compatible with access to social well-being, in general, and to mobility, in particular, as one of the basic rights to the city. Recent studies highlight some of the changes in urban public transport in Argentina during the 21st century, with a greater role for state jurisdictions, although contributions will decline from 2024 onwards, given the new adjustment policies of the national State. Other antecedents specify aspects of the transport service that are negative for the living, working and studying conditions of passengers in general and university travellers in particular. However, it is worth further investigating the meanings of the different groups of users from, among others, the multidimensional and multi-methodological perspective of social representations to update the broad scope of the always current studies on urban communication. This research examines six dimensions of university actors as users of public transport in an urban agglomeration in the interior of Argentina. The method is dominated by a very extensive online survey of almost 4,000 university actors, the vast majority of whom were students, carried out using a specific digital system of the local public university. The empirical findings presented focus on the recent changes in the local system of urban public transport services. The knowledge generated, perhaps without known precedents in research on communication and the city, identifies experiences, perceptions and suggestions for improving a public transport service with increasing costs and the cause of frequent complaints, demands and disputes.