Abstract

Environmental conflicts are the result of the clash of different ways of territorially conceiving the same space. The so-called Industrial Bridge, located in the Metropolitan Area of Concepción (AMC in Spanish), Chile, is taken as a case study, on being an environmental conflict derived from a central government infrastructure project, which affected a local agricultural space, stressing, activating and reorganizing different community agents, who throughout the conflict, built a dynamic public discourse. The purpose of this article is to look into the trialectic among the social mobilization processes and the magnitude of the space of articulation of its resistance networks, the re-elaboration of their ideas and values so that they define the conflict, and the changes in the territorial conceptions and territorialities they subscribe to. The methodology applied was qualitative and abductive, based on a phenomenological design which, taking the local press as a source, systematically represented and analyzed the public arena of the conflict and the underling territorial conceptions and territorialities in the public discourses of the community agents. The results confirm the trialectic, establishing a positive gradient between the magnitude of the organizational resistance networks, their mobilization of meanings, and the (re)scaling of their territorial conceptions and territorialities, redefining both what was in dispute and its solution.