Abstract

Abstract Wefocusontheconflict of the Bicentennial Bridge in the city of Concepción, Chile, whose layout confronted informal settlers and the public-state sector, as an event through which to investigate, from its public arena and the discourses that structure it, the multiple narratives that entered into controversy here. Our hypothesis suggested that the narrative of the Right to the City, significantly established by supranational institutions and by local academic and professional elites, fails to constitute a narrative that substantiates or refutes the contingent processes of citymaking. In the methodological strategy, we made the framing theory and content analysis converge, focusing on discovering, in an abductive and iterative way, the different communicational frames that each group of actors struggled to impose, focusing on the discursive categories defined as substantial frames, that is, (i) how they define the origin of the controversy, (II) the aspirations that the conflict brings into play, and (iii) the desired outcomes. For this, we relied on the records of the local press and the use of the software ATLAS TI, coding and categorizing discursive contents andidentifyingthedifferent framesindispute.Ourresultsshowframes, which, taking elements from the Right to the City, fail to structure themselves as a significant narrative, being quickly excluded from the public arena. Thus, the contingent discourses, of one and the other, ended up circumscribed to a hegemonic and structuring capitalist narrative, reducing the conflict to a controversy over the scale and scope of the desired modernization, thereby marking the material future of the place object of the controversy.