Lake Sagaris

Lake Sagaris
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile · Transport engineering (retired) & Centre for Sustainable Urban Development CEDEUS

PhD Urban and Regional Planning, Master of Science Planning & Community Development, Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing,
Associate Adjunct Professor (retired), Transport Engineering, Associate Researcher CEDEUS (current), PUC Chile

About

60
Publications
7,937
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
706
Citations
Introduction
The failure of current strategies to communicate climate change and foster behavioural change is well established. “Two-track” thinking about climate change and related sustainability challenges reflects the tendency for people to express concern about impacts but, notwithstanding, continue life as usual, making no changes to their own lives or political agendas. Revolving debates, bitter resistance to change, and enormous fear, particularly of crime, underline the importance of local identities
Additional affiliations
June 2017 - January 2022
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Position
  • Professor (Associate)
March 2013 - December 2017
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Position
  • Professor
March 2013 - present
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Position
  • Post-doctoral fellow and adjunct assistant professor

Publications

Publications (60)
Article
Full-text available
La aplicación de políticas de "Calles Completas", originada en Estados Unidos en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, se ha generalizado en todo el mundo, extendiéndose incluso a las principales ciudades del Sur Global. Sin embargo, los retos que plantea la realidad del Norte Global difieren fuertemente de los presentes en los países en desarrollo. Este...
Article
Full-text available
We examine to what extent Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) contributes to a successful participatory process and how context affects the tool’s role in both process and results. We tested a tool to visualize accessibility effects of transport projects, using it in participatory workshops related to a major bus corridor proposal in Santiago de Chile...
Article
Medio siglo de experimentación demuestra la efectividad de algunas estrategias para reconquistar las calles locales, para recuperar su uso para caminar, socializar, jugar. Una revisión global, realizada en el marco de una colaboración con el Transport & Health Science Group (Reino Unido), generó más de 20 estrategias. Rescatamos estos aprendizajes...
Article
Introduction Understanding of social sustainability has deepened as concepts of transport justice, mobility and access highlight the importance of health, safety, security, but also human agency, rights and civic competence as strategic within the social determinants of health. Gender helps to assess progress towards social justice. How can transpo...
Chapter
Este fascinante libro relacionado al mundo de ciclismo urbano es de lectura obligatoria para todos. Abarca temas tan diversos como la enseñanza del ciclismo a los niños y jóvenes, cómo se revitalizó la cultura de la bicicleta en China, entre otras experiencias. Contiene 25 artículos en inglés que detallan las buenas prácticas procedentes de muchas...
Article
Various studies show that bikeshare systems have positive implications for people's health, social cohesion, urban livability, and urban congestion, although many suggest bikeshare systems are not achieving equity goals, particularly regarding low-income people and women. To date, most of these studies come from cities in the Global North, the majo...
Article
Full-text available
At the root of the multiple, diverse and multi-scalar challenges facing the living systems we call cities likes a single enormous knot: figuring out how to live together very differently, in light of climate crisis, pandemics, loss of biodiversity and other life-threatening conditions. Active transport has an important role to play in showing ways...
Technical Report
Full-text available
El propósito de este Informe es apoyar la difusión en América Latina de temas importantes relacionados con salud, transporte y equidad.
Article
An extensive literature examines the usefulness of “Safe Routes to Schools programs” to encourage active travel (walking and cycling) to school, thereby increasing physical activity with all its benefits for mental and physical health, mainly in the Global North. This article reports on an adaptation for vulnerable schools in several Chilean cities...
Article
If sustainable transport is defined by emissions and energy, urban passenger transport in Chile could be considered “sustainable”, with two-thirds of trips made by walking, cycling or public transit. Recent studies, however, reveal that gender and equity issues are highly problematic, pointing to tensions between environmental and social sustainabi...
Article
Full-text available
An extensive body of work from the urban planning, health, and other disciplines has documented the importance of walking to urban sustainability from health, safety, security, environmental and other perspectives. These studies come mainly from countries in North America and Europe, where the majority of the population relies on cars for transport...
Article
An abundant literature has examined the usefulness of “safe routes to school” programs to increase active transport (mainly walking and cycling) and with it levels of physical activity, hence health. To date, these have been applied mainly in the Global North, where they are supported by national networks and government. Conditions in developing co...
Article
The links between health and physical activity and between physical activity and habitual travel by passive (cars) and active (principally walking and cycling) transport modes have been well explored. As a result, the potential of urban planning strategies that mobilize their potential for achieving significant health and environmental benefits is...
Article
Winning citizens’ support for urban planning decisions has been a challenge at least since Jacobs published her groundbreaking Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961) and Arnstein defined a “ladder of participation” (Arnstein, 1969). Since then, anti-highway movements and pro-cycling advocacy have demonstrated considerable efficacy (...
Preprint
Full-text available
Chile es un país inseguro para transitar en sus calles, avenidas, caminos y carreteras. En nuestro país al año se producen cerca de 12 muertes en siniestros de tránsito por cada 100.000 habitantes, un valor muy superior al de los países con mejores prácticas en seguridad vial, según datos compilados por la Organización para la Cooperación y el Desa...
Book
Full-text available
La Vía Medioambiental. Desafíos y Proyecciones para un Chile Futuro, es el primer escrito que aborda multidisciplinarmente el problema medio ambiental y el anhelo de un desarrollo sustentable. Académicos, investigadores de di-versas áreas del saber, políticos y autoridades de Gobierno dan cuerpo a un volumen que reúne variadas realidades, problemát...
Book
Full-text available
ESTA PUBLICACIÓN REÚNE 17 DOCUMENTOS PARA POLÍTICA PÚBLICA CON MIRADAS LOCALES SOBRE LA NUEVA AGENDA URBANA DE LA ONU QUE BUSCA SER UN APORTE A LA DISCUSIÓN DE LA CALIDAD DE VIDA EN LAS CIUDADES CHILENAS. CEDEUS es un centro interdisciplinario de investigación que busca la generación e intercambio de conocimiento con el fin de enfrentar los desafío...
Article
Full-text available
Gilbert and Perl (2007) establish how different epochs in human history came with specific “transport revolutions.” Our research suggests that intermodal approaches could constitute an invisible transport planning revolution. Based on a review defining “social” sustainability as it applies to urban passenger transportation, we consider the potentia...
Article
Full-text available
After forty years of car-centered planning, developed countries have generated a convincing body of evidence that reveals the extensive impacts of citizen movements against highways, in terms of both urban and planning systems. More recently, we have seen these models expand worldwide, turning auto mobility into the dominant planning paradigm, desp...
Article
Workshop 4 explored the development of inter-modal transport systems in developed and developing economies worldwide, focusing on their characteristics, approach, design, performance, relative merits, challenges faced and their evaluation. The workshop examined the social, political, institutional, regulatory, and operational challenges in providin...
Article
Scholars, practitioners and activists have been reconsidering the importance of cycling to create sustainable transport systems. A discussion of intermodal transport invites us to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of diverse modes, as they relate to strategic planning decisions and particularly land use, along with considering ways that citie...
Chapter
The importance of citizen participation has long been recognized as an essential component of development. How participation should be organized and who should lead is hotly debated. Researchers and transport agencies in North America and Europe are showing a growing commitment to different strategies and degrees of participation. Anti-highway and...
Article
The promise of BRT is that it can serve as a catalyst for reshaping urban space and embedding sustainable transport into the fabric of the city. In developing cities with informal bus service sectors, BRT can be used as a method to restructure public transport provision by providing the physical infrastructure for the integrated network design and...
Chapter
Introduction: bringing context into focus to understand the power of participation As discussed elsewhere in this book, transport planners seeking to build more sustainable urban transport systems generally view Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) as an option that offers substantial advantages, in terms of flexibility, implementation, public–private arrangeme...
Article
Cycling-inclusive urban planning is attracting worldwide attention as cycling has demonstrated its potential for contributing to resolving not only mobility but also diverse issues of social concern (health and physical activity, urban congestion and pollution), amidst the challenges of global warming and the need to define more equitable ways of o...
Article
Twenty years ago, a global trend toward “automobility”, in which the car is the main transport mode in cities, seemed virtually inevitable. In North America and many European countries, a generation of school children accustomed to walking or cycling to school gave way to new generations expecting to bus or travel by car. Developing countries too b...
Article
During the last third of the 20th century, citizens throughout North America and Europe organized protests against urban highway projects, influencing urban transport planning in ways that shape its evolution to this day. With the globalization of car-centred urban planning models, some similar movements have emerged in developing countries. What,...
Article
Increasingly, the search for sustainable transport has reflected the awareness that cycling, walking and the liveable cities that encourage these activities lie at the centre of any effective strategy. While citizens' groups are often encouraged, instructed or expected to support these initiatives, to date, there have been few studies of how these...
Article
Full-text available
Public participation processes have become increasingly important as a means of structuring the relationship between states and citizens in managing processes of urban change, but continue to fall short of achieving significant democratization of urban governance. Through an examination of three bottom-up processes of citizen engagement in managing...
Article
Full-text available
Although the usefulness of walking and cycling to promote health is increasingly recognized, the importance of civil society leadership in developing new policies and activities is often overlooked. This case study, of Living City (Ciudad Viva) a community-based organization in Santiago, Chile, examines how several communities used knowledge about...
Article
Full-text available
Five years after an elected government took over from a military regime, Chile has enjoyed booming economic growth and some measure of political stability but the scars of the legacy left by the regime of Augusto Pinochet run deep. Alcohol and drug abuse, family violence, depression and other mental-health problems are reported by a large proportio...
Article
Full-text available
Four years ago, Lake Sagaris wrote about the problems facing the Chilean health care system as it attempted to function under a strict military regime (Sagaris L: Health care in Chile: Doctors take on a declining system. Can Med Assoc J 1987; 136: 174-178). Last year that regime was replaced by a democratically elected government. Sagaris reports t...
Article
In the cool dusk of the Chilean summer, thousands flocked to a circus tent last January to see a new kind of theatre. Part vaudeville, part street theatre, part melodrama, part music, La Negra Esther sets Romeo and Juliet in a brothel and carries it off with its own peculiarly Chilean sense of language and fun.
Article
Lake Sagaris, a graduate in creative writing of the University of British Columbia, is currently working as a language teacher and translator; she has published poetry and short stories in Chilean, Canadian, and American journals. She is a member of the Society of Writers of Chile and winner of the Agrupacion Cultural Universitaria's "Palabras para...
Article
Lake Sagaris, born in Montreal and educated at UBC, now works as a journalist and teacher in Santiago, Chile. She has published poems and stories in many journals and was editor and translator of the first anthology of Canadian literature to appear in Spanish.

Questions

Questions (2)
Question
Our Transport Justice report -- first effort -- is just coming out and has opened up quite a bit of new areas of interest, from both a theoretical and a practical point of view... We're happy to share and compare if you are interested. lsagaris@uc.cl Best to all. L
Question
Trips to schools are a substantial proportion of daily trips in most cities and, in Latin America, distances are often long as parents struggle to get their children to "better" schools. Providing quality schools in all neighbourhoods could be the best transport and health policy for addressing this reality sustainably. Hence, the interest in this kind of analysis on school trips. I imagine it is easiest to locate primary schools (within a 1-2 km diameter catchment area?)  in neighbourhoods, while longer distances (2-5km) would work for older children and adolescents. These are also the distances most favourable for walking and cycling. I am an urban planner in transport engineering at the Catholic University in Santiago, by the way. 

Network

Cited By