In profile: Chris Zegras
Christopher ZegrasPhoto: Dominick Reuter When Chris Zegras started studying the way cities work, in the early 1990s, it wasn’t in a classroom, and he wasn’t pursuing a formal academic project. Instead, Zegras was a recent college graduate who had majored in economics and Spanish, and was trying to combine both of those interests in his first real job. As such, he had found a position in Santiago, the capital of Chile, working in finance.“Chile had been going through its re-emergence as a democracy, and I wanted to see what that was like,” Zegras says. But before long, Zegras realized that what was going on outside his office was more interesting than anything he was doing on the job. In particular, he became fascinated by the flow of people in bustling Santiago — on buses, in the city’s subway system, and in the hundreds of thousands of cars that contributed to Santiago’s...