The Cosmopolitics of Urban Sustainability. Infrastructures, Mobilities and Modernities in Cuenca, Ecuador

Abstract

This thesis explores the cosmopolitics of urban change in Cuenca, Ecuador, linked to a set of sustainable mobility projects developed by the local government. With particular focus on the implementation of a tramway, I examine what sustainability comes to mean and do, and how it relates to other worldings in Cuenca. Particularly, 'sustainability' entertains ambiguous relations with notions of modernity and development, culture and heritage, order and participation. These ambiguous relations are part of the everyday life of the city, characterised by the interactions between divergent actors, from city officials to residents, drivers, shopkeepers, academics and activists. Starting from the municipality's projects, I explore the frictions they generate with the different lifeworlds of the city - frictions which simultaneously reconfigure these lifeworlds and sustainability. In chapter 1, I focus on the narratives that are involved in these processes of city making. I reconstruct the municipality's sustainability story in the historical context of Ecuador's shifting transport systems, political developments and international connections. Sustainability projects in Cuenca can be linked, but are not reducible, to a history of modernisation projects, just as much as to recent contestations of western neoliberal modernity. Chapter 2 analyses traffic discourses and practices in the city. I discuss how a widespread culture discourse turns traffic into the realm of cultural agents, disconnecting it from broader logics of patriarchal capitalism. Sustainable mobility is presented as the antidote to disorderly, unsafe and unhealthy traffic, but chapter 3 shows how the new tram system struggles to realise the local government's ideal of order. Large-scale change turns out to involve unpredictable city assemblages. This is also exemplified in the discussion on heritage in chapter 4. The proposed urban interventions are perceived by many residents as a threat to the city's identity, its heritage and people's belonging to that heritage. As the city changes, its physical, symbolic and practical components are reassembled. In order to make change less disruptive and more participatory and incremental, the municipality has started to experiment with ideas of 'tactical urbanism'. Chapter 5 explores how this approach plays out concretely, examining what kinds of publics emerge in such purportedly participatory experiments. Throughout the thesis, sustainability appears as a contested terrain, in which different lifeworlds interact and are reshaped, struggle to be sustained and are rendered unsustainable. The notion of sustainability can neither be considered as entirely embedded in modern, neoliberal processes, nor as a radical alternative to these. Rather, it is partially connected to the worldings of modernity, neoliberalism, culture and heritage, multiplying and reconfiguring them in uncertain ways.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Jolynna Sinanan (Supervisor) & Penelope Harvey (Supervisor)