RETROFIT: CABLE CARS AND THE REENGINEERING OF URBAN WORLDS
During the past decade, gondola lift systems have traveled from the mountain resorts of the Alps to the hillside shantytowns of the Andes and beyond. These flexible and sleek infrastructures are being re-embedded as urban transportation systems and neighborhood revitalization corridors across a growing number of cities in Latin America. Building on the increasing policy and scholarly interest on aerial cable-cars as vehicles for urban inclusion and development, I am conducting research on the conditions under which these networks of mobility have become a widespread platform to reimagine and reorder urban space.
This is a multi-sited and comparative project focused on the emergence, modularity, and social life of aerial cable cars. First, I explore the forms of technical and non-technical knowledge, as well as material capabilities, required to assemble gondola lifts in densely inhabited urban areas shaped by histories of violence and deprivation. I follow Austrian and French cable car manufacturing firms Doppelmayr and Poma, and local urban experts and technicians, as they negotiate technological standards and the specifics of socio-material and political contexts.
Second, and in contrast to recent scholarship on the techno-politics of infrastructure, I also explore the aesthetic and affective dimensions of gondola lifts. This includes ethnographic research of inhabitants' and users' experiences of mobility and their navigations of new landscapes of technological artifacts–from the cabins gliding above to the large metal towers and stations inserted into the urban fabric.
Finally, the project examines the political terrain in which aerial cable cars operate and the multiple projects they enable: from the rebranding of space as a tourist destination and the creation of new socio-economic circuits to the transformation of land uses and values and the rerouting of policing and surveillance. Ultimately, I consider the place of cable car infrastructures in a longer history of engineering, social control, and the mastering of unruly topographies in Latin America.
I have conducted fieldwork in Medellín in 2008 and 2012, and most recently in Bogotá since 2017. I have followed officials from the Instituto de Desarrollo Urbano and engineers from Doppelmayr as they build the city's first gondola lift in the district of Ciudad Bolivar. More recently my research has also focused on the everyday lives of community leaders, residents, and commuters in the rapidly changing landscapes of cable car urbanism. In the following stages of the project I intend to carry out fieldwork in Manizales (Colombia), La Paz (Bolivia), and Ecatepec (Mexico).
Photos and videos by Federico Pérez Fernández