Retrofit: Aerial cable cars and the reengineering of urban peripheries

Abstract

Aerial cable car construction has boomed across Latin America’s urban edges. The reinvented gondola lift has circulated as a prototype to remake the city’s peripheries from the inside out. Drawing on ethnographic research on the construction of a first urban cable car line in Bogotá, Colombia, I conceptualize cable car urbanism as a form of socio-technical, political, and aesthetic retrofit. As an emergent interface for material and epistemic practices, the urban gondola lift embodies a logic of governance based on the continual adjustment of and tinkering with existing socio-spatial realities. At the same time, it constitutes a platform for ongoing reinvention and reconfiguration from below. Tracking this interplay between official engineering and grounded autoconstruction critically illuminates the limits and promise of the politics of infrastructural retrofitting.