Experimental Infrastructure: Experiences in Bicycling in Quito, Ecuador

Abstract

Bicycling infrastructure has flourished across Latin American cities as urban activists who cycle have pressed municipalities to grant space on the streets. This article analyzes the ways urban cyclists use and create bicycling infrastructure in the city of Quito, Ecuador. It uses an ethnographic approach to understand how infrastructure is systematically produced through various relationships with human actors and non‐human phenomena. The article starts from the perspective of the ethnographer moving within the assemblage of the feminist bicycle collective Carishina en Bici. The ethnographer drew on feminist science and technology studies (STS) approaches to cultivate everyday relationships of ‘care' to become a moving part of an infrastructural assemblage. The study of infrastructure entails carefully choosing research relationships that result in intra‐action, or the coming together of the subjects and objects of a study to produce infrastructure. The article uses the term experimental infrastructure to reveal the procedures of studying and analyzing the political dynamics that result from bicycling infrastructure. It draws on 15 months of fieldwork in Quito, Ecuador, and participatory photo travel diaries of cyclists to demonstrate how bicycling infrastructure is a point of intersection as well as an active site for making democratic claims to the Andean city.

Weeds, Pheasants and Wild Dogs: Resituating the Ecological Paradigm in Postindustrial Detroit

“…At the same time, assemblage and patch dynamics approaches, with their attention to flux, disruption and flows, can allow for the integration of new uses, perspectives or combinations within these value estimations: drug users, homeowners, dogs, real estate developers, squatters, gardens, grasses, dilapidated houses, spontaneous meeting places are all parts of the living world, components of the city's plasma. In her study of bicycling infrastructure in Quito, Ecuador, Gamble () employs experimental ethnography in conjunction with assemblage theory to explore the ways in which cyclists respond to limitations and craft new possibilities. Likewise, Guattari (: 28) states that the ecology he envisions ‘must not be exclusively concerned with visible relations of force on a grand scale, but will also take into account molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence and desire’.…”

“…Taking some cues from actor‐network theory (ANT), which Muller () describes as the empirical sister of assemblage thinking, we attempt to limit ourselves to the trails that we are able to detect; associations we can observe and what the ‘actors themselves’ (Latour, ) tell us. According to Gamble (: 164), an assemblage is ‘an open‐ended configuration that is produced by the active encounters of subjects and objects woven together by the researcher seeking to ascertain possibility and difference’. Our method itself is a form of assemblage; as embodied researchers we are necessarily engaged in a process of selecting and excluding phenomena.…”

BICYCLE POLICY IN MEXICO CITY: Urban Experiments and Differentiated Citizenship

“…With a focus on the politics of the urban poor, Anand (2017) and McFarlane (2011) have also examined how excluded residents make claims for recognition in relation to access to water and sanitation. Likewise in the case of transportation planning and geography, scholarship has highlighted the relationship between transportation policy and social mobilization around road construction (López, 2017), transit service (Burgos and Pulido, 1998), and bicycle infrastructure (Golub et al, 2016;Gamble, 2017;Stehlin, 2019). This varied research enhances our understanding of 'mobility justice' in terms of how infrastructures distribute resources and enable movement across the urban space (Sheller, 2018).…”

From the Right to Mobility to the Right to the Mobile City: Playfulness and Mobilities in Bogotá’s Cycling Activism

“…I wish to challenge this conceptualisation, arguing that while access to the city is indeed important, the 'right to the mobile city' -that is, the marriage of mobilities and the right to the city -sheds light on the way in which mobile practices themselves are exercises in participation and appropriation. Already, some have paved the way in this direction, attending to how young men and women's movement and circulation are ways of asserting their belonging in, and making claims to, the city (Caldeira, 2012;Gamble, 2017;Simone, 2005). Furthermore, in his work, Kafui Attoh (2017) argues that access to the city is insufficient if it prevents individuals from being part of the public through 'enforced privatised isolation'.…”

“…Cycling protest, specifically, has received attention from a quickly expanding vélomobilities field which has empirically turned to cities of the Global North to conceptualise it as a contentious issue in its own right (Aldred, 2013;Cupples & Ridley, 2008;Furness, 2007;Hoffmann, 2016). Meanwhile, a critical engagement with cycling and politics in the Global South is overdue to unpack the manifold ways in which cycling becomes embedded in the urban landscape (though see: Gamble, 2017;López León, 2016;Rinaldi, 2018). In all, while explicit connections with the right to the city have been suggested across the literature, they remain to be elaborated (though see : Raquel, 2018).…”