Retrofit: Aerial cable cars and the reengineering of urban peripheries

Retrofitting the slum’s image

Writing about a failed cable car project in Cazucá, an impoverished and violence-ridden neighborhood bordering Ciudad Bolívar to the southwest, María José Álvarez Rivadulla and Diana Bocarejo conceptualize the technology as a “powerful fetish” that is “capable of reinstantiating old aspirations and creating new ones” (2014: 2026–2027). The cable-car-as-fetish appears here not as a form of misrecognition, but rather as a highly visible artifact that actively shapes new modes of agency and desires, while mediating local histories of governmental intervention and failure (Álvarez Rivadulla and Bocarejo, 2014: 2033). For Álvarez Rivadulla and Bocarejo, “cable cars have become part of a new aesthetic agenda” that promotes a “pacified and beautified kind of poverty” (2014: 2036).

Such agenda was tangibly showcased in Rio de Janeiro, where the urban cable car’s “futuristic design” became a central feature of recent favela “pacification” and development programs (Cavalcanti, 2014: 93). According to Mariana Cavalcanti and Marcos Campos, the inauguration of a new gondola in Rio’s Complexo de Alemão in 2011 was above all “an aesthetic performance of [the favela’s] integration to the city” (2022: 16). Monumental architecture and heightened visibility took precedence over the infrastructure’s functionality both as a transit system and as a neighborhood improvement scheme. An urban spectacle narrowly fitted to the city’s rebranding as a global sporting capital, Rio’s two urban cable cars were shut down due to lack of maintenance soon after the 2016 Olympic Games. The now derelict infrastructures stand as ruins not of the past, but of a “projected future” (Cavalcanti and Campos, 2022: 27).

Infrastructural aesthetics have been equally central to Ciudad Bolívar’s Transmicable. Yet a closer look at the creation and operations of the system––the retrofitting practices on which it is grounded––reveal not mainly a fetish or spectacle, but rather the continual performance and reworking of its aesthetic and ideological dimensions. The urban cable car, in this sense, is emblematic of what Brian Larkin (2018) calls the “political aesthetics of infrastructure.” Far from a narrow focus on either symbolism or materiality, this means that “the technical and logistical sides of infrastructure are not privileged over, or seen as separate from, its social and political, or formal and aesthetic sides” (Appel et al., 2018: 17).

The promises and visions of the urban gondola lift have been inextricably bound to its technopolitical insertion into the urban landscape. Transmicable’s projection of ideals of inclusion, sustainability, and progress are part and parcel of the everyday retrofitting of Ciudad Bolívar. If the autoconstructed neighborhood is the result of the accretion of built forms, sociopolitical networks, and urban practices, the reengineering spearheaded by the aerial cable car aims to unsettle and transform these relatively obdurate sociomaterial ensembles (Hommels, 2008). In Ciudad Bolívar, engineers, architects, and planners have sought to bypass the congested maze of local streets, steep stairways, and broken topography, as they overlay Transmicable’s technological artifacts and spatial forms on a complex terrain of land ownership, socioeconomic activity, and conflict. In doing so, the infrastructure has been shaping a new political aesthetics for the transformed barrio.

The everyday political aesthetics of Transmicable were made plain to me early in my research during an apparently innocuous event in Ciudad Bolívar. A Saturday morning in August of 2017, I met with Andrés, a planner who worked at Bogotá’s Instituto de Desarrollo Urbano or IDU (Institute of Urban Development) and who had invited me to an official outing. One of the city’s most powerful agencies, the IDU oversees infrastructure development, from roads and sidewalks to bike lanes and mass transit lines. The IDU had been charged with directing the construction of Transmicable for which it had recently contracted the Austrian aerial lift manufacturer Doppelmayr. That day, IDU functionaries––engineers, topographers, and managers of various stripes––set out on a jornada social (social engagement visit) to Ciudad Bolívar and a tour of the construction sites of Transmicable.

As I boarded the charter bus, Andrés gave me a bright blue baseball cap with the IDU’s official logo and with the group of roughly 60 functionaries we headed to the city’s southwestern edge. The bus snaked past the main Transmicable station construction site on the lower part of Ciudad Bolívar and then squeezed through the narrow streets of the Lucero neighborhood. It stopped in front of a bulky white and grey building, a semi-abandoned food market and commercial center constructed by the city government years earlier. To my surprise, as I stepped down from the bus, a functionary handed me a scraper as others took shovels, brooms, and paint cans. As it turned out, the IDU jornada social was part of government organized volunteer cleaning event in Ciudad Bolívar––what one official called “maintenance, cleaning, and transformation.” Functionaries swept the large dusty sidewalks, painted over graffitied columns, scraped flyers and posters off light posts, and planted trees. Meanwhile, local business owners and residents stared at them from the opposite sidewalk. Only one of the Plaza’s exterior commercial spaces was open––a corpulent, middle-aged man, stood in front of towers of mattresses for sale looking perplexed. “I wish they would reopen the commercial spaces,” he told me as I struck a conversation about the event. “I’m not sure how the cable will benefit us,” he said, when I brought up the aerial cable car construction.

Once the cleaning stopped and a senior official thanked the group and the functionaries cheered––an institutional bonding ritual of sorts––everyone climbed onto the buses eager to finally see the cable car construction. At one of the main construction sites, where the hilly barrio started, Doppelmayr engineers explained some of the principles of the project: the minimal impact of the supporting towers and their double function as public and recreational spaces; the intermediate stations as mobility nodes and sites for neighborhood amenities; and the cable’s integration to the city’s bus rapid transit system, Transmilenio. Functionaries hopped back onto the buses to make their way to the top of the hill where the last pylons were being installed. As we moved higher into the mountain, functionaries seemed increasingly wary. This part of the neighborhood was feared by many for its history of criminal activity and turf wars. Stories about assaults of cable car contractors and theft of machinery were well known. “Let’s hurry,” someone said as they walked up the steep streets of the bustling residential and commercial area. Finally, the last tower was visible, surrounded by workers and construction materials within a guarded perimeter and the urban expanse behind. IDU engineers lined up in front of the site to get their picture taken, quickly returning to the buses to descend from the hilly barrio (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Group of IDU functionaries taking a break during the jornada social. Photo by the author, 2017.

During the IDU jornada social, the cleaning event and the installation of the cable car were brought together under the same technopolitical and aesthetic frame (Bijker, 1995): intervention was about cleansing the violence-ridden and impoverished district. City officials’ and experts’ practices around the cable car pointed to familiar ideas about urban ordering and beautification. The system emerged as a technology to retrofit Ciudad Bolívar’s image––something in line with the beautification of public spaces and creation of civic infrastructure in Bogotá since the late 1990s, part of the so-called Bogotá Model (Montero, 2017). But as the mattress storeowner suggested, this framing was far from settled. For residents like him, the meaning and effects of the infrastructure had yet to be linked to local socioeconomic realities. More than a predetermined path, cable car retrofitting opened a space around which different social processes would coalesce. As the implementation of the system advanced, engineers and designers would inevitably confront this sociopolitical complexity in their work to embed the system, or as they themselves put it, to have residents “appropriate [apropiarse]” the infrastructure.

Between modularity and penetration

“Look, here’s your bulletproof vest.” Alejandro handed me a construction vest, a hard hat, and a pair of boots. With his characteristically wry humor, the Dopplemayr engineer, a Venezuelan who had worked at the company for years, was gesturing at the dangers of infrastructure construction in Ciudad Bolívar. I put on the gear as I glanced over the diagrams of cable car stations hanging next to a crayon portrait drawn by the engineer’s daughter. Alejandro verified that my paperwork was in order––including proof of high-risk workplace insurance––and we left the field office of Doppelmayr for a tour of the Transmicable construction site.

The firm’s engineers and technicians had been working out of shipping containers installed at the base of Ciudad Bolívar. By 2017, when I first visited the site, most of the gondola lift’s pylons had been erected and three of the line’s four stations were under construction. We zipped up the district’s main road––a frequently clogged two-way street––in a company SUV as Alejandro described the everyday challenges of moving equipment, carrying out targeted demolitions, and erecting towering pylons in the dense urban fabric.

Like other global engineering projects, the circulation of urban cable cars in Latin America has relied on processes of standardization and replicability (Appel, 2012; Easterling, 2014; Harvey and Knox, 2015). As an engineer proudly explained, Doppelmayr is considered the Rolls Royce of cable cars boasting the most advanced technology and highest quality standards among cable car manufacturers. During our ride along the Transmicable line, Alejandro pointed out how “every component is manufactured in Austria” and shipped to be assembled on site. To a certain extent, the urban cable car exemplifies what Hannah Appel calls “modularity”: “the use of mobile, compliant, and self-contained infrastructures, labor setups, forms of expertise, and legal guidelines” (2012: 693). The installation of Transmicable followed standardized electromechanical specifications––down to the sizes of tower rings and bolts—and hinged on the expertise of European assemblers or montadores. As Alejandro explained:

One of these systems can bring up to 160 shipping containers, it’s a Lego for big kids. Each container can have up to sixty sheets of parts and those parts come with an installation plan [plano de instalación] and that’s what foreign assemblers do. They check that all the parts are there, and they use that plan to put the Lego together.

Further illustrating the modular qualities of the “assembly kit,” he noted that the company “had minimal measuring tolerances of just around five millimeters.” A design engineer from the company checked all the Doppelmayr inserts in the structure and advised about any necessary adjustments, including movements of just a few centimeters (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Cable car assembly kit. Photo by the author, 2017.

In her research on the transnational oil industry, Appel shows how modular practices are an essential part of the work to “disentangle” global political economic projects from the social worlds on which they inevitably depend (2012: 693). Oil extraction, particularly the offshore variety, is exemplary not simply of the disregard for local conditions––something that critics of intervention in its various guises have noted––but rather of the “intentional disengagement” from local socioeconomic and political contexts (2012: 697). The urban cable car can be viewed as a similarly mobile, self-contained, and standardized technology. Part of the work of engineers is to insulate their designs and machinery to ensure their integrity, replicability, and rapid implementation across messy urban landscapes. As Alejandro put it, “Doppelmayr isn’t interested in extending the duration of its time [on-site], that’s not its business, its business is building cable cars [and getting out].” At the same time, however, urban cable car development must constantly negotiate the technology’s insertion in the layered terrain of Latin America’s urban edges. In contrast to modular projects, this requires an equally intentional engagement with realities on the ground—a constant retrofitting of the technology into the everyday life of the urban periphery.

Such retrofit processes are not only technical and material, as mentioned above, but also aesthetic and political. If the IDU’s jornada social rendered the cable car into a cleansing of the disorderly barrio, its installation revealed how the technology would serve as a far-reaching conduit for the diffusion of governmental rationalities. At stake here, following Brian Larkin, are the “formal qualities of everyday infrastructures and their role in producing a political aesthetics” (2018: 185). The material constitution of technologies is always already endowed with sociopolitical meanings and is productive of sensorial experiences. According to Larkin, infrastructure is “representational… distributing particular sorts of political rationalities” and it also “creates a sensory, tactile environment that translates political rationalities into ambient experience” (2018: 184).

The mundane logistics of Transmicable’s assembly, for instance, became inevitably embroiled in Ciudad Bolívar’s long-standing problems of governance and security. “The zone is somewhat difficult,” Alejandro noted cautiously as we drove up to a Transmicable station on higher ground: “There have been incidents, they’ve stolen some of our equipment, they robbed us at gun point.” Cable car engineering was partly couched in the language of territorial control and political sovereignty, something that Alejandro and others expressed through the notion of penetration. “Penetration with the community had helped significantly” to deal with local safety issues, Alejandro noted. In addition to moving people quickly over the neighborhood’s irregular topography, urban cable car systems were built rapidly, within two years or less: “this allows you to carry out more effective political penetration.” Erecting metal pylons and creating stations for the flying cabins was thus also about giving the state a new material form and reshaping both relations among locals and between them and official institutions: “Things get better as you penetrate those places and people start to know you.”

Gondola lifts emerged as light and pliable systems to pry open the allegedly impenetrable urban margin and reconnect it to the normative city. If modern engineering was “rooted” in the “imaginary-practical entities” of “networks and flows,” urban cable car engineering has mobilized the imagery of infiltration (Picon, 2018: 265). Imaginaries of networks were critical in “articulating technical and social dimensions” (266), as well as in enabling the political work of infrastructures such as roads and railways: from capitalist accumulation and social control to the “dream of state territoriality” (Harvey and Knox, 2015: 168). Urban cable cars can be viewed as extending the logic of networks to overcome the obstacles of topography and the lack of urban planning and infrastructure across Latin America. The language of penetration and its material and aesthetic manifestations, however, also point to a new technopolitical arrangement to deepen such governmental logics: an assemblage of sites and nodes that create new interfaces between the state and citizens, as well as new opportunities for the reinvention of everyday spaces and practices.

The imagery of penetration and its technopolitical rationalities were most apparent in Transmicable’s large stations. Alejandro was still struck by the scale of construction in places like Ciudad Bolívar. Pointing to the intermediate stations of Juan Pablo II and Manitas, he noted they “were rather monstruous.” “If you see a ski station [in Europe] you’ll see fewer people and a smaller infrastructure,” he explained, “but one that is much more practical and functional.” Alejandro thus remained partially beholden to the logic of modularity and envisioned a less “tropicalized” technology more in line with the expediency of engineering: “We should try to minimize areas so they’re faster to build and more effective.” At the same time, he was fully aware of the political aesthetics of the redesigned urban cable car––not only that it aimed to “beautify” the area, as he himself put it, but also that it brought with it new public facilities and services that aimed to change residents’ lives.

Acupunctural governance

Esteban, a senior urban designer from Bogotá’s Planning Secretariat (Secretaría de Planeación), expanded on the imagery of penetration with the notion of urban acupuncture (acupuntura urbana). ³ A young architect with professional experience in academia, private firms, and the city administration, Esteban was in charge of planning the amenities and public spaces that would accompany the Transmicable infrastructure. Noting the triteness of the term ‘urban acupuncture’ in expert circles, he nonetheless found it apt to describe the project. “Although urban acupuncture sounds like cheap talk of architecture undergrads [pura carreta de arquitecto de pregrado],” Esteban noted, “[the aerial cable car] consists precisely of needles stuck in the territory, in other words, it’s pure urban acupuncture.” Clicking through architectural renderings of the system’s projected amenities in his office computer––from a large administrative hub to social welfare and community centers, and a museum ⁴ —Esteban explained the importance of clearing out plots around the pylons and stations for public buildings and spaces. And these were much fewer lots than the city would have acquired to build a road or a bus rapid transit trunk line, he added, “so it’s a project that is much more delicate with the city.” For Esteban these elements, more than its potential as a sustainable and inclusionary transit system, made the aerial cable car particularly valuable: “This is the vision—which applies to the [future] metro [system], to new bus rapid transit lines—and it’s that mobility infrastructures are excuses to generate city [generar ciudad]. They aren’t simply engineering projects [simples obras de ingeniería].”

The aesthetics of penetration and acupuncture gestured to a form of engineering that sought to be more closely attuned to its effects on the ground. As Carlos, a former IDU official and veteran transportation engineer told me elaborating on the biomedical language of acupuncture:

[with bus infrastructure development] we realized that transit projects must be more integral, that we must intervene at a greater scale and be much more careful with the scars [cicatrices] that one leaves behind. [Those scars] need to be cauterized, and for that, work with communities is essential.

Transmicable had “copied” Medellín’s Metrocable, Esteban argued, “although trying not to make the same mistakes.” For him, a station like the Parque Biblioteca España built at the end of the Metrocable’s first line, was very “sculptural” but nonetheless a “failure” in terms of engaging locals and visitors.

In Bogotá, engineers, planners, and designers had undertaken extended consultations with residents to create stations that would work as social hubs by approximating people’s “actual needs.” They deepened such piecemeal retrofitting through what experts called pylon urbanism (urbanismo de pilona): the creation of small parks, focused amenities, and micro-public spaces around the base of half of the system’s 24 pylons. Lucy Molano, ⁵ an architect who had worked for years on citizen participation at the IDU illustrated this perspective with “the metaphor of the line and the dot”: the idea that infrastructure development should not be just about “connecting two dots with a line.” She and her colleagues had brought this conviction to the Transmicable project emphasizing its “interdimensional, interdisciplinary, and interinstitutional” nature. “We started paying attention to other things,” Lucy explained, working to balance “the economic and physical” sides of things with “social, cultural, and environmental dimensions.” Hopefully, she continued, this would also map onto domains of knowledge and help undo long-standing hierarchies: “from engineers and architects to social workers, anthropologists, and community members.”

Yet experts admitted that acupunctural retrofitting was deeply entangled with ideals of state territoriality and political subjectivity. For Carlos, the seasoned transportation engineer, Transmicable was aimed at “strengthening of the presence of the state” in a territory “with very complex issues of governance.” Esteban was even more candid about the security undertones of the project. For him, not only did the technology’s “well-illuminated and designed public spaces lead to more security” but it also meant “a lot of cameras everywhere”—in cabins, stations, public buildings, and towers. Going even further, several experts suggested that the infrastructure would shape new urban subjects. As Esteban put it, a very “cool thing [cosa bacanísima]” about the gondola lift was its alleged potential to change inhabitants’ views and behaviors: “I think that for people to see the neighborhood from above changes their ‘[mental] chip’.” Alejandro also ventured that the technology would “change [users’] perspective”:

it doesn’t simply save you time and improve your quality of life, it totally changes your visual [orientation]. It opens your senses, and you see other things, how the city changes, from another point of view because you’re up in the air.

In the history of modern engineering, avenues and roads were the materialization of national state power and its aspirations to shape the experience and political consciousness of modern subjects (Harvey and Knox, 2015; Larkin, 2018; Scott, 1998 ). Such modernist infrastructure—from Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards to Bogotá’s own Corbuserian inner-city avenues—epitomized a form of intervention inflected by the militarized logics of demolition and displacement, and the capitalist dreams of unfettered consumption. As a mode of retrofit, in contrast, the urban cable car purposely avoids large-scale reconstruction and overt state control in favor of the piecemeal penetration and gradual remaking of urban spaces and socialities. Embodying prototyping sensibilities, it seeks to mobilize communities and put into motion processes of reinvention that ripple across the existing urban fabric.

In setting out to connect the ‘slum’ to the city, however, cable car retrofitting reproduces normative assumptions about the relations between state and citizens and about what urban subjectivity should look and feel like. The idea itself of acupuncture, Juan Pablo Galvis importantly notes (2020: 19), reinscribes older hygienist and modernist paradigms about “curing” urban pathologies and recreating the city as a healthy “living organism.” In doing so, it partly shifts the logics and logistics of state planning and control to a “community empowered by acupunctural activation” (Galvis, 2020: 19). From this perspective, cable car retrofitting appears as a potentially more insidious mode of governance. Yet the social life of Transmicable also reveals that its effects are far from predetermined or unitary. It shows the possibilities of reinvention afforded by the technology together with the limits it imposes on political dreams and aspirations.

Peripheral interfacing

If retrofit involves the reengineering of built forms and social practices across time (Hodson and Marvin, 2017; Howe et al., 2016), then people in barrios populares like Ciudad Bolívar have always engaged in modes of urban retrofitting: from the continual redesign of their autoconstructed homes and the self-provision of services to the collective construction of neighborhood infrastructure. Repair and refurbishing have been central to the “long-term processes of incompletion and continuous improvement” that characterize “peripheral urbanization” (Caldeira, 2017: 5). This does not mean, following Teresa Caldeira, that such urban improvisations happen “in the absence of the state or planning” (2017: 7). The gradual piecing together of spaces and livelihoods in Ciudad Bolívar has been closely entangled with legal frameworks, political clientelism, and fragmentary government schemes. A crucial question, then, is how by seeping into everyday spaces and routines, the cable car and its acupunctural interventions further interact with the “transversal logics” through which residents engage with the state and produce “heterogenous urban spaces” (Caldeira, 2017: 7, 10).

As a prototype that interfaces between state and residents, formality and informality, and city and slum, the aerial cable car creates new conditions for local modes of retrofitting and performances of political agency. The technology both openly stimulates and implicitly sets the terms for—or penetrates, to use engineers’ language—local experiments of sociomaterial reconditioning. As an interface, it is implicated in simultaneously “enabling and disciplining” (Hookway, 2014: 10; see also Suchman, 2007). At stake here, more broadly, is a bid for the reconstitution of the periphery, not in “ontological” or “topological” terms ( Roy, 2011 ) or merely as an “object” or “process” (Corsín Jiménez, 2017), but also as an epistemic form and an aesthetic and sensorial orientation toward the city: the remaking of the “slum as theory” ( Rao , 2006 ) and phenomenology of the urban world. The aerial cable car and its urbanistic interventions open new vistas on city-making, both figuratively and literally, and in doing so they mediate the imaginaries of past and future, and the aspirations and desires cyphered in the everyday adaptive practices of retrofitting.

Floating above Ciudad Bolívar on Transmicable, one can already see signs of the contradictions between state and local retrofit. The view from the cabins is adorned by colorful patches formed by thousands of houses that were repainted in bright hues between 2016 and 2019 through the government program HabitARTE. Aiming to “beautify” facades in the city’s “vulnerable” areas, the intervention was supposed to bolster official community-building and social learning schemes linked to the cable car project. Moreover, it enhanced the aesthetic power of Transmicable, rendering the ‘slum’ into a stage for the sleek technology as well as remaking it into a desirable image to be consumed from above.

Significantly, HabitARTE all but ignored a peripheral prototype of aesthetic retrofit and community learning launched by local street artists years earlier. Since 2013, the urban art collective Survamos had organized a collaborative open-air museum in Ciudad Bolívar known as Museo Libre (Free Museum). It started as a series of murals created by local artists in the ruined landscape left behind by the demolition of several houses deemed at risk due to their proximity to the Quebrada Limas (Limas Creek). As members of Survamos explained, Museo Libre became a key “precedent in the development of peri-urban art” and in the struggle against the city’s historic centralization of artistic and cultural infrastructure (Survamos, 2021). In later versions, the festival drew more artists from South Bogotá and beyond, consolidating a street art critique of extractivism and environmental degradation, state and criminal violence, and poverty and segregation. ⁶

In 2019, HabitARTE approached Survamos to survey existing murals. Although officials committed to the preservation of Museo Libre, the collective discovered that 21 works had been erased as façade painting in the area continued apace. Responding to what they saw as “censure” and “discrimination,” Survamos mobilized street artists to “resist,” participate in the “reactivation of the erased spaces,” and continue creating works that challenged “territorial imaginaries” (Griffin and Young, 2023; Survamos, 2021). Flying on Transmicable, Museo Libre murals appear in the fissures of the sea of repainted houses. As one nears the end of the trip to El Mirador-Paraíso, a recent work stands as a powerful reminder of the politics of retrofit: a realist rendering of an enormous human eye painted by Salvadorian artist Abraham O. on a jagged boulder of what was once an active sand quarry. In stark contrast to the flat colors of HabitARTE, the eye on the textured rock surface takes on a lifelike, vibrant quality. “Maneuvers in the quarry”—as Survamos captioned an Instagram post of the work—pointed to the human and environmental toll of extraction in Ciudad Bolívar. Ultimately, the mural invited a reversal of the politics of viewing enabled by the gondola lift. Gazing back at cable car commuter-spectators, the giant eye challenged a regime of visibility in which the neighborhood emerged as a passive field of vision, an object of consumption and surveillance (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Top:View of the Manitas station and repainted HabitARTE houses. Bottom: “Maneuvers in the quarry,” Museo Libre work by Abraham O. in collaboration with Inzecto (Survamos). Photos by the author, 2023.

But everyday tactics of adaptation, including oppositional practices such as the ones described above, have become entangled in paradoxical ways with the broader logics of cable car retrofitting. The streets around the last cable car station have been slowly reconfigured into a commuter hub and tourism circuit. Once a periphery within the periphery, the area was populated by precarious shacks clinging to the edge of a cliff and was avoided by locals for its olla (drug market). In the years following the creation of the station, small businesses opened for the steady flow of commuters and growing number of tourists. Lina, a former “addict,” as she presented herself, was now busy building a new life as a tour guide and emprendedora (entrepreneur). She learned screen printing and computer design skills to make t-shirts and other souvenirs with cable car motifs.

Through a partnership with Airbnb bilingual guides, she started offering a tour of El Paraiso-Mirador. This included a walk through a street rebranded by her and other guides as The Street of Color. The narrow corridor of houses had been painted by a new street art collective, Bogotá Colors, with images that evoked the history of the neighborhood as well broader references to culture and nature in the Colombian Andes. The murals, while also the creation of local artists, conjured very different publics from the local networks of critique and resistance animated by Survamos and Museo Libre. With works ranging from portraits of a famous soccer player to a rural landscape and an elderly peasant woman, the images catered to an outside audience, now increasingly composed of middle-class Colombian visitors and foreign tourists. This shift was brought home to me when Lina, during an Airbnb experiences tour on a Friday morning, turned to the group of North American and British tourists and welcomed them in broken Quechua. The Indigenous language is spoken across a large swath of the Andes but not primarily in Colombia (except in the southwest of the country). Before moving on to talk about the Muisca ancestral inhabitants of what is now Bogotá—and whose language was Chibcha—she gave me a side glance and confessed she had learned the Quechua words from an Ecuadorian neighbor. The performance of indigenismo amid the mural exhibition was central to Lina’s ongoing work to recraft a historical narrative about Ciudad Bolívar. It was the retrofitting of the violence-ridden periphery into a site of cultural and ecological value, although following the imagined dictates of global tourism and consumption.

A counterpolitics under (auto)construction

The paradoxes of “retrofitting the past” (Oushakine, 2007) and restaging the present of Ciudad Bolívar became most apparent with the flagship intervention on the last stop of Transmicable: the Museo de la Ciudad Autoconstruída (Museum of the Autoconstructed City). The museum opened in 2021 as a main destination for visitors, as well as a space for community participation and learning. The creation of the museum emulated the construction of the award-winning Parque Biblioteca España at the end of Medellín’s first Metrocable line. As a spectacular urban icon, this “park library” had been built to anchor the infrastructure both in the periphery and within the city as a whole. Its premature deterioration and underuse, however, had evinced the limits of a narrow form of architectural retrofit. Ciudad Bolivar’s museum, although also aiming to anchor Transmicable in its urban surroundings, was a much more modest structure whose design was not centered on aesthetic visibility. Instead, it was framed as a community-based mode of retrofitting through which the gondola lift infrastructure would be grafted onto local social networks and political imaginaries.

In one sense, the state-led project evinced the “museumification” of urban marginality. By being put on exhibit, the practice of autoconstruction became ossified and emptied out of its sociopolitical significance. At the museum, the everyday things of slum living reemerged as official objects to be appreciated and consumed by visitors (Domínguez Rubio, 2016). Such operations of recontextualization had spatiotemporal effects, where the ongoing making of the periphery appeared as an artifact of the past, untethered from the space beyond the doors of the museum. The malleable functionality of slum things—from bricks and asphalt fabric (paroy) to recycled plastic and cooking wares—were recast as stable objects within the museum’s “discursive and material conditions and practices” and thereby given new “kinds of value, meaning, and power” (Domínguez Rubio, 2016: 60).

The tensions surrounding the museum’s retrofitting of things and narratives was first pointed out to me by Angela, an IDU contractor who had tracked residents’ trajectories of ownership and displacement. While she recognized the museum’s participatory “exercise of collective memory,” for her it was more like “a picture, [in which] you zoom in and everything else is blurred out, but you know something is lying behind.” For Angela, the absence of the cable car construction in the curatorial script showed the “lack of will to make visible the effects of administration’s own structure (estructura).” Out of view was the infrastructural retrofitting of the neighborhood, an omission that further naturalized the gondola lift’s operations as a medium of citymaking (Davis, 2020; Easterling, 2014). The museum called on visitors to “remember only nostalgic things, and not the injury [lesión] caused by institutions.” It was like a “system within the system,” she concluded, in which the technology’s effects had been recursively naturalized and obscured in the museum itself.

Yet as much as the gondola lift seemed to expand the “absent presence” of state power in the urban periphery (Goldstein, 2016), its sociomaterial effects are far from determined. Instead, its operations are continually resignified and endowed with political force in everyday life. Nelson, a museum guide and local community organizer, brought such counterpolitics into focus. Donning a black hat with a patterned wool band and a traditional knitted mochila bag, Nelson was a university-trained social science educator who had worked on the recuperation of Indigenous Muisca knowledge and “ancestral pedagogies.” Nelson was not only fluent in Muisca history—part of his own identity as a person of Muisca descent—but he was also actively engaged in Ciudad Bolívar’s networks of Indigenous peoples, social activism, and radical popular education. Far from Angela’s assumptions about the nostalgic museumification of the barrio, he offered a decidedly political tour of the exhibit. He reclaimed the notion of “autoconstruction” and explained how it did not merely stand for “building your own house” but rather pointed to how people “build solidarity networks, [social] fabric, and other forms of territoriality.” The museum itself, Nelson argued, was a “social amenity” that had resulted from such social “struggles” and “organizational processes.”

Nelson repositioned the museum as a collection of “devices” that illuminated political economic and environmental marginalization. Commenting on a series of drawings and texts on ecological degradation painted on the museum’s windows, Nelson claimed that the “territory [had been a] victim of extractivism.” He described Ciudad Bolívar’s long history of mining and how it had provided the raw materials for the construction of the rest of the city. But not only had these “territories been exploited,” Nelson continued, “but also its people.” Alongside the sourcing of clay and sand, Ciudad Bolívar had been the main site for the extraction of cheap labor. “The great majority of people who live in Ciudad Bolívar don’t work in Ciudad Bolívar,” he noted, “they work at those buildings and houses that are built with the materials that come from here.” Pointing to the downtown skyline he added, “the city has been built at the expense of what has been taken out of these mountains … benefitting some [while] hurting others.”

Besides the exploitation of the area’s labor force and mining materials, Nelson added, Ciudad Bolívar had also become the city’s “botadero [dump].” Thousands of tons of trash had been buried daily in the Doña Juana landfill on the southeastern edge of Ciudad Bolívar since late 1980s. As a result of the accumulation of untreated waste, gases and lixiviates had leached out into neighborhoods, aquifers, and the Río Tunjuelo, south Bogotá’s main river. Along with the effects of mining, cement production, and the tannery industry, the landfill had transformed the zone into a “toxic landscape” increasingly prone to flooding and landslides (Molano Camargo, 2019). Nelson described the cycle of destruction as a “[capitalist] machine that feeds off the territory, feeds off the people, and then what it expels, what it literally vomits, they come and leave here again” (Figure 4).

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Figure 4.

Exhibition space at the Museo de la Ciudad Autoconstruida: windows with texts and drawings; artifacts and crafts made with recycled materials in the background; models of Ciudad Bolívar’s ecological and geological features and history of resource extraction; and neighborhood dog lounging in the center. Photo by the author, 2023.

For Nelson, the museum brought into focus the new political meanings afforded by the cable car technology. The exhibits—from tiny models of self-built houses and installations of the equipment of community organizing to everyday objects and crafts made with recycled materials—reemerged as the materialization of local modes of political consciousness and action. These were “devices [dispositivos],” Nelson argued, that “vindicated” the work of community leaders, waste-pickers, and residents who struggled for a space in the city. His use of the term “dispositivo,” along with his previous descriptions of the city as a machine-like apparatus of exploitation, was revealing. The imagery suggested a close attunement to the power-laden operations of the gondola lift. But instead of an overdetermining dispositif or apparatus of governmental power, as famously conceptualized by Michel Foucault, the museum’s dispositivos came together to form a counterhegemonic project. Following Gilles Deleuze’s (1992) influential reconceptualization of the dispositif as assemblage, the aerial car infrastructure and its retrofits appeared as an emergent and open-ended constellation of sociomaterial and technical elements. ⁷

Nelson recast cable car retrofitting as a “multilinear ensemble” which afforded unexpected paths for political engagement that exceeded its ordering impulses (Deleuze, 1992: 159). Furthermore, he pointed out how the critiques articulated in the museum’s dispositivos had been rendered visible by the infrastructure itself. At stake here were the political affordances of the technomaterial system—the alternative ways of seeing and inhabiting that it opened up: “One of the benefits of Transmicable is that it allows one to understand the scale” of environmental and social destruction in Ciudad Bolívar, Nelson reflected. He recalled how CEMEX, a Mexican building materials multinational company, had been allowed to change the course of the Río Tunjuelo, and create enormous excavation pits along the riverbanks. This had exacerbated flooding, landslides, and pollution near the Tunjuelo and the mining pit walls. For years, Nelson noted, the tall fencing around CEMEX had prevented people from seeing the effects of the company’s operations: “It was only until Transmicable [was built] that its aerial views allowed people to grasp the extent of what had been done to the river.”

Far from experts’ assumptions about the gondola lift as a “perceptual system” (Simone, 2006; see also Corsín Jiménez, 2017) favoring governmental optics, for Nelson the technology had other political potentialities. Instead of a commodified and panoptic view of the beautified slum—one that allegedly instilled new citizen behaviors (the “mental chip” evoked by Esteban the urban designer)—the epistemic and sensorial orientations enabled by the aerial cable car brought into focus an entrenched landscape of destruction and marginalization. Looking from above revealed the traces of environmental degradation and resource extraction, as well as local histories of urban violence, precarity, and resistance. The slum came into view not as an object to be consumed, but rather as the ground for past struggles and ongoing political mobilization.

Conclusion: the political horizon of urban retrofitting

The nimbleness of the aerial cable car has made it a powerful prototype of urban retrofit in Latin America’s peripheries. Ongoing projects branching out of the cable car infrastructure—from public space interventions to public buildings such as the museum—brought together technology and people, materialities and knowledges, under particular configurations. Engineers and designers recognized that their technological ensembles, to borrow from Karen Barad, were “not mere static arrangements in the world, but rather … dynamic (re)configurings of the world” (2003: 816).

But such work of “reconfiguration,” following Lucy Suchman, is not only contingent and unfinished; it involves a broad array of people, things, and contexts. It is in these “encounters at the interface” (Suchman, 2007: 284) that sociomaterial and technopolitical configurations are enacted and contested. The Museum of the Autoconstructed City emerged as one of such tension-ridden interfaces. Nelson and local community activists evinced both the world-making capabilities and limits of cable car retrofitting. They reconfigured the gondola/museum ensemble into a dispositivo to make visible and oppose structures of inequality, violence, and environmental destruction. In doing so, they unsettled official configurations of the aestheticized, governable, and consumable slum and challenged experts’ expectations regarding the uses and imaginaries attached to the cable car system.

A revealing episode related to the unstable interfaces of retrofitting made the headlines of El País newspaper in 2023 (Reynoso, 2023). The city administration had invited renowned contemporary artist Doris Salcedo to ride the gondola lift and visit with museum staff, which included a demobilized FARC guerrilla combatant who had curated the temporary exhibition The footprints of art in war. Despite her celebrated trajectory creating artworks around the politics of memory and violence, Salcedo critiqued the museum’s “sociological language,” which she argued was “useful to understand and think through solutions,” but not to “project us into the future, into utopias and dreams.” She stressed the need for “Ciudad Bolívar’s art to project [itself] outward” and “teach us about life, not only about Ciudad Bolívar.” Salcedo questioned the extent to which the museum’s “handicrafts [artesanías]”—risked being “instrumentalized and imposing meaning.” She concluded by warning that “militant art limits us, reduces us.”

During a later conversation with the journalist covering the event, the guide and ex-combatant/curator pushed back on Salcedo’s recommendations noting that the purpose of the museum was precisely to “promote community processes” (Reynoso, 2023). As Daniela, the local guide put it, “transforming ourselves [along those lines] would make us like an art gallery, whereas the museum is a political wager.” She admitted that they needed to continue exploring new paths, because otherwise “we would stop being an ‘autoconstructed’ museum,” and this required, more than anything, “maintaining constant dialogue with the community.”

In talking about an ‘autoconstructed museum’ as opposed to a ‘museum of autoconstruction,’ Daniela evinced the tensions surrounding political imaginaries enabled by cable car retrofitting. Salcedo’s discomfort with the museum—which was echoed by functionaries who found it “too political”—signaled appropriate forms of social creativity and knowledge. On one hand, local communities strove to align the infrastructure with existing modes of grounded knowledge and practices—such as everyday crafting, building, and social organizing—to create configurations ranging from Lina’s entrepreneurial tourism to Nelson’s radical urban politics. On the other hand, engineers, designers, and elite artists—despite their engagements with local social realities—positioned themselves outside such processes and tacitly imposed the forms in which they would materialize. Their wariness of ‘militant’ cultural productions and overly political engagements thus redrew the lines between art and craft, formality and informality, engineering and bricolage. ⁸

At its core, this made apparent the political and ethical conflicts surrounding the “world-building” and “form-giving” capabilities of urban cable car engineering (Murphy, 2021). Experts recognized that the uncertain leakages of the technology unsettled its encoded ideals of neoliberal citizenship and progress. Locals were confronted by the fact that their infrastructural hacks would inevitably be channeled and constrained by the technological interfaces they now inhabited (Easterling, 2014). From this perspective, Nelson’s critiques of enduring patterns of housing insecurity, environmental destruction, and structural violence, were enabled but also remained captured by the cable car’s sociomaterial logics. This was a counterpolitics deferred by the “incremental meantime” of urban retrofit (Redfield, 2022: 26).

Such ambivalences came into focus during a series of historic protests that erupted in Colombian cities between 2019 and 2021. Channeling vigorous opposition against regressive tax reforms, police violence, and ever-increasing socioeconomic inequalities, the unprecedented mobilizations had a tangible expression in urban space and infrastructure (Waterhouse, 2019): from the toppling of monuments and burning of police stations to the creation of street art and the organization of assembly spaces. Notably, the city’s bus rapid transit system, Transmilenio, became a central target of blockades and sabotage. Transmicable, however, remained untouched. Although Ciudad Bolívar had been at the center of the uprisings, “neighbors cordoned stations and said ‘no one will damage [the gondola lift]’,” in the words of a cable car worker. According to one resident, even local gangs declared the infrastructure off limits. Engineers and designers saw this as promising sign of “local appropriation.” Yet the contrast between the sleek technological forms and the precariousness and unrest below, called into question the political horizon of urban retrofitting.

While cable car urbanism builds on and seemingly enhances the periphery’s ongoing adjustments and tinkering, it also subordinates these practices to its own parameters. In one sense, then, the urban cable car prototype calls attention to the emergent “infrastructural communities” (Johnson et al., 2021) through which retrofit is continually enacted, materialized, and reshaped. At the same time, it makes apparent the relative obduracy of retrofit constellations and the wider and undeclared urban visions that they both obscure and tacitly reproduce. Ultimately, Latin America’s urban cable cars show how retrofit is not only integral to infrastructural development, but also a crucial site of urban politics. Far from a narrow technical endeavor, retrofitting is a sociopolitical, aesthetic, and epistemic practice that involves planners, experts, and communities. Understanding such human and material processes requires tracing the interfaces and hinges at which the ongoing fitting of such infrastructures is worked out in daily life. As retrofit becomes imperative within imagined urban futures—whether it is for heating and flood-prone cities, recurring pandemic risks or the deepening inequalities and violences of capitalist urbanization—it will be indispensable for urban scholars to illuminate its affordances and limitations as a contested medium for the remaking of urban worlds.