8. The contradictions of sustainability: discourse, planning and the tramway in Cuenca, Ecuador

Sam Rumé

Introduction

Anthropologists have long taken on the challenge of analysing big urban paradigms in Latin America, such as modernist city building (Holston, 1989; Peattie, 1968), security urbanism (Zeiderman, 2016; Caldeira, 2000), and neoliberal urban renewal (Gandolfo, 2009; Low, 2000). These works have helped to shed light on the discourses of these paradigms, on the heterogeneous actors involved in their formulation, and the conflictual nature of their materialisations. An urbanist tendency still in need of a more elaborated anthropological look, I argue, is ‘sustainable urbanism’ in Latin America. Though not a new concept anymore, the notion of sustainability is becoming ever more central in the policy formulations of many Latin American cities (UN-Habitat, 2012). Several reasons account for this lack of detailed investigation of this emerging trend. In the first place, scholarship on sustainable urbanism has focused more on cities of the Global North, identified as hubs of sustainable development up until now (Jensen et al., 2019; Blok, 2012). Latin American cities are usually characterised instead by their ‘unsustainable’ aspects, being described as chaotic, segregated, dangerous, and contaminated places (see, for example, Duhau and Giglia, 2008, on the typical discourse on Mexico City). Second, as the edited volume Anthropology of Sustainability (Brightman and Lewis, 2017a) shows, anthropological studies on sustainability tend to focus on rural areas, where the interaction with ‘nature’ is more apparent.1 Rival’s (2017) chapter is the only one in the book based on the city, but it is also explicitly focused on people’s relationship to ‘nature’ in the city. This point raises a third and central issue, namely what sustainability actually means: is it necessarily linked to ‘nature’ and environmentalism?

Many scholars have emphasised the vagueness of the notion of sustainability, which would make it a mere buzzword used in uncritical, often contradictory ways (Jensen et al., 2019; Isenhour et al., 2015). International conceptualisations of sustainability, such as the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), include three realms, environmental, economic, and social sustainability, but the defined goals of these three realms are often difficult, if not impossible to reconcile (Homewood, 2017). In the vein of Brightman and Lewis’s (2017b) critique of the distortions of sustainable ideas by powerful actors, many sustainable urbanism projects might simply be rejected as unworthy of this label. The inflationary use of the notion in policy discourses also suggests that one cannot consider ‘sustainable urbanism’ a consistent paradigm to be studied as such. Therefore, other scholars instead argue for an analysis of the uses of the term in order to see what it is made to mean in specific contexts, and how it thereby acts in these contexts (Jensen et al., 2019; Tahvilzadeh et al., 2017; Blok, 2013). In what follows, I will address the concrete case of sustainable urbanism in Cuenca, Ecuador, exploring the different meanings and uses of ‘sustainability’, as well as the tensions between policy, planning, and infrastructure in this process of urban change. My aim, thus, is not only to contribute to the scholarship on sustainable urbanism, but also to explore the interstices between the anthropology of infrastructures and the anthropology of policy and planning.

Cuenca, with its roughly half a million inhabitants, is Ecuador’s third largest city, situated in the southern Andean region of the country. It is defined as a heritage city, due to the UNESCO-protected old city centre which combines colonial architecture with pre-colonial remnants and post-colonial, republican buildings. The heritage, along with the natural surroundings, crossed by four emblematic rivers, gives Cuenca a certain charm and makes it a much-appreciated city among Ecuadorians and foreign visitors alike. Cuenca is also a leading city in sustainable policies nationwide, for example in what refers to the protection of its water reserves and wastewater management (Latorre and Malo-Larrea, 2019). Also in terms of sustainable mobility, local authorities express their desire to be seen as frontrunners in Ecuador and the wider region. One of the most significant planning documents in terms of its sustainable vision statement and its supposed impact on the lives of Cuenca’s inhabitants is the 2015 Plan de Movilidad y Espacios Públicos (PMEP) [Plan for Mobility and Public Spaces], (GAD Cuenca, 2015).

This document conceives a radical change in the organisation of the city. From the city streets congested by the steadily increasing motorised traffic, considered highly polluting and invading public space, the PMEP plans to shift to a more sustainable, comfortable, and socially just city by promoting walking and cycling and redeveloping public transport. The plan advocates a compact city model, which would be less resource-intensive, in which people would no longer depend on the car but be able to enjoy public space and sociality again. The biggest of the transport projects is the construction of a tramway, which is presented as the heart of the future public-transport system and will constitute a central axis through the city.2 Initiated in 2013, the tramway project became the flagship of the city’s transformation plans, embodying in the most visible form the values and expectations of the sustainability policies. However, the project was also heavily criticised from the beginning, because of the high cost of the project, the possible damage to the historic city centre and the political intentions behind the project. Later, complications in the construction paralysed parts of the city for several years, interrupting commerce and mobility in the surrounding areas and leaving the outcome of the project uncertain. As recently as May 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the tram was finally put into operation and presented as an emergency measure meant to transport people safely through a city threatened by the virus. This happened at a new moment for sustainable urbanism, in which its proponents saw the sustainable projects as even more justified and urgent in the fight against the pandemic.

I undertook fieldwork in Cuenca from 2017 to 2018,3 observing the dynamics along the tram route under construction, and interviewing disparate social actors, from residents and shopkeepers to academics and municipal authorities. In this period of time, the construction process was constantly haunted by conflicts between these actors and by the seemingly endless ruinations (Gupta, 2018) of the building sites. These conflicts point toward a set of contradictions in Cuenca’s sustainability policies and the ambiguous relationship between infrastructure construction and policy discourse. This ambiguity is also temporal, challenging the linearity of project time. Thus, the next section is dedicated to the changes the tram project has known over time, painting a picture which is much more uncertain than the usual ‘practitioners’ perspective’ on policy (Shore and Wright, 2011, p. 4) and the temporal order of policy mobilities (McCann and Ward, 2011). Subsequently, I will analyse the official plans for sustainable mobility in the light of shifting political interests, questioning the divide between planning authorities and unruly society. The last section asks what it takes for the tram to become a sustainable infrastructure, focusing on the politics of urban assemblages.

What came first, the desire for sustainability or the tram?

In December 2013, towards the end of his mandate as mayor of Cuenca, Paúl Granda fulfilled his biggest electoral promise initiating the construction of a single tram line across the city. In the run-up to the construction, the tram was hyped as a radical innovation for the city, making Cuenca the first Andean city and the third city in Latin America with a modern tram. In television interviews, the mayor suggested that Cuenca could become a model for mobility on the continent. The tram’s modern technology and aesthetics were displayed on billboards, in promotional films, and even in the form of a prototype carriage, which was presented ceremoniously in a public space. Although depicted as unprecedented in the regional context, its proponents however made sure to always link the tram project to the many European cities in which trams are operating. One promotional film4 gives a lengthy list of such cities, praising the tram as ‘the future of mobility’, efficient and sustainable, which would introduce a ‘new culture of mobility’ in Cuenca. Sustainability here is understood as ‘respectful of both the environment [as the tram is electrically driven] and the passengers [because of its levelled surfaces, its spacious interior, and its smooth locomotion]’. This would make it inclusive for people of all ages and physical conditions, in contrast to the old buses of the city which, apart from being extremely polluting, are considered uncomfortable, even dangerously shaky and inaccesible for some groups.

Various authors (Moraglio, 2014; Siemiatycki, 2006) have pointed out a global trend to reintroduce rail infrastructures in cities, after trams had been abandoned in most places towards the middle of the 20th century. This development can be understood in the context of growing concerns about climate change and pollution, and increasingly congested and fragmented cities. The new generation of tramways, heralded as non-polluting and inclusive technologies, are thus proposed by many city administrations as the best way to fight such problems and make the city more sustainable. The fact that very similar developments of sustainable planning involving tramway systems can be observed in different cities around the world can be fruitfully addressed through the policy mobilities literature (McCann and Ward, 2011). This scholarship shows how ideas, plans, and technologies travel around, supported and negotiated by consultants, construction companies, and politicians. This illustrates how connected cities are, and how complex processes of negotiation and power influence their development.

In much of the literature on this global spread of sustainable planning (Rapoport and Hult, 2017; Carr, 2014; Blok, 2012), it is taken for granted that first there is the desire to implement sustainable projects and then the election and concretisation of some of the possible projects. The case of the Cuenca tram, however, might tell a different story. Here, the idea for a tram was expressed for the first time in 2009 as part of Paúl Granda’s electoral campaign for mayor. In a televised interview from that year,5 Granda presented his embryonic vision of the tram. The computer-designed picture he held towards the camera showed a tram that looked very different from the one which was to be built four years later. It was a single angular carriage in a rustic reddish-brown tone that resembled less the contemporary trams and more the trams that had been built a century ago. So Granda was actually inspired by the older generation of tramways, and in this interview both Granda and the interviewer became quite excited about the idea. The interviewer found it ‘formidable’, comparing it to the San Francisco cable car, and Granda replied by calling it ‘spectacular’ and in turn invoking the Lisbon tram – both examples of preserved heritage trams. At this point, Granda might have found this aesthetically more suitable for the historic city centre of Cuenca, with its colonial architecture. His motivations for building a tram were, as he told the interviewer, that ‘this is going to boost the economy enormously, it’s going to create a lot of jobs and, above all, it’s going to resolve the problem of the chaos that the city of Cuenca is living’. By chaos, he referred to the increasing traffic in the city, which he had mentioned earlier in the interview. When asked if the tram was going to be electrically driven, he denied it, saying that he preferred it to have an internal combustion engine.

So, as this interview shows, the Cuenca tramway started off with quite a different discourse from the sustainable one. Obviously, as a means of public transport, it was already conceived of as a measure against car traffic, but not fully in the vein of sustainable urbanism, as Granda dismissed the option of electrical locomotion. He might have been more concerned with the aesthetics than with the technical details – especially considering that he imagined a newly built ‘retro’ tram, which in fact only operates in cities in which it has a long history. Only in the course of the following years was the idea of the tram shaped into its ‘modern’, ‘sustainable’ form, through various exchanges Granda’s administration had with European consultants. A group of local officials travelled overseas to inspect operating tram systems, and Spanish and French agents came to Cuenca to undertake feasibility studies. Backed by a loan from the French government, French and Spanish companies were then appointed for the construction of the tramway in 2013 (Cardoso, 2017). The earlier model had completely disappeared from view, eclipsed by a new-generation electric tram which was ‘formidable’ and ‘spectacular’ in a different way. Instead of the rustic vintage aesthetic, this new model stood out through its shiny red colour and its rounded-off, elegant design. In this form, the tram was more likely to correspond to Larkin’s (2013) description of infrastructures’ affective modernity. For many cuencanos, the tram came to represent something excitingly outlandish and futuristic, something which would undoubtedly make the city more modern. The fact, often voiced in public discourse, that it would be the first of its kind in the whole Andean region, resonated with the inhabitants’ high opinion of their city.

Figure 8.1 The Cuenca tramway in 2020. Photo taken by the author

Not everyone was equally excited about the project, however. As I was sitting with Diego in his workshop in the city centre, having a coffee and chatting about the changes in Cuenca, buses periodically drove by, emitting their black exhaust fumes through the open shopfront and cutting our conversation with their noise. Diego, a young artisan and passionate walker, hates these old contaminating buses and describes a ride on them as a rollercoaster, due to the bus drivers’ aggressive driving style. But he does not consider the tram to be a viable alternative. According to him, the tram is useless for most inhabitants, as it only represents one route. It would rather constitute a means to transport tourists from the airport and the coach station through the city centre. Apart from the tram’s considerable financial cost, Diego emphasises the material and symbolic threat to the city which he feels the tram poses. The Cuenca he loves and admires on his walks is characterised by the details of the heritage architecture and the natural surroundings. The essence of Cuenca, to him, is its tradition, and the tram is likely to damage the fragile heritage buildings, especially those made of adobe. Its modernist look would also clash with the city’s traditional aesthetic. But Diego describes Cuenca as a ‘city of many appearances’, aspiring to appear in certain ways. He says people here are mestizos, cholos, indios, ‘but people sometimes don’t want to recognise this. They focus on this image on the television, on what they sell you. That might be why this futuristic tram is coming about now.’

This comment illustrates two opposed visions of the city, a traditionalising and a modernising one. Many people I have met in Cuenca feel as attached to the city’s heritage as Diego does. Heritage conservation policies are reinforcing this sense of belonging, while promoting the city as a tourist destination. The first draft of the Cuenca tramway embodied a heritage aesthetic, although Cuenca has never had a tramway in the past. Instead, the new-generation tram which came to be built was presented as a revolutionising innovation, a technology which would lead the city into the future.6 This future was presented as already a reality in European cities, thus feeding a sense that Cuenca was lagging behind a temporally advanced ‘developed world’. Diego feels that the resolutely modern aesthetic of the tram clashes with the identity of the city and its inhabitants. However, he does not frame this clash in temporal terms, but rather in cultural, even racial ones. The racial implications of this conflict between the traditional and the modern in Cuenca is also described by Weismantel (2003). In her analysis, the modernisation discourse would represent indigenous people as the traditional, anti-modern past, and aspire towards the whitening of the population (see also the introduction to this volume). The explicit inspiration from urban Europe and the praising of its technology, expertise and supposedly orderly city life, might not go as far as implying racial superiority, but it does imply a cultural advance. Can the imagined ‘new culture of mobility’, proposed by the tramway project, thus be seen as a case of persistent ‘colonial cultures of planning’ (Horn, 2019, p. 39)?

The policy mobilities perspective helps us to understand how powerful global actors maintain their influence in the international arena of urban development, in this case asserting a Eurocentric view of the ‘best practices’ (McCann, 2017; Blok, 2012) to be reproduced. This Eurocentric view also explains why the discourse of sustainability accompanying the Cuenca tramway and the city’s mobility planning in general almost completely blank out notions of buen vivir. The concept of buen vivir has been developed in national policy, including the new constitution of 2008, as an alternative to the Western idea of ‘sustainable development’. While sustainable development maintains modernist logics of progress, economic development, and control over nature, understood as resources, buen vivir is inspired by indigenous worldviews, uniting the social and the natural in a non-dualist, relational ontology (see Latorre and Malo-Larrea, 2019; Bretón, 2017; Merino, 2016). The supposed sustainability of the Cuenca tramway project is intrinsically linked to its modernity, its electric technology, and ‘inclusive’ design. Rather than the more holistic approach of buen vivir, it thus constitutes a technological fix understood to create sustainability. This trust in the power of technology to produce sustainable futures reveals the techno-modernist logic of the tram project, which, according to Latorre and Malo-Larrea (2019) would correspond to the general worldview of policymakers in Cuenca, despite the national policy discourse of buen vivir.7 What these authors do not discuss, however, is the influence powerful international actors can have on the shape and discourse of local sustainability projects.8

The early development of the Cuenca tram project shows how an infrastructure project can change its forms, workings, and meanings over time (see Latour, 1996), and how the same project can involve different, even contradictory interests and visions of the city. The Cuenca tramway came into being as the electoral promise of a mayoral candidate seemingly inspired by heritage trams. His motivations, apart from being elected, appeared to be primarily to solve traffic problems and boost the local economy, while beautifying the city. These goals were maintained as the project materialised several years later, but they were integrated into a new discourse of sustainability and modernisation. At this point, international actors had participated in redirecting the tram into the global field of sustainable urbanism, thereby completely changing its shape and aesthetics. This modern aesthetic excited many residents, and clashed with others’ sense of belonging. Also, national efforts to produce an alternative to Western conceptions of sustainability were overlooked. The tram had become a project in line with a global urban trend towards sustainable development and mobility, presented at the same time as a pioneer project in the region.

Thus, a tram can mean very different things: an old-fashioned means of transport that is turned into a picturesque heritage object and a cutting-edge technology that promises sustainable development. The Cuenca tram, rather than being the result of explicit sustainability policies, was only integrated into these in the course of its development. The tram project therefore challenges the ‘practitioners’ perspective’ on policies (Shore and Wright, 2011, p. 4), which considers policymaking as a rational, temporally linear process with clear stages. This process would begin with a general vision statement offering a frame for concrete actions to be taken subsequently. This is also the common representation of urban planning (Abram, 2011). In the next section, I will address the relationship between the tram project and the broader sustainable planning efforts in Cuenca.

Who is planning?

Despite Cuenca usually being described as more peaceful than Ecuador’s two largest cities, Quito and Guayaquil, the discourse of local authorities, as well as many residents, shifts when it comes to characterising traffic in the city. Streets are perceived as contaminated and overcrowded; bus, taxi, and private car drivers as irresponsible and aggressive. To make matters worse, street vendors are said to invade public space and crime to be on the rise. The picture drawn of urban space here corresponds to typical accounts of chaotic Latin American city streets (see Gandolfo, 2009; Duhau and Giglia, 2008). Municipal plans, such as the PMEP (GAD Cuenca, 2015) claim to profoundly change this cityscape. They imagine a mobility system which would prioritise and significantly increase pedestrian and bicycle mobility through (semi-)pedestrianisation, the implementation of bicycle lanes, and a public bicycle rental system.9 These would be connected to non-polluting and inclusive public transport, constituted by a renovated bus fleet and the tramway as the central axis and ‘articulator’ (GAD Cuenca, 2015, p. 12) of the system. The different mobilities would work conjointly in an overarching intermodal system, which would not only be more efficient than current transport, but also it would also create a more sustainable and liveable city. It would have to emerge together with a more compact city, in which dense, mixed-use neighbourhoods would allow for shorter journeys and lively public spaces. The PMEP’s broad vision of sustainability thus includes the reduction of pollution, as well as the physical and mental health, safety, and social inclusion of city dwellers. With its almost thousand pages, the plan leaves no doubt that these aspects have been thoroughly analysed and it shows how to improve them. But the PMEP, like the tramway project, might not correspond to the policy and planning ideal of a linear process, starting with the analysis of a problem, followed by an informed choice of response and its implementation (Shore and Wright, 2011).

One day in February 2018, I met up with Juan for lunch on campus. As one of the scholars in Cuenca focused on mobilities, he was participating in public debates and projects to improve mobilities in the city. An engaged advocate of sustainability, he had also contributed to the elaboration of the PMEP, which came into being as a participatory project between the municipality, local universities, and certain civic groups. Juan considered the plan to go in the right direction, although it would still lack broader participation. Regarding the tram, he had mixed feelings, as the tramway project was not really a consequence of the plan: ‘Everything was done the other way round, because first they thought of building the tram, and then, when they had already started building the tram, they thought of making the mobility plan. So completely in reverse. Also, the mobility plan kind of had to adjust to this heavy condition which was the tram.’ According to Juan, thus, the tram constituted a certain constraint for the PMEP, to which other measures had to be adapted, rather than emerging from the plan as a logical and coordinated measure. Antonio, an engineer and transport expert who had only recently been hired by the municipality to work on the tram project, echoed this view during our interview. ‘The tramway project did not exactly respond to planning’, he said, ‘it was an improvisation’ which would have completely thrown previous mobility plans off track. So just as the tram project had emerged before its conceptualisation in terms of sustainability, it was also developed out of sync with the city’s more general public-transport planning.

When the PMEP was published in 2015, two years after the beginning of the tram project, circumstances had changed in Cuenca. Paúl Granda, the left-wing originator of the tram project, lost the municipal elections in 2014 against the centrist Marcelo Cabrera, who had shown himself to be critical of the tramway in his campaign. Construction of the tram had already begun, when Cabrera reevaluated the details of the project. However, the previously concluded deals and the pressure from the national government apparently forced him to continue the construction. In fact, Granda’s project had been supported from the beginning by the then President Rafael Correa, whose left-wing party Alianza País Granda was a member of. The tram project fitted into the government’s large-scale modernisation project, which produced an unprecedented amount of infrastructure projects throughout the country. It also corresponded to national efforts to decrease dependence on fossil fuel and develop electrification. In this sense, although locally the tram caused confusion and disrupted planning, it was in line with the national agenda.10

The tram project was perceived by many locals as a primarily political project, the spectacularity of which had fulfilled its function of electing Granda as mayor in the previous elections. The view that infrastructure projects fulfil political interests rather than ‘public’ ones (see Harvey, 2017) is quite common in Ecuador, especially among opponents of Correa’s government. Many big projects of Correa’s administration have been criticised as entailing false promises and white elephants (Wilson and Bayón, 2017), and as tools for political campaigns and corruption. The Cuenca tram played into this criticism, especially when problems arising in the construction hinted at flawed planning (Cardoso, 2017). In fact, many details given by the early promoters of the tram project turned out to be wrong in the course of the construction. The tram ended up costing much more than expected by feasibility studies, and the construction was considerably lengthier and more intrusive than Granda had claimed. Instead of going into operation in 2016, it only started to run in May 2020. In 2013, the municipality argued that the tram would transport 120,000 people a day. Today, the tram directorate has lowered its expectations considerably, as only a third of this number of passengers might be achieved. What may have seemed like a viable project, based on international expertise, at the outset, was revealed to be hugely problematic five years later, when it was commonly accepted to be irreversible.

Therefore, interlocutors like Juan, the scholar, and Antonio, the engineer, saw planning efforts like the PMEP as a necessity to restore order and make the tramway a success. However, Juan was sceptical about the actual outcomes of the PMEP. Although he and many other contributors had worked on this plan on behalf of the municipality, Juan had heard that Mayor Cabrera himself was actually not that keen on following the plan rigorously. ‘There are contradictory positions [of the municipality] all the time, which shows again – irrespective of what is ultimately going to be done – the absolute lack of vision about how the city centre should work. […] Many things have been done and will continue to be done on the go, searching for makeshift solutions rather than a more global vision and plan.’

So although Cabrera wanted to dissociate himself and his administration from previous errors, he quickly suffered from criticism himself about the handling of the tramway project. While his administration argued they had inherited a flawed project from his political opponent Granda (who in 2017 would become Minister of Transport), critics thought Cabrera and his team had made it even worse. The construction slowed down and eventually came to a halt, with inhabitants left amid fenced-off and broken streets, workers unpaid, and the municipality fighting with the Spanish construction company over prices.11 For more than a year, the construction sites remained abandoned. Not only did this chaotic development of the project give people the impression of incompetence on the part of the municipality, Juan’s quote above also suggests a lack of will. What his comment referred to in particular was the municipality’s unclear position concerning pedestrianisation. The tram construction would have been a good opportunity to pedestrianise the areas along the rails – even a necessity for Juan, considering the narrowness of some of the streets hosting the tram. This measure would have been in line with the vision of the PMEP, but apparently it was too controversial for the mayor to realise it, risking his approval among car supporters. So Juan’s mention of ‘makeshift solutions’ implies short-term political strategies, which may sometimes bring forth infrastructure projects – as had happened in the electoral campaign of the previous mayor – but which are inherently contrary to the long-term commitment of infrastructure projects and planning. There is thus a contradiction between the temporality of political interests and the temporality of planning which contributes to the intrinsic instability of infrastructure projects (see Harvey, 2017; Abram, 2011).

Two theoretical lines can be helpful to follow from here. On the one hand, the literature on infrastructures (Anand et al., 2018; Harvey et al., 2017b; Harvey and Knox, 2015) shows how, apart from the volatility of political actors, innumerable other forces participate in the course of infrastructure projects, ‘enchanting’ (Harvey and Knox, 2012) and simultaneously unsettling them – among these, the economic actors and market tendencies, the unruly actions of local residents, and the unpredictable behaviour of materials and climate. Infrastructure projects claim to hold these elements in place, promising different benefits for all of their publics. Unsurprisingly, they often fail to do so. In this sense, the official narratives of orderly development, as well as the critiques of incompetent authorities, stem from an overestimation of the decision-makers’ ability to anticipate infrastructural futures (Harvey et al., 2017a).

On the other hand, the literature on the state (Krupa and Nugent, 2015; Sharma and Gupta, 2006; Scott 1998) shows how such projects are also meant to conjure up the state through those very narratives of planning and the emerging materials. This applies, on the national level, to Ecuador’s ‘postneoliberal’ return of the state under Correa (Grugel and Riggirozzi, 2012), as well as, on the local level, to the municipality’s projects to impose order in an uncontrolled landscape of mobilities. This performative state effect would counter the unruly heterogeneity, not only of the society to be governed, but also of the state itself. The state, or the municipality in this case, is seen through the same processual lens as its infrastructure projects. The uncertainty of the outcomes of infrastructure projects thus goes in hand with the uncertainty of the state effect, a failing infrastructure being likely to expose the flaws of the responsible entities and thereby damage their relationship with those to be governed. This was the case with the Cuenca tramway, especially during the construction phase.

What about the municipality’s failure to comply with the PMEP? As Juan suggested, plans can be developed from the start with the knowledge that they are not going to be followed: ‘[The mayor] was interested in making the plan, not to improve mobility, I think, but in order to say “we have a mobility plan.”’ The state effect of a plan, although unrealised, might be enough to stimulate certain economic gains. At a time when sustainable development is advocated by international organisations such as UN-Habitat and generating a flourishing market, cities’ sustainable policy initiatives give them an attractive and trustworthy image for investment (Rapoport and Hult, 2017). The municipality of Cuenca does indeed work a lot towards international cooperation, reaching out to organisations such as the UN, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Development Bank of Latin America. The sustainable image might also attract businesses and tourists, as it makes the city appear well-organised, innovative, and secure. In this sense, sustainable urbanism is often criticised for maintaining the neoliberal logics of the entrepreneurial city. Sustainability would only be used as a superficial aesthetic, or a means in the inter-city competition for ‘best practices’ (McCann, 2017).

Figure 8.2 Shops along the paralysed tram construction in 2017. Photo taken by the author

By all appearances, thus, the tramway project was hastily launched without the necessary planning, while the PMEP was carefully elaborated, but not to be realised. Based on the representation of a chaotic cityscape, the discourse of both the tram and the PMEP suggests the ordering of the city and its mobilities in more sustainable ways, implying a certain disciplining process through which a new form of citizenship, a ‘new culture of mobility’12 is supposed to emerge.13 However, in the face of the apparent problems and contradictions within the municipality, it was increasingly residents who accused the municipality of being disorganised and creating chaos in the city. As the tram construction irrupted in the everyday spaces of city dwellers, obstructing their mobility and paralysing commerce over the course of several years, inhabitants started organising in order to improve their situation.

A couple of shopkeepers and other engaged people formed a veeduría, in accordance with a legal mechanism in Ecuador which makes it possible for citizens to monitor and assess public works. Over several months, I attended the weekly veeduría meetings which were held in the ballroom of a hotel in the city centre. The half a dozen to a dozen participants would gather in the empty ballroom to discuss their monitoring work, their personal situations, and political opinions. These meetings offered a space for the participants to share their sorrow, as most of them were directly affected by the obstructive construction sites. Like many other shops along the unfinished tram route, their businesses were on the brink of collapse. In their meetings, they also programmed protest marches, prepared press conferences, and came up with actions in solidarity with other affected residents. In their efforts to monitor the progress of the tram construction, they struggled with an uncooperative, untransparent municipality. However, they got hold of a leaked timeline of the tramway project and publicly put pressure on the municipality to abide to it. This perspective further challenges the idea of planning as involving organised institutions, on the one hand, and unruly social forces, on the other14 – akin to de Certeau’s (1988) dichotomic view of urbanism. Municipal actors can just as well be indecisive and inclined to improvisation, while inhabitants prove able to plan themselves and pressure authorities to respect official plans.

A sustainable infrastructure?

At one of the veeduría meetings, Eugenia, the president of the group, informed the participants about a project presentation by one of the city’s universities she had attended the week before. Given that new calculations gave the tram far fewer passengers than initially expected, the university had been commissioned by the municipality to develop a plan to solve this problem. Basically, they needed to make the tram useful, as Eugenia explained. The university had come up with a plan to densify certain areas along the tram route, outside the heritage perimeter, which were somewhat commercial and not particularly residential at present. It was the veedores’ understanding that this meant high-rise residential buildings should be developed there in order to produce passengers. The veeduría participants were very sceptical of this idea. It seemed even more extravagant and unrealistic than the tram itself. It made Eugenia think of Brasília, Brazil’s capital which had been designed from scratch. But Cuenca was an existing, historic city, which could not simply be replaced by a new design, she said, especially not from one day to the next.

This university project was aimed at developing a Master Plan for the Area of Influence of the Tramway, abbreviated as PMAIT.15 The PMAIT project thus started from a recognition that the city was still in need of thorough planning with regard to the tram: ‘the lack of planning for the integration of the tramway profoundly limits the potential for linkage and urban regeneration that a means of transport of these characteristics can achieve, becoming, on the one hand, an element of fracture in the urban fabric and, on the other hand, the origin of its possible unsustainability in the long term’ (UDA, 2016, p. 118). How is (un)sustainability understood here? The inherent characteristics of the tram, such as its electrical drive and its inclusive design, are revealed not to be a sufficient condition anymore for it to be sustainable. Although this perspective leads the authors of this document to reject the technological determinism implied in the tram discourse (the idea that the city would become sustainable through the tramway), they still consider the tram as a potential catalyst for broader urban change. ‘How to build a better city using the tramway as a tool?’, they ask (UDA, 2016, p. 14). A more reciprocal understanding thus arises, with the tram depending on a range of other elements and actors, while the city’s sustainable future is made to depend on the tram. What is suggested is a thorough re-assemblage of the city, which the veedores, as well as Diego the artisan, see as a threat to the historical city. Thus, the tension between the conservationist vision of the city and the sustainable projects emerges again, the tram being understood less as a means to sustain the present city as it is involved in the imagining of a more sustainable future. In this future-oriented logic, the recurrent critique that the tram does not respond to Cuenca’s needs is not as relevant anymore. Instead of responding to present needs, it would create future possibilities. But these future possibilities actually create new needs in the present, the tram requiring a range of adjustments of the city in order to fulfil its promises. I will briefly discuss some of these adjustments, ranging from densification to the restructuring of buses and, more broadly, of social life along the tram route.

As mentioned, the main claim of the PMAIT project is for densification. This idea can be seen, as Eugenia put it, as a necessity to make the tram useful by producing passengers. If a sufficient number of paying passengers is not achieved, the tram becomes unsustainable: financially. On the other hand, the tram can be understood to make densification possible, as it is more appropriate for transporting large numbers of people than buses or private cars. In this sense, it indeed becomes a tool, namely in the quest for a compact city, counteracting urban sprawl (see also Hermida et al., 2015). The tramway’s very need of financial sustainability becomes an incentive to pursue compact city policies more seriously. Apart from densification, this might include restrictions on car traffic, pedestrianisation, and the revision of land uses in order to create mixed-use neighbourhoods (mixing residence, work, commerce, and leisure). Environmental sustainability and financial sustainability turn out to be overlapping concerns in this case, the tram’s promises coalescing with its needs.

Likewise, the tram makes this ideal of an overarching, intermodal mobility system both possible and necessary. It makes this system possible as it can work as its central axis and connect future pedestrian spaces with bus routes and public bicycle docks. In turn, this interconnection with other means of transport is necessary for the tram, again in order to attract people to it and increase tram passengers. In particular, the city’s buses ought to become essential suppliers of passengers, through the adaptation of their routes to the tram line. The buses would thereby become more peripheral in this intermodal system, connecting the city centre – covered by the tram – to its surroundings. The image of harmonious and effective cooperation between these different means of transport, however, conceals the diverging interests of the actors involved. The buses in Cuenca are owned by private companies who see their spaces, passengers, and autonomy captured by the municipality and its tramway project. The relationship between the municipality and the bus companies was already tense before, but the negotiations around the creation of the intermodal mobility system is currently exacerbating this tension. As a result, for instance, the tram started operation without a unified fare payment system, although the municipality had established this as a requirement for the tram to start operating.

But perhaps most importantly, the emergence of the sustainable and orderly ‘new culture of mobility’16 (UDA, 2016, p. 113) relies on the shaping of social life in the city streets. The PMAIT recognises the spaces along the tram route as essential to the city’s sociality and commerce. Several of those spaces, such as the Feria Libre (the city’s biggest market) and the coach station, would attract large masses of people, especially from lower social classes, producing unwieldy settings of mobility, encounter, formal and informal commerce, alcohol consumption, and theft. The PMAIT argues that these spaces need to change together with the tram project. The inclusive design of the tram, along with municipal ordinances, educational campaigns, and police control should participate in making these public spaces safe, comfortable, and orderly. A sense of social sustainability (see Polèse and Stren, 2000) emerges from this vision, the tram, combined with other measures, being able to create more harmonious social ties. However, the ideal of the socially sustainable city, where everybody has equal rights and access, can easily be contradicted by the discriminatory implications of many ‘urban regeneration’ policies (UDA, 2016, p. 118; see Gandolfo 2009; Swanson, 2007). The implicitly middle-class aesthetic of sustainability and its particular vision of order might in fact exclude practices of informality from the spaces in question, profoundly changing the character of these spaces.

What is more, formal commerce along the tram route has also been undergoing important changes, as hundreds of shops have had to close down since the construction of the tram began. The longer the construction dragged on, complicating access to surrounding streets, the more businesses nearby suffered. Several veedores expressed suspicions about the intentions of the municipality. Was the construction being retarded on purpose so as to force traditional small businesses to abandon their spaces and sell their properties for a reduced price, only for the municipality and allied investors to benefit from the revaluation of the area which was expected to occur with the tram in operation? Such speculations about possible intentions remain unproven. What is certain, however, is that the construction process has destabilised and devalued commerce and ownership in affected areas, and revaluation is likely to ensue from a working tram and connected urban regeneration efforts. Thus, as Siemiatycki (2006) showed in the case of the tram construction in Bilbao, the Cuenca tram is likely to reinforce gentrification in the city centre.17

Cuenca’s sustainable planning documents emphasise their social conscience, mentioning ideas of ‘social cohesion’ and ‘right to the city’ (GAD Cuenca, 2015, p. 177), but their overly harmonious vision easily omits more conflictual realities. However idealised, their conceptualisation of sustainability might sound familiar to the anthropologist of infrastructures. The understanding of sustainability as relying on the tram becoming an inclusive system, seamlessly integrated into the ‘urban fabric’ (UDA, 2016, p. 118), ordering mobility and stabilising social relations, in fact comes close to the scholarly ideal type of infrastructure (Star, 1999). The PMAIT’s vision of sustainability involves reciprocal relations between the tram and the urban environment, including its material and social organisation. This reciprocity between humans and materials can be understood through conceptualisations of infrastructures as socio-technical assemblages (see Harvey et al., 2017a).

One could therefore argue that the efforts to make the tram sustainable are synonymous with infrastructuring it. According to Star’s (1999) by now classic definition of infrastructures, effectively intertwined and adapted infrastructures are seen to produce the systemic background of social life, defining the possibilities of action without being taken into account. Key to this background condition is the seamlessness of their interconnected working (Vertesi, 2014). The introduction of the tram would thus require the re-entanglement of infrastructures and infrastructured practices which were destabilised by the tram construction. This involves the physical reconnections of transport routes, as well as certain legal adjustments, the orientation of population growth, and changes to social life in public spaces.18 The sustainability of the planned intermodality is linked to its seamlessness. The tram, buses, public bicycles, bicycle lanes, and pedestrian zones are supposed to form a coherent whole, in which one could comfortably skip from one means of transport to another (e.g. by allowing bikes on the tram, by reducing waiting times, or by not paying twice when switching between tram and bus). The supposed sustainability of the tram itself, as a technology, also stems largely from its promise of seamlessness. People will not have to put up with exhaust fumes, loud motor noises, and uncomfortable, even dangerous rides – in contrast to the experience of the urban bus, which was elucidated at my visit to Diego’s workshop. The tram offers smooth, silent movement and levelled surfaces, constituting a technology which includes the elderly, the disabled, and people with young children.

However, the ideals of sustainability and inclusiveness are contradicted by possible and actual instances of discrimination, coercion, and exclusion. This ambivalent reorganising effort of the city illustrates the politics of urban assemblages (Ureta, 2015; Blok, 2013; Farías, 2011). The building of a ‘sustainable future’, in accordance with the current planning imagination, requires its proponents to build alliances, making humans and non-humans behave according to plan by convincing people of the values of sustainability, successfully negotiating with companies and other interest groups, and making infrastructures work together. However, this alliance-building is not necessarily a peaceful process, unlike what might be represented in planning documents. These documents omit the diversity of agencies and interests which can resist official plans within a heterogeneous society. A heterogeneous society might include residents with contrary feelings of belonging, higher-class inhabitants who continue to prefer their suburb-car assemblage, lower-class inhabitants who continue to make ‘informal’ use of public space, bus companies and shopkeepers who defend their businesses, and even the very proponents of sustainability projects, who value their personal careers over their official plans. What becomes clear is that the sustainable assemblage is never a finished infrastructure, but rather a political terrain (von Schnitzler, 2013), with possibly as many alternatives, sometimes openly resisting worlds as there are stable alliances. This uncertainty makes the official definition of sustainability an ever-partial reality.

Conclusion

The Cuenca tramway project involves critical elements with which to think about sustainable urbanism and infrastructures. It shows how infrastructure projects are malleable and multiple, able to change their forms and meanings over time (Latour, 1996), as well as to enfold heterogeneous, conflicting forces in unstable assemblages (Harvey, 2018). As the tram emerged in the form of an electoral promise before being imbued with a globalised sustainable development discourse, it alludes to the uncertain politics of infrastructure. But by the time of its concretisation, not only had the discourse changed from a merely logistic and economic focus to imply a more radical transformation of the city, but the tram itself was also hardly recognisable anymore. The project had exchanged its technology under the same name – ‘tram’ – as transnational actors had engaged their expertise and money.

Represented henceforth as the embodiment of sustainable development and modernity in its advertising, the tram project however disrupted contemporaneous mobility planning and increased experiences of chaos in the everyday lives of city dwellers. It thereby illustrates the ambiguous relationship between infrastructure projects and planning, the former not necessarily ensuing from the latter but instead disturbing and constraining it. Despite the tram being non-polluting, its planning failures made it ‘unsustainable’ in various ways: The lack of organisation caused the construction site to durably affect infrastructured practices of dwelling, mobility, and commerce in the city. It thereby also compromised the state effect of the municipality and the relationships between inhabitants and their affective spaces. Inasmuch as sustainability includes considerations of human wellbeing and consolidated social ties, the tram became acknowledged as socially unsustainable in its impromptu form (see UDA, 2016). But the expected deficiency of ‘integration’, and thus of passengers, also contradicts the very goal of environmental benefit (by not decreasing motorised traffic) and threatens the financial sustainability of the tram.

The tramway appears as neither sustainable by itself, nor able to produce sustainability on its own – a diagnosis which challenges technological essentialism and determinism respectively. Instead, for it to be sustainable, it would need to be infrastructured by reassembling socio-material relations. Sustainability, in this sense, can be understood to correspond to the very ideal of infrastructure as a seamless technical support for social life, facilitating and ordering collective action. This reassembling effort equates to a large-scale transformation of the city, including changes in the legal frameworks, the built environment, the organisation of social life, and the practices and values of inhabitants. By acknowledging this, planning documents such as the PMAIT advance towards a deeper understanding of the implications of infrastructure production, hinting at the hugely complex challenge of such projects. If, as Star (1999) argued, an infrastructure is never an infrastructure for everybody, neither is sustainability. A considerable range of conflicts has already been sparked by the tramway construction, and the operational tram and the quest for an intermodal mobility system are likely to entail new ones. The anthropological analysis of infrastructures is well placed to describe the heterogeneous actors involved in this process. The inherent uncertainty of infrastructure projects leaves questions open about how the city will reassemble with the tram, and who is to win and who is to lose in this process.

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