Infrastructuring Sustainability
Sustainability is a key policy term today that gives rise to a diversity of realities the world over. In Cuenca, Ecuador, I explore what is involved in the implementation of sustainable mobility projects, ranging from the construction of a tram to bike lanes, pedestrian zones, and complete streets.
It is common in the social sciences to understand sustainability narratives of states and corporations as watered-down climate action at best, and insidious greenwashing strategy at worst. Though this is all too often true, my ethnography in Cuenca offers important nuances to such approaches.
First, the notion of “sustainability” (sostenibilidad) is far from hegemonic in Cuenca. The local government’s sustainable mobility projects are widely contested and reinterpreted in terms of “modernization”, “culture”, “heritage” and “politics” by inhabitants, showing not only that “sustainability” has limited cultural reach but also that people perform different discourses and values to sustain themselves in the city. Beyond the official sustainability claims, thus, there are what I call the divergent practices of sustainment.
Further, if sustainability projects are considered as failing, it might be not because they had different intentions all along, but because to enact them requires an enormous collective effort. Even modest proposals for change require the participation of all kinds of human and nonhuman forces.
In this sense, also, I challenge scholarly approaches which by default reject mainstream sustainability projects as ontologically inconsequential. These approaches suggest that sustainability claims remain plainly within modern configurations of the nature/culture divide, progress temporality, and anthropocentrism. My research suggests that even in rather mainstream settings connected to international policy mobilities, worlds can change and diverge from archetypal modernity. Sustainability claims reframe the world, however partially, in narrative as well as in practice and infrastructure provision. Therefore, not only do we need to take sustainability claims seriously in their consequences on the world, we also need to understand modernity as profoundly multiple and unstable. That way, we might be able, as anthropologists, to support more radical departures.
This is the general argument of my book manuscript that is currently under review, as well as other outputs (see below) and work in progress. As part of this research project, I have also explored the contradictions of “sustainability” (Rumé 2022a), issues of responsibility in infrastructure construction (Rumé 2024a), and everyday (auto)mobilities (Rumé 2025a), among other things. The project also led me to dig deeper into questions of heritage and populism.
***
This research started out as an MA project at the University of Barcelona in 2017-18, under the supervision of Roger Sansi. I then further developed it in my PhD research (University of Manchester, 2019-2023), supervised by Penny Harvey and Jolynna Sinanan. Work on the book manuscript was made possible by a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship (GOIPD/2024/691) at University College Cork, under the guidance of James Cuffe. Other outputs (e.g. Rumé 2025a) are the result of my collaboration with the research project MOVER at the University of Barcelona.
Outputs
In review. Monograph. Sustainably modern? An ethnography of urban intervention in Ecuador.
2026. Conference paper. “Construyendo la ciudad con palabras y otras cosas ambivalentes: Las cadenas semiótico-materiales de un tranvía en Ecuador”, presented at the 4th Congrés Català d’Antropologia, 28-30 January, Barcelona, Spain.
2025a. Book chapter. La ciudad permeable: Ideas, políticas y prácticas de la movilidad en Cuenca, Ecuador. In R. Sansi Roca and M. Delgado Ruiz (eds.), Movilidades desbordadas: Límites y futuros de las nuevas movilidades urbanas. Manresa: Bellaterra Edicions, pp. 237-254.
2025b. Conference panel. “Framing sustainability: What worlds does sustainability create?”, co-convened with Constance Smith (University of Manchester), discussant: Felix Ringel (Durham University). APA Congress “Itinerâncias”, 14-18 July, Viana do Castelo, Portugal.
2025c. Conference paper. “Sustaining the myth of the sustainable city: Enacting mobility policy in Cuenca, Ecuador”, presented at the APA Congress “Itinerâncias”, 14-18 July, Viana do Castelo, Portugal.
2025d. Conference paper. “Liminality in urban change: From structure to infrastructure”, presented at the UGRG Conference “Urban Borders, Boundaries and Liminality”, 6 February, London, UK (online).
2024a. Article. Constructing Responsibility: Infrastructural Harm, Citizen Oversight and the Politics of Publics. Ethnography. Advance online publication.
2024b. Book chapter. Liminality as Anti-Infrastructure? Boundary Making and Breaking in Infrastructure Construction. In B. Tanulku and S. Pekelsma (eds.), Liminality, Transgression and Space Across the World: Being, Living and Becoming(s) Against, Across and with Borders and Boundaries. Abingdon & New York: Routledge, pp. 122-136.
2024c. Conference paper. “La ciudad permeable: Ideas, políticas y prácticas de la movilidad en Cuenca, Ecuador”, presented at the conference “Movilidades desbordadas: Un estudio comparativo de las nuevas movilidades urbanas”, 25 April, University of Barcelona, Spain.
2023a. PhD Thesis. The Cosmopolitics of Urban Sustainability: Infrastructures, Mobilities and Modernities in Cuenca, Ecuador. University of Manchester, UK.
2023b. Conference paper. “El tranvía de Cuenca entre formalidades y pragmatismos”, presented at the XIV Reunião de Antropologia do Mercosul, 1-4 August, Niteroi, Brazil.
2023c. Workshop paper. “CoPing with traffic: Mobile communities, transport technologies and urban governance in Ecuador”, presented at the working group “Communities of Practice Revisited”, University of Bayreuth, Germany (online).
2022a. Book chapter. The Contradictions of Sustainability: Discourse, Planning and the Tramway in Cuenca, Ecuador. In J. Alderman and G. Goodwin (eds.), The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures. London: University of London Press, pp. 199-222.
2022b. Conference paper. “Responsibility, blame and the different lives of a tram: Sustainability transition and its discontents”, presented at the Nordic Ethnology and Folklore Conference, 13-16 June, Reykjavik, Iceland.
2022c. Workshop paper. “Tactical urbanism and the politics and publics of sustainability experiments in Cuenca, Ecuador”, presented at the workshop “Exploring Urban Environmental Futures in the Global South”, 16 May, Institute of Anthropology, Basel, Switzerland.
2022d. Guest lecture. “Ontology and the tram project in Cuenca, Ecuador”, on the course “Key Ideas in Social Anthropology”, University of Manchester, UK.
2019a. Guest lecture. “La vida social de las infraestructuras”, on the course “Etnografía de la morfología e infraestructura urbana”, ANTIARQ Formación, Spain (online).
2019b. Symposium paper. “The contradictions of sustainability: Discourse, planning and the tramway in Cuenca, Ecuador”, presented at the symposium “The social and political life of Latin American infrastructure: meanings, values, and competing visions of the future”, 20 September, ILAS, London, UK.
2019c. Conference paper. “Construction time: Rhythms, creative destruction and liminality in infrastructure projects”, presented at the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 29-30 August, Helsinki, Finland.
2019d. Conference paper. “Tecnopolíticas de la movilidad sostenible: El tranvía de Cuenca, Ecuador”, presented at the V Congreso Internacional AIBR, 9-12 July, Madrid, Spain.
2018a. Article. Reflexiones antropológicas sobre la difícil ejecución del proyecto tranvía en Cuenca. CIVITIC. Revista Interuniversitaria de Estudios Urbanos de Ecuador, 4: 25-34.
2018b. Workshop paper. “Infrastructuring urban mobility: Discipline, culture and a tramway construction in Cuenca, Ecuador”, presented at the workshop “Jornades Internacionals d’Antropologia de les Infraestructures i les Mobilitats”, 9 November, University of Barcelona, Spain.
2018c. MA Thesis. Sobre imposiciones y adecuaciones infraestructurales. El caso del tranvía en Cuenca, Ecuador. University of Barcelona, Spain.