The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS): Miriam Greenberg

Urban Solidarity: Gender, Mobility, and the Unfinished Politics of Buen Vivir in Quito, Ecuador

Between 2007 and 2017, Ecuador embraced wide-sweeping, post-neoliberal discourses that repositioned the government by the side of the people. Under President Rafael Correa’s leadership, the new development plan, Buen Vivir (BV), was one measure that materialized how state and society relations were reconfigured to construct a multicultural state and build a care economy through solidarity relations. BV had the objective of supporting the nation socially by constructing large-scale infrastructure, such as transportation networks. These mobility systems are central to improving the quality of life for socially vulnerable groups who rely on public transit to get around. Yet, transportation networks in Quito, such as the underground metro rail and the public bicycle system, did not address the systemic inequities that mass infrastructure systems can create. Women and urban poor in many cities, particularly in Latin America, and specifically in Quito, rely on public transit to make complex trips with multiple stops related to childcare, wage labor, and other socially reproductive tasks. This book examines how discourses of BV unfolded to better understand how transport infrastructure became a new terrain of political opportunity, reflecting a vision of a collective livable life. It tracks how urban mobility patterns in contemporary Quito reflect solidarity relations that proliferate in response to various forms of precarity—political, economic, social, gender-based, and racial. In doing so, Urban Solidarity extends beyond examining dominant approaches to government frameworks that manage life, such as security and risk, to explore how solidarities have brought together citizens, the city, and the state to build intricate trust networks during moments of crisis, like democratic failure, disease, or in everyday life. Urban mobility, a gendered, interdependent, socio-spatial relation, ultimately reveals how small everyday caring politics gradually suture the fortified, segregated city through solidarity.

Julie Gamble is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current book project explores immigrant accompaniment practices in Nashville, TN, amid rising enforcement practices. Her forthcoming book, Urban Solidarity, with the University of Texas Press in 2027, analyzes the cultural politics of urban mobility to explore how Latin American cities, spaces of prolonged historical segregation, can be remade through the daily rhythms of movement by engendering solidarity and trust. She has also published single- and co-authored articles related to gender and urban mobilities in journals like Transport Geography, Applied Mobilities, Mobilities, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Antipode. She is interested in the ways that gender informs urban experience and in how to build caring cities. She teaches courses on gender, the city, mobilities, Latinx urban environments, and sustainable urban development.

The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) is co-organized by the MSUP Program and second-year PhD students in Urban Planning: Light refreshments will be served. This event is open to Columbia University affiliates with a valid university ID. Any questions on the events can be directed Asher Alec Kelvin, aak2255@columbia.edu, Lauren Drew Leiker, ldl2124@columbia.edu and Kavyaa Rizal, kr3020@columbia.edu