Of cables and threads
Reweaving the urban fabric at the edge of Bogotá
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21050656 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Federico Pérez Fernández (0000-0003-0850-6092, Portland State University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 283-295 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-03 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Ethnologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/amet.70113 |
| OpenAlex | W7167240726 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 46 |
Over the past two decades, gondola lifts have become central to interventions in urban Latin America's auto‐constructed peripheries. As cable car urbanism reshapes the city's edge, it raises fundamental questions about the notion of the “urban fabric” as a sociomaterial practice, an epistemology, and a site of politics. In Bogotá, the city's first aerial cable car line has been integrated into the sprawling district of Ciudad Bolívar, revealing a dialectical process of urban fabrication—a form of urban weaving, in the language of both experts and residents, that bridges technical retrofits and popular logistics. These state‐community interfaces operate beyond the binaries of compromise and dissent, co‐optation and participation, control and invention. At stake is an emergent politics in the seam: an interlacing of activist networks and infrastructural ecologies that recomposes modes of urban mending and care from below
Compromise · Control (management) · Dialectic · Latin Americans · Politics · Process (computing) · Urbanism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure
Posthumanist Performativity
El paro cívico de octubre de 1993 en Ciudad Bolívar (Bogotá)
Topological twists
Mobility innovation at the urban margins
Assemblage and critical urbanism
Making the state care
El relleno sanitario Doña Juana en Bogotá
Roads
Inalienable Possessions
Peripheral best practices and the politics of visibility
Territorio sur
Urban Informality
Durable governance assemblages at the margins
Terrain as insurgent weapon
Does the future of the favela fit in an aerial cable car? Examining tourism mobilities and urban inequalities through a decolonial lens
Touching with Light, or, How Texture Recasts the Sensing of Underground Water
Skinworlds
Dealing with Dangerous Spaces
Peripheral urbanization
Retrofit
A Fantástica Obra da Paz
"Divining" the city
In the wake of the plebeian revolt
Anthropological knots
Auto-Construction Redux
Rendering assemblage dialectical
Metropolitan rebellions and the politics of commoning the city
The Topological Quality of Infrastructural Relation
Assemblage
Social Movements, Cultural Production, and Protests
Practices of assemblage and community forest management
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |