Performing “Sustainable Mobility” in Ecuador: Entangling Climate in Moving Social Bodies

In Cuenca, a city of half a million inhabitants in the Ecuadorian Andes, “sustainable mobility” has become a keyword in policy making and activism. Various municipal initiatives have been implemented recently, including bike lanes and a public bike rental scheme. Especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, statistics show that cycling in the city has increased exponentially. During ethnographic fieldwork and regular visits to Cuenca over the last few years, I have observed and participated in various kinds of urban mobilities, accompanying research participants on their everyday journeys and interviewing them about their mobility practices. Apart from research with “common” city dwellers, I also extended my inquiry to municipal employees, local academics and activist groups concerned with sustainable mobility and cycling in particular.

I consider there to be a heterogeneous “cycling front” at work in the city, which we can understand as at the intersection of a discourse coalition and a community of practice. There are shared narratives on becoming more environmentally sustainable, healthier, and less car-dependent as a society, but these narratives also become entangled with a number of other values and objectives, including gender and class considerations. And there is the shared practice of cycling, through which myriad bodily performances take place. First, everyday cycling performances constitute an active struggle against what cyclists perceive as the local car culture, defined as polluting, dangerous and entrenched. The latter is also perceived by (activist) women cyclists as embodying (literally) toxic masculinity, thus involving mobile performances of gender. Further, municipal employees’ cycling performs both their (contested) integrity as sustainability proponents and their attempts to advertise cycling. These considerations will be the basis for a reflection on urban traffic as the stage on which climate and sustainability issues are turned into everyday embodied, performative struggles, entangled with other lively social issues.