1 Urban Mobility and Poverty: Lessons from Medellin's Aerial Cable-Car Systems, Peter Brand
1. ESRC-DFID Impact Conference, Pretoria, 16-18 March 2016
URBAN MOBILITY AND POVERTY:
lessons from Medellin's aerial cable-car systems
Development Planning Unit, University College London/
School of Urban and Regional Planning, Universidad
Nacional de Colombia (Medellín campus)
2. Planning’s assumption:
Planning tends to assume that increased
transport and mobility options will lead to
greater equality and social inclusion, in
that they increase opportunities for full
engagement in economic, social and
political life. However, in increasingly
fragmented and individualized societies,
there is no ‘whole’ to be integrated into …
8. 1. Metrocable mobility and travel costs
• Contrary to technical rationality, the cable cars do not necessarily save
time, and except for long journeys, money.
• Formal sector workers and students are the main users/beneficieries.
• Little evidence of non-essential trips leading to greater participation in
urban social life.
“You have to get up earlier, I can get there quicker by bus but [to use the Metrocable] you have to have patience, the queues
a very long here.” (Orlando, construction worker)
9. 2. Mobility and the neighbourhood economy
• Enhanced mobility does not, in itself, inexorably lead to improvement in
the economic conditions of families or communities.
• Minor improvements in social indicators are more attributable to the
general economy and social programmes.
• Urban income inequality (Gini) has increased.
10. x
No clear indication of improved
mobility in quality of life and
human development indices.
Mobility is not included
specifically in the calculation of
these indices but, it can be
argued, should be reflected in
them.
The importance of social
programmes.
Coeficiente Gini, 2009
0,566 Medellin
0,552 Montería
0,548 Bogotá
0,536 Pasto
0,530 Manizales
0,525 Cúcuta
0,521 Cartagena
0,517 Cali
0,513 Ibague
0,494 Villavicencio
0,487 Barranquillas
0,486 Pereira
0,465 Bucaramanga
Fuente: MESEP
11. 3. Mobility and urban integration
• Achieved at a symbolic level.
• Increased self-esteem, less stigmatization.
• Sensations of inclusion.
20. Theoretical considerations: mobilities
and socio-spatial trajectories
Social life in all its domains – work, leisure, family relations, friendships and love, cultural life,
political activity, civic engagement – are all caught up in an overlapping complex of multi-
spatial networks.
New opportunities … exacting new demands … an new forms of isolation and exclusion
21. Mobility and inequality
• Increased mobility does not homogenise society, rather it stratifies and polarises (Bauman).
• Lack of mobility becomes a severe obstacle to social inclusion and an additional form of
social inequality.
On top of the traditional (vertical) stratification of society
according to wealth, income, education and status,
mobility develops a ‘horizontal’ dimension that further
fragments and accentuates existing social divisions
around dimensions like age, gender, ethnicity
and lifestyle (Ohnmacht et al., 2009).
22. Mobility as capital
• Neither
transport/communications
infrastructures nor social
landscapes are flat and
uniform.
• The need to recognise the social
and cultural differentiation of
contexts led Kaufmann et al.
(2004) to consolidate the notion
of motility, or the real or
potential capacity to be mobile
and its significance in different
socio-spatial contexts. Mobility,
they argue, constitutes a new
kind of capital.
23. Motility and the importance of
context
Mobility capacity or motility requires:
• Access: or the range of possible mobilities according to place, time and other contextual restraints and
conditions of that access (costs, logistics and other restrictions).
• Competences: or the skills and abilities - physical, cognitive or organisational.
• Appropriation: or how people interpret and act upon those options;
Above all, motility incorporates
needs and aspirations as well as
motives, strategies and values.
24. Multiple and open-ended mobilities
Increased mobility options have no inevitable outcomes but, rather, operate in a fluid way in
the highly diverse intersections of individual aspirations, social group dynamics and spatial
configurations.