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)

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 …

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What happens in poorer societies and cities …?

2. Medellin - the urban context

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)

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.

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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 Medellin0,552 Montería0,548 Bogotá0,536 Pasto0,530 Manizales0,525 Cúcuta0,521 Cartagena0,517 Cali0,513 Ibague0,494 Villavicencio0,487 Barranquillas0,486 Pereira0,465 BucaramangaFuente: MESEP

3. Mobility and urban integration

• Achieved at a symbolic level.• Increased self-esteem, less stigmatization. • Sensations of inclusion.

Maximising urban improvement potential: complementary projects

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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

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 societyaccording to wealth, income, education and status, mobility develops a ‘horizontal’ dimension that further fragments and accentuates existing social divisionsaround dimensions like age, gender, ethnicityand lifestyle (Ohnmacht et al., 2009).

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.

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 asmotives, strategies and values.

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.

For more information:

www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/dpu/