Published In
American Ethnologist
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-1-2026
Subjects
aerial cable cars, Bogotá, infrastructural ecologies, peripheries, popular urbanization, urban fabric
Abstract
Over the past two decades, gondola lifts have become central to interventions in urbanLatin America’s auto-constructed peripheries. As cable car urbanism reshapes the city’sedge, it raises fundamental questions about the notion of the “urban fabric” as a socio-material practice, an epistemology, and a site of politics. In Bogotá, the city’s first aerialcable car line has been integrated into the sprawling district of Ciudad Bolívar, revealinga dialectical process of urban fabrication—a form of urban weaving, in the language ofboth experts and residents, that bridges technical retrofits and popular logistics. Thesestate-community interfaces operate beyond the binaries of compromise and dissent, co-optation and participation, control and invention. At stake is an emergent politics in theseam: an interlacing of activist networks and infrastructural ecologies that recomposesmodes of urban mending and care from below.
Rights
© 2026 The Author(s). American Ethnologist published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1111/amet.70113
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45189
Citation Details
Pérez Fernández, F. (2026). Of cables and threads: Reweaving the urban fabric at the edge of Bogotá. American Ethnologist, 53(3), 283–295. Portico.