Grounded Coerciveness of Tourism & Nation (re) Branding: Slow Violence Towards Large Traditional Food Markets in Quito, Ecuador Alexandra Venner
May 6th, 2016 Graduate Thesis | Primary Thesis Advisor: Miguel Robles-Duran Secondary Thesis Advisor: Jilly Traganou Master of Science Design & Urban Ecologies Parsons Design School | The New School 1
About the Author Alexandra (Zanny) is motivated by big mountains, people, and the processes of city-making. Raised in-between the prairies of Alberta and the mountains of British Columbia, Canada, Zanny grounded her passion for the urban context with a BA in Interdisciplinary studies a the University of British Columbia prior to expanding her ongoing curiosities for social justice and the city. As a young woman balancing a rich city life with never-ending mountain invitations, Zanny is learning to find a way to let adventure, education and work coalesce and resonate into a single way of seeing and acting in the world. The life she lives, as an elite athlete, urban practitioner, and backcountry traveler, is her launching point.
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Image: View of the city of Quito from Pichincha Volcano, Quito, Ecuador Source: Photograph by author, January 2016
Acknowledgments I am truly humbled to have been apart of this year-long collective thesis project. Working in-between New York City and Quito has given me the opportunity to develop multiple relationships, experiences and knowledges as a young urban researcher and designer. Working with the core thesis team in NYC alongside Sinead, Sascia, Gamar, Tait, Masoom, Maria and Mateo has been nothing but an inspiring and dynamic adventure together. Collaboration is not easy, but we did it and we will continue so! The NYC team continues my praise towards a collective guidance that carried this project through. First, the group’s shared thesis advisor, Miguel Robles-Duran, who provided incredible mentorship for pushing the direction of urban research and practice. Also to Hector Grad, your ongoing support provided an insightful contribution to bettering my work. I am so very grateful you were able to assist me with my fieldwork in January; those spanish conversations could not have happened without you! Finally, David Harvey, you continually reminded me to stay humble, bold and clear as my work evolved. Importantly, you reminded me to keep climbing mountains because that too is field-work! To the three of you--Miguel, Hector and David--do not worry this isn’t’ the end, it is only the beginning towards future collaborations pertaining to social justice and the city. Immense gratitude goes towards working with the Quito team from afar and in-person: Ana Rodriguez, Luis Herrera, Henar Diez, Lucas Alvarez, Nora Fernandez, Veronica Morales, Juan Carlos Leon, Jeremy Rayner and Monica Herrera. You all have been fundamental towards helping the group engage with the everyday life of Quito’s multiple market spaces, their everyday struggles and situating bigger, uneven development struggles and forces across the city and the country. To the multiple interviewees and the street conversations that I had over three visits to Quito, thank-you for sharing a piece of your past, present and future life with me. This thesis project is framed within a much larger support system and network as well. To my dear friends of the 2014-2016 DUE & TUP cohort, we have paved, trudged and charged the way through the past two years together. I am inspired by each of your minds and your work every day and cannot wait to collaborate on bold urban projects with you in the future-when and wherever that maybe. And of course to the Urban Council, you have laid the foundation to redirecting graduates who can walk a fine line between critique, analysis and proposition. Finally, to my family in Edmonton, Alberta for their ongoing love, support and never-ending questions about what Design and Urban Ecologies is. I wouldn’t have landed my first NYC opportunity as a Graduate student without your encouragement. This leap forward would also have not been possible without the backbone of CityStudio in Vancouver, British Columbia who continues to push the boundary in higher-level education working in between post-secondary institutions and city government on projects that matter. Trust the process, you say. Do not be afriad to take risks and challenge the status quo in a critical way. This requires courage and is something that is needed more than ever by emerging young urban graduates. Just be sure to carry forward a sensitive conscious towards past, present and future urban situations and maintain relationships along the way. Gratitude to you Duane Elverum, Janet Moore and Lena Soots for your inspiration to take bigger and better steps!
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BRIEF INTRODUCTION
Framing Investment & Disinvestment This research study traces the pressures facing Mercado San Roque, a large traditional food market in Quito, Ecuador, from global agencies through to state and municipal policy -particularly looking at tourism as a key force. Threatened with displacement and perceived as a site of crime and disorder by the general public, the market’s struggle to resist the pressures of urban development is emblematic of many struggles in cities all over the world. This brief introduction provides a historical framework for the contested space of Mercado San Roque as a prism to comment on external pressures towards wider contemporary urban issues of unequal development via the research and design proposition that follows.
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Quito’s designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978 occurred during a period when global agencies were focusing on the effects of increased urbanization. The first UN conference on human settlement, now called UN-Habitat, took place in 1976 in Vancouver and since then has become the largest global conference on urban issues. Habitat III is set to take place in Quito in October 2016. This period also saw the acceleration of urban development through the emerging globalized economy. International agencies founded after World War II, such as the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, became key players in debt restructuring and investment for states.
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Cities increasingly became sites for capital accumulation, and specific economic and cultural features emerged as facets for rehabilitation and were leveraged for investment.
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We can trace these global pressures throughout Latin America. In the 1980s and 1990s neoliberal policies were introduced in states across the continent under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
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This has led to increased inequality, loss of land, and other forms of violence. Within this context, many states shifted from national development to the augmenting of “competitive� urban regions. Competitiveness is based on the attractive qualities that these cities bring to the global market, such as rich cultural heritage, and ecological tourism.
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Ecuador’s unique combination of ecological and cultural heritage has been strengthened as part of an alternative model for development since the inauguration of President Rafael Correa in 2008. The Correa administration based this alternative model on the recognition of Ecuador as a plurinational state, as well as the nominal opposition of neoliberal privatization. This alternative model entails looking for new channels for investment and development, and in this climate, ecological and cultural heritage have become increasingly wielded as vehicles for tourism. However, this has translated into state-led capitalist development, and there are many contradictions in the administration’s progressive ideology. We look at these effects on Quito in particular.
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Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, is a node for global heritage tourism with the historic center as a driver. This has increased the pressure for redevelopment throughout the city and peripheral urban areas. Since the late 1990s, rehabilitation plans at the municipal level have displaced the local population and initiated major efforts to sanitize the space, driven by preservation policies under the auspices of investment partners such as the Inter-American Development Bank.
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The historic center receives a lot of investment attention from local and international political actors to sustain its colonial heritage. This stands in stark contrast with the ongoing disinvestment and speculation pressuring Mercado San Roque, located a few streets from the center’s core attraction sites. Through field work I observed and learned more about these relational tensions and looked at how to build upon a collective awareness about various pressures affecting large traditional food markets in Quito. Here is where this thesis project launches to focus on urban social movements anchored by Mercado San Roque.
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Ground Coerciveness of Tourism & Nation (re) Branding: Slow Violence Towards Large Traditional Food Markets in Quito, Ecuador
Alexandra Venner
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ABSTRACT This thesis contributes to an existing dialect between built urban form and living urban space when new tourism, branding, and development strategies explicitly make the formation of the future city that spatially excludes and governmentally prioritizes. One point of departure to understand and contribute to this dialect falls under an analysis of the making of a world-class tourist destination. The astounding forces that contribute to the city and nation becoming a “destination”, are related to the conditions of inter-urban competition; a process where governmental authorities work to sell their local and nation-wide assets to the global stage for international attraction, which includes tourism and foreign investment. This conceptualization of urban life is essential to frame because it offers clues as to which sectors become prioritized for (re)development and which sectors, urban forms and populations remain in the background and experience exclusion, disinvestment, and or displacement. Thus, to see such contested macro and micro processes at play, a collective, year-long thesis project based in Quito, Ecuador, enabled a particular investigation to link how topdown inter-urban competitive strategies-based on tourism and (re)branding-produces an exclusionary city where low-income populations and marginalized districts are negatively impacted. One particular site to understand the macro, competitive, political and economic logic that works to actively undermine authentic sites of social activity and cultural and economic exchange, is through the dynamic sites of Quito’s large traditional food markets. Out of Quito’s 52 large traditional food markets, Mercado San Roque is one particular market that is more impacted by current National and Municipal plans and vision selling the capital city of Quito and the nation of Ecuador to the global stage. This market is threatened with displacement and perceived as a site of crime and disorder by the general public. Its general negative reputation in the city is mainly due to the surrounding neighbourhood of a class that is of lower-economic status, indigenous people, sex-workers, and also included an active prison until 2014. This stands in stark contrast to its neighbouring district, Quito’s UNESCO Historical Centre District, which receives significant investment attention from local and international political actors working to sustain its colonial heritage and status as a world-class destination site. Further, ongoing pressures of luxury development in the form of a 5 star hotel envisioned for the neighbourhood of San Roque and city plans to modernize the market via a strong gentrifying vision is one telling sign of the city’s larger
economic plans for increasing income from tourism, which involves sanitizing “informal” sectors of the city. For instance, the Municipality’s long term Land Management Strategy to invest in “attraction zones” in the form of profitable commercial, business and tourist sectors can be argued as a tool that promotes long-term, uneven, and market-oriented urban development and redevelopment that puts emphasis on the speculation for the prosperity of Quito’s future. This is one tactic that devalues other significant city spaces that do not possess profitable value(s) and who have limited recognition or validity in the City’s urban agenda; thereby triggering processes of devalorization, displacement and/or commodification. Fundamentally, the grounded coerciveness of tourism and (re)branding has extraordinary impacts on the future of Quito’s landscape. Thus, through active field work, a synthesis of on-the-ground knowledge, and an ongoing collaboration with an activist-based organization in Quito called, Red de Sabres, I have identified a design proposition to contribute to the market’s existing struggle. I am proposing a narrative-based pedagogical tool, called “The Future of Two Markets”, to enable Red de Sabres to engage the markets about exclusionary economic development plans via tourism and branding and their own spatial reality. Through the locus of Mercado San Roque as the heart of the story, “The Future of Two Markets” is an accessible, entertaining and politicizing narrative to catalyze a more controversial conversation about the macro and micro forces piercing everyday life. The underlying value of this narrative piece is to build awareness and capacities for the organizational structures of and related to the markets to understand the unforeseeable consequences shaping their future city and, ultimately, their future market(s). After all, in order to advance into any policy recommendations there needs to be a heightened awareness about exclusionary forms of economic development and there is a need to begin this discussion at the macro level.
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“As crafty architects bent on insurgency we have to think strategically and tactically about what to change and where, about how to change what and with what tools.” -David Harvey, Spaces of Hope
OUTLINE
SECTION 1 An Urban Investigation| Inter-Urban Competition as Exclusionary Econonmic Development SECTION 3 Reframing Quito as a World Class Tourist Destination | Slow Violence Towards Large Traditional Food Markets in Quito
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SECTION 2 Quito and Ecuador |(Re)Building & (Re)Branding a ‘New’ City and a ‘New’ Nation SECTION 4 A Design Contribution Towards an Ongoing Struggle |Critical Visual Narrative as a Pedagogical Tool
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Framework for an Urban Investgation: Inter-Urban Competition, Tourism, & (re) Branding Pressures Towards Large Traditional Food Markets in Quito, Ecuador
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SECTION 1
An Urban Investigation: Inter-Urban Competition as Exclusionary Economic Development 1.1. Introduction: Making a World-Class Tourist Destination The desire to become a world-class tourist destination is a fascinating and critical point of inquiry for an urban investigation. It is one significant sign of urban change to situate the kind of future development of a city’s and/or a nation’s landscape. This change can be traced in the vision of a city or a nation on the rise, in a new place that is shedding light to advertise its potential future, as a guaranteed presence in the global imaginary of ‘destination’ oriented spaces. One principal geographical territory to situate the effects of tourism and branding as an economic development strategy is in Latin America. Significant public and private efforts have utilized the tourism sector as a source of economic activity and as a development strategy to aid economic recovery and boost growth. Under global pressures to become sites of worldclass tourist destinations, cities and nations in Latin America seek to project themselves utilizing their culture, political and economic references. From positioning themselves as cultural sites, economic centres or political capitals, there is a continuous struggle and battle over metropolitan visibility in order to capitalize investments, stimulate commerce, activate tourisms and fortify political nice. One point of entry to investigate the instrumental logic of the aestheticization and representation of a nation is to trace the geopolitical landscape of the South American country of Ecuador and it’s capital city of Quito, where tourism and branding have been rapidly accelerating since 2008. It is one successful and contested urban example of how public authorities have utilized specific tourism strategies and branding tactics to build ‘newness’ in order to meet the needs of temporary tourists and be apart of the global stage. To bring awareness and to prompt discussion about the exclusionary impacts of the making of Quito and Ecuador as a world-class tourist destination, I am interested in investigating the effects of tourism development in Quito in order to reveal the conditions that tourism brings to everyday lives. Tourism, as a national economic and political strategy in Ecuador, inserts Quito into global processes of commodification, and competition for funding and marketing. Specifically, local sites that privilege the international tourist class frequently revolve around notions of culture and places of visual consumption. This approach
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introduces a strong logic of city and cultural marketing, which operates locally as a force compounding existing urban hardship and inequalities together for the achievement of global status and economic wealth. Moreover, these are the sites that are most impacted during political movements that aggressively pursue the urban spectacle agenda where municipalities, private developers and other stakeholders favor profitable infrastructure to cater to the world-class tourist destination rhetoric, rather than people’s capacity and livelihood.1 This thesis in an attempt to contribute to an existing dialect between built urban form and living urban space when new tourism, branding, development strategies make visually explicit the formation of the future city that spatially excludes and governmentally prioritizes.2 This will be accomplished by presenting a comprehensive analysis of global financial capitalism and inter-urban competition –two interrelated and astounding forces that illuminate exclusionary urban logics between new urban development projects and the restructuring of political, social and economic power relations in the city. Tracing the ‘world-class tourist destination’ equation within the country of Ecuador and its capital city of Quito is through strategies, tactics, policies and trends that formulate the relationship between inter-urban competitiveness and exclusionary forms of economic development. Further, this urban investigation catalyzes the ongoing commentary about how the transformation of a city and or nation into becoming a world class tourist destination relates to the local economic restructuring processes based on global trends of transnational investment, deregulation and privatization.3 This is indeed part of a global struggle for the survival of the social-welfare state and poses to question how the hunger for a world-class tourist destination status spatially prioritizes and spatially excludes working-class populations and marginalized city districts.
1 Ananya Roy, “Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association, 71, no.2 (2005): 151. 2 Filip De Boek and Marie-Francoise Plissart, Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City (Belgium: Ludion, 2004); Filip De Boek “Inhabiting Ocular Ground: Kinshasa’s Future in the Light of Congo’s Spectral Urban Politics,” Cultural Anthropology 26, No.2 (2011) :263286; Ananya Roy, “Urban Informality, Toward an Epistemology of Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 71, No.2 (2005): 147-158; Michael Goldman, “Speculative Urbanism and the making of the world city,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 35, No.3 (2011): 555-582 3 David Harvey, “From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation of Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Human Geography 71, no.1 (1989): 3-17; Eric Swyngedouw, Frank Moulaert, Arantxa Rodriguez, “Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large-Scale Urban Development Project and the New Urban Policy,” Antipode (2002), 548.
1.2 Becomings of Inter-Urban Competitiveness: Influences and Forces by Powers Far Greater Than the Local The making of a world class tourist destination entails a restructuring of cities and nations that positions them as rivalries and competitors between one another. Such a global-urban discussion also sits within Uneven Development, which has been powerfully framed by renowned urban geographers, such as Neil Smith and David Harvey, to describe the capitalist processes and liberalizing discourses that promote “competitiveness” for the sake of capital accumulation.4 This conceptualization of urban life is essential to frame the making of a world-class tourist destination because it offers clues as to which sectors become prioritized for development and redevelopment, and which sectors, urban forms and populations remain in the background and experience exclusion, disinvestment, and or displacement. Thus, I am questioning the socio-spatial economic and political restructuring processes that accelerate the fabrication for the newcity and new-nation as a world-class tourist destination in Quito, Ecuador. This mode of urbanization is confronted with dynamic pressures to raise ‘place identity’ in order to position the city and/ or nation competitively in the global context.5 One significant condition that fuels world-class making experiments is the desire to enter the global circuit to find new forms of commerce, culture and tourism strategies, putting cities and regions in competition with each other for funding and marketing. Becoming a “competitive” city is as much about the economics as about the vision of the future.Hence, tourism and nation-wide branding is a powerful tool to control and practice this vision. As geographer Luc Gwiazdzinski says, “once again, symbols replace reality and cliches conceal complexity.”6 This is the image of projected city that drives market-model urban redevelopment processes, which deepen the landscape of existing uneven development for the people more affected by disinvestment plans.7 The city on the rise is the image that is not yet being inhabited but conceptually being re-created within a present 4 Neil Smith, Uneven Development, Nature Capital and the Production of Space (Athens:The University of Georgia Press, 2008) 5 Simon Anholt, “Beyond the Nation Brand: The Role of IMage and Identity in International Relations,” The Journal of Public Diplomacy 2, no.1 (2013): 6-12. 6 Luc Gwiazdzinski, “ Against Disposable Territories: A Preliminary Critical Approach to System of Territorial Identification” in Don’t Brand My Public Space, ed. Ruedi Baur and Sebastien Thiery (Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2013), 276 7 Kevin Fox Gotham and Miriam Greenberg, Crisis Cities Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)
living moment. Situating this lens within Quito and Ecuador’s growing interurban-competitiveness is one way to question the power of selling ‘newness’ that sets visual and spatial strategies of who belongs where and under what conditions. It is a question of what is being promoted and valued and what spaces and/ or people are left as ‘insignificant’ in the workings of the government and their image-making schemes. Thus, it become significant to investigate the spatial patterns and urban spatial structures that are proposed through plans and policies at the city and national level and to question those new developments materializing on the ground. As explained by Urban Economists, Peter Gordon and Harry W. Richardson, spatial arrangements of urban form matter because it hints to patterns of economic growth.8 In reference to Marx, David Harvey conceptualizes the dynamics behind urban-restructuring as one that favours the built environment because it secures investment for profit and ‘promises’ a rate of return.9 Thus, becoming a competitive city is one that is about trade-offs, which involves prioritizing physical infrastructure that are ‘secure’ assets as opposed to social infrastructure and everyday social relations. Certainly, key characteristics to ‘compete’ at a global scale involve economic and political logic that are able to restructure certain assets of a nation or a city for visibility on the world-stage. One way to do so is through a city’s ‘competitive advantage’, which, according to Economist Anwar Shaikh, proves for globalization to be working as predicted because, “[globalization] generally favors the developed over the developing and the rich over the poor.”10 This is a significant factor about “competitiveness” because it reiterates the drive for profitability –a contested structure for public institutions who are not responding to the provision of public services and building a civil society.11 Significantly so, when the Mayor of Quito claims that the city’s competitiveness must be better taken advantage of, than a critical eye can question the Mayor’s direction to develop and prioritize the tourist sector.12 Economies that desire strategies to position themselves in interconnected and competitive global markets, find ways to formulate strategies and policies to build their economic 8 Peter Gordon and Harry W. Richardson, “ Urban Structure and Economic Growth”, in Nancy Brooks, Kieran Donaghy, and Gerrit-Jann Knaap, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Urban Economic and Planning (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 98-122. 9 David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford: University Press, 2014), Chapter 10, 11 10 Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (Oxford: University Press, 2016), 495. 11 David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, No. 53 (2008), 23-40. 12 “A City on the Rise,” Interview with The Business Year and the Mayor of Quito, Mauricio Rodas Espinel https://www.thebusinessyear. com/ecuador-2014/a-city-on-the-rise/interview
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Framing Inter-Urban Competition: World-Class Inter-Urban Competition:Tourism & Branding Tourism & (re)Branding Processes Investments Surplus-Capital
Exclusionary Economic Development
Speculative Urbanization
Local Built Environment Land Buildings Infrastructure
Non-Profitable
Profitability
Non-Prioritized Areas
Prioritized Areas
Non-Commodifiable Neighborhoods & Sectors
Commodifiable Neighborhoods & Sectors
Civil Society
De-Valued Living Built Form
Phyical Assets
Tourism-based Competitiveness
urban and state entrepreneurial activities
Value of the Built Form
urban ‘restructuring’ & ‘revitalization’ projects
World-Class Tourist Destination Making
National competitiveness
Global competitiveness
Foreign Investors
Policy Reform
Institution Reform
Strategies & Processes
1.3 Inter-Urban Competitiveness: Tourism and Re-Branding Strategies in Latin America for the Global Stage There are multiple components to inter-urban competition. For the purpose of this thesis, I am concerned about the interrelations between inter-urban competition, tourism and re-
Global Positioning via international trade, finance, tourism City Branding & ‘Place-Marketing’ Arts, Culture & Heritage Strategies Investment Strategies Innovation-based Strategies Investment & Development Corporation Strategies Business-Oriented Renewal Relations b/w National & State levels of gov’t Increased Public-Private Collaboration Use of Ideas & Visions Utilizing “Windows of Opportunity”
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competitiveness. These strategies include, but are not limited to, innovation polices, image-building endeavours, place-marketing strategies and urban governance arrangements between private and public actors (PPP).13 Apart of this toolkit are the tactics and techniques of tourism that serve to promote competitiveness and opportunities for urban (re)development and urban regeneration projected, based on an urban spectacle agenda.14 Thus, tourism and branding creates certain conditions that actively undermine the inherent rights and agency of the local residents and treats their inhabited spaces as a destination, rather than living spaces of social relations. This is what Henri Lefebvre, the philosopher, sociologist, and urban theorist, calls “lived space” as “the space of the everyday activities of users” as opposed to “the abstract space of the experts (architects, urbanists, planners)”.15 It is the materiality of lived space that is absent in city maps, statistics, measurement, ideology, and capitalism. Despite more images, slogans and brands, there is a need to reframe how a commercialized tourist space intensely focusing on serialized and distracted pleasures of leisure, undermine the populations that are affected by the ‘city on the rise’. Along with other scholars who pose a critical eye towards the construct of tourism-oriented spaces in Latin American and Ecuador, I equally question how tourism, a strategy of economic development, compounds existing urban struggles of marginalization and/or restructures vulnerable districts in order to justify a ‘new’ and attractive urban economy.16
13 See Neil Brenner & Nic Theodore’s chart on the destructive and creative moments of institutional restructuring in “Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism,” Antipode (2002), 364-366. 14 Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerade ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 25. 15 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), 362 16 Rosemary Bromley, and Peter Mackie, “Displacement and the new spaces for informal trade in the Latin American city centre,” Urban Studies 46, no.7 (2009), 1485–506; Alan Middleton,“Informal Traders and Planners in the Regeneration of Historic City Centres: the Case of Quito, Ecuador,” Progress in Planning 59, no.2 (2003), 71–123; Eduardo Kingman, “Heritage, Policies of Memory and then Institutionalization of Culture,” City & Time 2, no.2 (2006):17-26.
branding strategies. After all, the pursuit of becoming a worldclass tourist destination is a strategy of urban governance to attract hyper-sources of national and foreign direct investment and able-tourists, which nonetheless guides cities to enter into competition with each other for capital investment, tourism, public funds and hosting mega-events, such as the Olympic Game, or World-Urban Forums. For instance, given the fact that Quito is to host 40,000 people for Habitat III in October 2016, which is the largest global forum on urban issues that takes place every 20 years, is one clue to frame a particular lense to understand how National and Municipal Public Authorities will utilize this mega-event as an opportunity to attain visibility on the world radar.17 Thus, to explore how tourism and re-branding processes evolve within the inter-urban competitive narrative, it is important to question the general strategy that sells cities, regions and nations for direct (often foreign) investment. By this I mean the privatization of municipal assets and public and social services for private benefits. I will take into consideration three practices in which a city and/or nation needs to embed itself in order to establish itself as a major world-class tourist destination: governmental transitional periods (i.e., windows of opportunity), material forms of new urban representations (i.e. urban regeneration projects), and city/nation branding and rebranding strategies (i.e. visionary campaigns). Specifically, how this is framed within a Latin American and/or Ecuadorian context will be discussed.
I. Governmental Transitional Periods Cities-in-transition suggests an important linkage between urban productivity, urban development, and improvements in urban living standards. It suggests hopeful optimism to new beginning for nations and cities to shift away from particular moments of crisis’ including political corruption, economic down-turns/collapse, natural disasters and/or war. Seen in this way, an inquiry on cities-in-transition is useful for analyzing the “networks of concrete becoming”, as Urbanist and Sociologist AbdouMaliq Simone reminds us, because it allows for a particular lens to enter the present and future built urban form with great suspicion.18 Specifically, it gathers insights on the kind of new political, economic and cultural forces that materialize on the ground during political moments of transition. This ‘window of opportunity’ encourages and demands new urban reforms, but 17 Greg Scruggs, “How is Quito preparing for Habitat III?” Citiscope, February 19th, 2016, http://citiscope.org//habitatIII/news/2016/02/ how-quito-preparing-habitat-iii 18 AbdouMaliiq Simone, “The Visible and Invisible: Remaking Cities in Africa, “ in Under Siege: Four African Cities: Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos (Document11_Platforrm4, 2002), 24.
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the question that remains is what are cities transitioning to and under what conditions? I am questioning how cities utilize transitional periods as a window of opportunity to pursue inter-urban competition strategies, trends, and policies. A city’s role in inter-urban competition is one that projects and valorizes restructuring for urban economic growth. However, within this trend of transition towards ‘world-class destination’ making, the built environment and physical amenities are prioritized and emphasized rather than people’s capacity or livelihood.19 While there maybe considerable physical improvements in the city, what is also equally important is how inter-urban restructuring processes impact the social welfare state. Thus, this re-creation and restructuring of urban space for economic growth is not just a technical issue, but a political process that frames what type of urban productivity is being offered and who gets to benefit. In the context of Latin America, situating a transitional period can be identified through Latin American countries associated with what has come to be known as the Pink Tide Movement. Since the late 1990s and after decades of neoliberal neglect, military governments and extreme forms of violence existed. Additionally, Latin America has been at the forefront to experiment with alternatives to neoliberalism in order to re-discover social policy and new forms of humanistic and progressive forms of governance and development strategies. The diversity of Latin America’s Pink Tide movement stems from centre-left countries of government to left-centred countries on the political spectrum. For example, Peru, Brazil and Argentina are centre-left tide whereas countries like Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador are part of the current left-wing political tide. What is most significant within this transitional spectrum of a new political era calling for an anti-neoliberal platform are the contradictions that arise when Latin American Countries began to create new national projects to embrace the vision of a 21st Century Socialism.20 Social forms of human-driven development become constrained within a capitalist agenda, which inhibits its enactment, and serves to strengthen the state by camouflaging certain controversial urban development projects at the expense of existing local settlements, cultures and ecologies.21 This is the art of governance that Latin American scholar, Fernando 19 Ananya Roy, “Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association, 71, no.2 (2005): 151. 20 Marc Becker, “The Stormy Relations between Rafael Correa and Social Movements in Ecuador,” Latin American Perspectives 40, no. 3(2013):43-62. 21 Steve Ellner, “Introduction: Complexities of the Twenty-First-Century Radical Left in Power” & Roger Burbach, “The Radical Left’s Turbulent Transitions: An Overview” in Latin America’s Radical Left, Challenges and Complexities of Political Power in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Steve Ellner (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
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Ignacio Leiva, raises a number of urgent questions regarding Latin America’s promising economic growth, social equity, and political democracy stemming from the Pink Tide Movement.22 This question is tied to the challenges that arise when alternative forms of development, which aim to transition away from resource-extraction, utilize other sectors, such as commerce, culture and tourism, to foster ways of urban growth and development to benefit the nation-state. This has been the case in Ecuador where the Alianza PAIS (AP) Administration in 2008 declared a new way to diversify the economy through a post-neoliberal platform based on constitutional reform, antifree trade policies and nationalization of Ecuador’s petroleum industry. One means to approach this strategy was through the tourist sector since the public authorities understood the significance of Ecuador’s natural and cultural heritage wealth-worthy of a world-class destination status. In-turn, this has become a catalyst for improving national and city images to the world by embarking on large-scale urban restructuring schemes to re-brand, modernize and sanitize specific territories deemed commodifiable. Thus, this particular need to implement a competitive and sustainable tourism sector--aimed towards inclusive and sustainable growth--should be highly contested when analyzing a political transitional-development agenda arising from progressive governments.
II. Material Forms of New Urban Representations In the writings about Spain and Latin America, scholars Michael Janoschka, Jorge Sequera, Luis Salinas bring forth a significant discussion on the gentrification processes across a variety of Latin cities.23 One way that they contest urban regeneration projects is through the lens of symbolic gentrification where the built form is transformed into spaces for entertainment and consumption for the audience of affluent users such as tourists. Moreover, this transformation creates a temporary experience for the visitor, but a permanent gesture toward urban development where Municipal resources become prioritized for sectors that cater to tourist needs and desires over the needs and demands of local residents. For example, given that the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has designated many natural and cultural heritage sites across Latin America, a strong sense of control to keep these places attractive is utilized. In fact, a 22 Fernando Ignacio Leiva, Latin American Neostructuralism:The contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 23 Michael Janoschka, Jorge Sequera, Luis Salinas, “ Gentrification in Spain and Latin America-A Critical Dialogue,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38, no.4 (2013):1234-1265.
transformation of historic regions compliments the global trend towards the transfiguration of working class areas into sites of global consumption.24 It is useful to illustrate the urban interventions that transform urban space to serve the tourist city. One question that can be raised is, how does a city and or nation find ways to position itself in global market by formulating strategies and policies that enhance their economic competitiveness? One significant tool includes place-making strategies, where governments identify, redevelop and, more times than others, exploit its place-specific assets that are considered competitive. Place specific assets become essential in interurban competition because they allow for escaping from a level in the global market. Significantly, what this demands are political operations to visiblize, provide and promote information to the public and to generate strategic alliances in order to place nation-wide tourist attractions as world-class destinations. Thus, becoming a world-class tourist destination offers the opportunity to re-write previously negative connotations that a city or nation might have had through its existing urban forms that can be utilized as ‘positive’ image-building assets. The vision for a world-class destination in itself is an effective driver to expose visibility in a global arena since tourism can serve as a first step towards reversing negative stereotypes. David Harvey suggests that such strategies are part of the “urban spectacle” agenda, which operate as a key means for an urban territory to position itself as a competitor via spatial measures.25 This tangible, material base for the reformation of the city, such as re-developments, new developments, and commercial upgrading, serves as an essential platform for understanding the political and economic logic that prioritizes spaces of entertainment and consumption. In fact, tourism and cultural development strategies requires massive global investments and are induced over a long period of time for the building of infrastructure to support tourist related activities, ranging from safety and security to large-scale developments, such as airports and hotels. As proposed by Janoschka et al., these are some of the mechanisms that cities utilize to channel urban makeovers into a play land for tourists and investors, which excludes long-established residents and can lead to extensive displacement.26 The manner in which a city and/or nation re-structures its economic resources towards activities based on profit and speculation for people, such as tourists and/or investors, ought to 24 David Harvey, “ Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism,” Human Geography 71, no.1 (1989): 3-17. 25 Ibid., 9. 26 Janoschka., et al. 1234-1265.
be problematized. Problematized in the fact that this strategy is used to accelerate economic growth and reinforces the structures and power relations that already compound unjust inequalities. Thus, a city that anchors itself to the world-class destination trend and works to position itself competitively in the global context is emblematic of a slow violence that disembeds the local population people from their everyday lives. Significantly, the “official urban politics” denies many urban residents from being apart of new reconstructions of material and social environments and in the end, denies them as out of place in the contours of this new, cleaner, “better” and more “modern” urban environment.27 As a result, processes of uneven development are at work, including under-investment, neglected services, and urban degradation, as public authorities search for profit niches, such as the amenities embedded in a tourist zone. Thus, an investigation of tourism related ‘urbanregeneration’, ‘urban restructuring’, and ‘urban aestheticization ’ plans and strategies is needed to frame how left-leaning politics and the promises to achieve an ideological platform associated with “21st Century Socialism” in Latin America becomes constrained when operationalized in a capitalist mindset to cater to global interests.
III. City and/or Nation Branding and Rebranding Strategies When a city/or nation has the desire to achieve a world-class tourist destination status, it opens up the opportunity to engage in campaigns of city and nation branding or rebranding strategies. The process of becoming a world-class destination awards cities with image-making strategies, which is a key mechanism for fostering “newness” on an international stage. After all, “to compete successfully in a cacophony of rival international destinations and entertainment facilities requires a distinctive local profile.”28 Under such conditions, it then becomes important to identify the rise of urban entrepreneurialism where authorities have sought to become an active promoter and managers of urban development. Significantly, in the backstage of this imagemaking production are the economic strategies that are inherently tied to on-the-ground social realities and everyday experiences of the city. In fact, the selling of ‘newness’ via campaigns and billboards also transforms a city by displacement and regulates the conduct of unwanted citizens, which targets people and places that are deemed to tarnish the new perception. hus, this drives 27 Keller Easterling, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerade ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). 28 Gordon Waitt, “Urban Festivals: Geographies of Hype, Helplessness and Hope,” Geography Compass 2, no. 2 (2008): 513-37.
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In the backstage of this image-making production are the economic strategies that are inherently tied to on-the-ground social realities and everyday experiences of the city.
Image: Left, Google Image Matrix when “ Quito AND Tourism” are typed in the search bar. Right, Google image matrix when “Ecuador AND tourism” are typed in the search bar. Source: Google Images
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a paradox between who the branding and/or the rebranding of a country’s newness is for--an international tourism audience or the city dweller’s? If we are to understand how the selling of the urban helps to de-politicise the city, then, a revised conceptualization of the political economy of place must beadopted.29 Branding a cityscape with iconographic architecture, unique historical features and attractive natural features often freezes the politics that hide the prevalent power dynamics inserted within that image of the campaigns. Thus, branding and rebranding campaigns, whether in the media or on billboards in the cityscapes, offers insights towards an understanding of the mechanisms that co-construct the relationship between space, power and social justice in the practice of selling places as world-class destinations.30 To become aware of such a spectral vision in an urban context, it is interesting to look for the new campaigns and billboards that announce the new city or nation geared towards the tourist or investor audience; they show the representation of soon-to-be constructions such as five star hotels, conference centers, skyscrapers, etc.31 How billboards announce the construction of hotels and luxury housings is emblematic of a highly speculative future that bears weight over any opportunities needed to build local capacity and livelihood. Significantly, it is the unforeseeable consequences embedded in the making of a world-class tourist destination that unlike building of the welfarestate, it targets the elevated standards of international viewers and consumers. By catering its urban development towards the creation of tourist-oriented spaces, both Quito and Ecuador are using the inter-urban competitiveness strategies of tourism and branding to meet the needs of temporary visitors, while redefining its cultural heritage by delegitimizing the history and struggle of its urban poor and working-class population. Thus, remaining questions to be explored when analyzing their image-based campaigns are, “whose image is being represented, whose image is being denied and which sectors and/or services of the city, region and/or nation are being promoted and prioritized over others”? From above, it is as much about image making as about political and economic restructuring; in fact, it characterizes the power that is needed to restructure the urban landscape to cater to an attractive image worthy for the international stage. As investigated in New York’s rebranding and redevelopment
strategies in the era of Mayor Bloomberg by urban and cultural sociologist Miriam Greenberg, the branding/re-branding of a city is a massive operation when cities and or nations reimagine changing their representation.32 According to Greenberg, it’s not only about image making and campaigns and campaign launching and logos, but also new forms of governmental commodification that begin at the institutional level and trickle down and impact the neighbourhood scale.
29 Tim Hall and Phil Hubbard, “The Entrepreneurial City: New Urban Politics, New Urban Geographies,” Progress in Human Geography 20, no.2 (1996): 153-74. 30 Filip de Boek, “Inhabiting Ocular Ground: Kinshasa’s Future in the Light of Congo’s Spectral Urban Politics,” Cultural Anthropology 26, no.2 (2011): 263-286 31 Ibid.
32 Miriam Greenberg, “Branding, Crisis, Utopia: Representing New York in the Age of Bloomberg,” in Blowing Up the Brand, ed. Melissa Aronczyk and Devon Powers ( New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010), 115-144. 33 “Fostering Sustainable Tourism in Latin America,” Inter-American Development Bank, http://goo.gl/LNwPyh 34 Ibid.
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1.4. Identifying ‘Competitiveness’: Ecuador Among Other WorldClass Tourist Destinations in Latin America It is no secret that Latin American destinations are popular sites for tourism, but what this popular perception demands is a critical eye. Reviewing recent statements, statistics and reports put forth by related institutions, organizations such as the World Bank ,the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Inter American Development Bank (IDB), among others, is one way to challenge what is at stake when nations and/or cities are encouraged to pursue economic restructuring processes for the sake of being interconnected and competitive in the global market. The IDB has been a very strategic partner of Latin American and the Caribbean for the development of ‘sustainable tourism’ through financial and technical support and claims that “[their] member countries offer more competitive tourism routes in international markets.”33 Tourism projects supported by the IDB include upgraded and expanded airports, built or rehabilitated highways, conservation work on cultural heritage sites and efforts to conserve protected areas.34 In addition, the World Bank has recently claimed that Latin American cities are among the world’s most competitive locations as they have been able to ‘swiftly adapt’ to diversify into new sources of growth; thereby exploiting its natural advantages of location, environment, political stability and democratic traditions. Thus, in the context of the urban political economy that works to redefine city and nation through tourism, addresses a broader spectrum of political acts from imaging to gentrification to social coercion. One point of departure is to briefly investigate other Latin
American cities that utilize the world-class tourist destination rhetoric in order to contextualize Latin American inter-urban competitiveness. Situating this short analysis in the present era, a few cities to consider are Medellin, Rio de Janeiro, Lima, and Buenos Aires because of their governmental acts and policies that have taken tourism development and branding strategies very seriously as a means of economic growth. Doing so, sets up a particular geo-political context to frame the world-class tourist logic in Quito, Ecuador as it is a capital-city and a nation embedded in highly competitive “destination” regional forces. Fundamentally, this also encapsulates a common local-regional concern for urban social justice struggles.
Medellin, Columbia For instance, in recent years, the city of Medellin, Columbia has been bathing in a new wave of media attention that’s been shining a ‘positive’ light on a country that, according to Time Magazine, went “from nearly failed state to emerging global player - in less than a decade.”35 In 2013, Medellin was also named the most “Innovative City of the Year“ by the Wall Street Journal, Citibank and the Urban Land Institute based on its economy, urban development, culture/livability, technology and research, among other measures.36 Known by Colombians as ‘The City of the Eternal Spring,’ Medellín was chosen for its progress, potential, “rich culture and impressive strides in urban development” in spite of a past of violence fueled by drug lord Pablo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel. However, the idea of the success of the city that claims to bring its residents together to assure opportunities for all, is one that deserves to be questioned. In fact, historian Forrest Hylton provides a much more critical and provocative perspective towards Medellin’s makeover: “the democracy that Medellin’s neoliberal plastic surgery allows is a “weak” or “thin” citizenship, based largely on North Atlantic models of consumerism and electoral politics.”37 Thus, a few big questions can be raised: Who exactly is an “innovation” campaign for? What is being valued here? What idea of the nation do they privilege?
35 Tim Padgett and John Otis, “The Columbina Comeback- From Nearly Failed state to emerging global player--in less than a decade,” Time Magazine, April 23rd, 2012, http://goo.gl/3u3qp7 36 Carolina Moreno,“Medellin, Colombia Names ‘Innovative City of The Year’ In WSJ And Citi Global Compeittion,” Huffpost Latino Voices, March 2nd, 2013, http://goo.gl/Ik0tdN 37 Forrest Hylton “ “Extreme Makeover”: Medellin in the New Millennium” in Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism Evil Paradises, ed. Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (New York: The New Press, 2007):152163.
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Another Latin American city to briefly highlight is Rio de Janeiro. Within Rio’s recent context of hosting mega-events, including the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the upcoming Summer Olympics, it is no surprise that Brazil continues to draw in tourists through arguably stereotypical images of samba, sun, sea, and soccer. In fact, the Olympics was heralded as Brazil’s moment to gain reputation and influence beyond Carnival and the soccer pitch. For instance, the 2009 “Promise of Rio” promotional video represents a “new Rio”, which is emblematic and symptomatic of a “New Brazil.”38 A few years later this was followed by another mega tourism campaign for the promotion of the country as a tourist destination. “The world meets in Brazil. Come celebrate life.” This is the theme of the new international campaign for the promotion of Brazil abroad launched by President Rousseff in the summer of 2012. However, what needs to be acknowledged is how city marketing and image making continue to show the international, friendly competition as a masquerade that hides the prevalent power dynamics that govern the productions of drastically revamping nation perceptions. In the case of Rio, one can ask how the selling of nation and a city to the global stage, especially under pressures of mega-event hosting, will turn them into tourist traps and business ventures where the only way the Western world is encouraged to relate to these countries is through a process of exotification and commodification. Geographer Christopher Gaffney, offers a more critical perspective on the beautification and aesthetization efforts of Rio. From his perspective, the Olympic process in Rio performs as a catalyst for improving Brazil’s and Rio’s image to the world by embarking on a large-scale urban restructuring scheme to modernize and sanitize the city.39 Thus, with growing competition for the attraction of visitors, the tactful process of camouflaging what would ultimately tarnish Rio’s international image is pursued. Significantly, this is the unjust procedure and practice of selling places in a developing economy.40
38 Rio Olímpico 2016, “Rio 2016 - Passion UNITY Celebration [HD],” YouTube, October 07, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xucJTdUTMzA. 39 Christopher Gaffney, “Mega-events and Socio-spatial Dynamics in Rio De Janeiro, 1919-2016,” Journal of Latin American Geography, 9, no.1 (2010):7-29. 40 Anne-Marie Broudehoux, “Image-Making, City-Marketing, and the Aesthetization of Inequality in Rio De Janeiro,” in Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism, ed. Nezar AlSayyad ( London: Routledge, 2001):273-297.
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Lima, Peru Furthermore, to briefly examine Latin America’s 3rd largest country, Peru, and its competitiveness, is to look to at the capital city of Lima, which is often referred to as the “City of Kings” or the “Gastronomy Capital” of Latin American for its multi-faceted array of Peruvian cuisine. While most tourists come to Peru to see Machu Picchu or other Inca ruins, it is equally as important to see additional competitive ways that put Peru’s places on the map in ‘attractive’ ways. Even with a recent headline that announced “international chain to open 7 hotels in Peru before 2018” is a clue to the kind of neoliberal, privatization strategies ahead.41 This trajectory of infrastructure construction, along with the construction of Lima’s Jorge Chavez International Airport’s second runway that will cost US$1.2 billion, are structural upgrades to prepare the city and the county for a predicted increase in tourism.42 The municipality of Lima is also considering redeveloping its city centre for a “gastronomy boulevard” via a ‘recovery zone plan’ to create an attractive pedestrianized public space for tourists.43 However, as visionary plans set the stage for a ‘new’ district, an urban image that, “[reflects] Disney World values of cleanliness, security, and visual coherence” is one to be questioned for how it caters to include or not long term residents.44 In fact, it is the power of selling ‘newness’ that sets visual and spatial strategies of who belongs where and under what conditions. Moreover, what is promoted and valued and what is left as ‘insignificant’ in the workings of the government and their image-making plans ought to be scrutinized.
41 “International chain to open 7 hotels in Peru before 2018,” Andina Agencia Peruana de Noticias, March 1, 2016, http://goo.gl/mCzvKk 42 “Lima airport new runway to cost US$1.2 billion.” Andina Agencia Peruana de Noticias, March 24, 2016, http://goo.gl/9Q6B65 43 “Centro de Lima podria tener un bulevar gastronomico en 2016,” El Comercio, Nov.3, 2014. http://goo.gl/hQWIDK 44 Sharon Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 67
Buenos Aires, Argentina Finally, another significant city in Latin America that has mastered the craft of ‘selling’ place for the global stage is Buenos Aires in Argentina. As a country driven by the vision of becoming South America’s number one destination because of its enviable natural and cultural resources, including its nine UNESCO World Heritage Sites, tourism has been one of the nation’s drivers of economic growth and development. Together with Brazil, Argentina leads the ranking of international arrival and total tourist spending in the Latin American region.45 In 2010 an investment of US$500 million dollars was confirmed for international event organization and an significant portion of funds were dedicated to luxury hotels. Supporting this vision is the National Institute of Tourism Promotion (INPROTUR). They are responsible for implementing Argentina’s International Tourism Marketing Strategic Plan that promotes Argentina as a tourist destination. Such tourist-oriented macro-restructuring policies are evident within Buenos Aires’ urban heritage district in the city centre. However, this ongoing battle between the public and the authorities about the struggle to preserve its architectural and physical history, as some of its famous buildings and infrastructure crumble, is overrun by municipal investment that favour municipal expenditure in ‘newer’ districts, such as Puerto Madero, in order to create new urban forms for economic activity. However, this is not to underestimate the importance of municipal investment in city centres to support urban economic growth, but to consider whether development oriented towards building Argentina and Buenos Aires, as a world-class destination, is consistent with just and long term development plans that leaves no people and space behind.
45 National Insitute of Tourism Promotion and Ministry of Tourism, “Argentina Land of of Opportunities,” http://goo.gl/ke49Pp
How the local operates in response (and resistance) to the global tourist imagery serves to shed-light upon the invisible displacement and social exclusion of marginalized communities and the multiple cultures and identities engrained in everyday life itself.
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Conclusion Although, this contextual discussion on tourism in Latin America is brief, it assists in framing certain tourism development and branding strategies as practices that put such cities and nation in competition with one another, which creates certain conditions for the privatization of social welfare. In this context, it is one way to frame the external pressures that drive Ecuador’s competitive processes with it’s own South American neighbors, whom are also using municipal and state finances for grand visions of global attraction even though the social inequalities that are inscribed in these cities landscape is visible among everyday life. What will follow this macro-framing of inter-urban competition vis-a-vis tourism and branding is a close analysis of how Quito, Ecuador became situated within this competitive lens. More closely, it will illuminate how certain macro visions translate to the level of the city and to local neighborhood sites via Quito’s large traditional food markets, which serve as an impetus to critically trace the relationship between global capital flows and local struggles for political recognition and political voice. Significantly, the struggles of the markets to resist the pressures of competitive urban development is emblematic of many struggles in cities all over the world.
Image: #Votaporecuador, Campaign to nominate Ecuador as the best destination in South American for 2016 Source: http://www.worldtravelawards.com/vote Image: Below, street vendors outside of Mercado San Roque, Quito, Ecuador Source: Photograph by author
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SECTION 2 Quito and Ecuador: (Re)Building and (Re) Branding a ‘New’ City and a ‘New’ Nation 2.1 Introduction: Tourism, Buen Vivir, and a New National Project Since the rise of Rafael Correa and the Alianza PAIS (AP) Movement coming into power at the end of 2007, it is one time frame to situate the nation’s more recent intense tourism and re-branding political efforts. Significantly, prior to Correa, Ecuador was defined by its political and economic instability, and seven presidents forced out of office in a decade. Thus, it was important for the AP administration to dominate Ecuadorian politics with visions and goals oriented towards building a strong, independent, democratic socialist state in order to move away from the country’s export-oriented economy. One way forward, according to the AP political movement, was through developing a strong nation-wide tourism sector. However, as the process began to unfold in a capitalist context, preparations for worldclass tourist destination sites fundamentally began to prioritize capital accumulation over the interests of citizens demanding alternative models of development. Thus, this begs a need to bring awareness to a situation that ultimately accentuated ways in which citizen welfare was being shelved as a consequence of the prioritization and facilitation of tourism itself. From this perspective, it can be understood that new forms of capital, power and politics were harnessed in order to sell Ecuador as a newly left progressive nation. However, this process of selling a place becomes inscribed in a global competitive market as the AP administration began to rebuild the nation’s economy via new visions, plans and strategies through Ecuador’s Citizens Revolution (La Revolución Ciudadana)--the organizing principle to brand the “new” Ecuador.1 This proposed national project, beginning in 2008, embraced the vision of a 21st Century Socialism model - following the Bolivarian project of Venezuela - which was reflected in the enactment of Ecuador’s new, 2008 Buen Vivir constitution as well. Importantly, the 1 Marc Becker, “The Stormy Relations between Rafael Correa and Social Movements in Ecuador,” Latin American Perspectives, 40, 3 (2013): 43-62; Alejandra Santillana Ortiz and Jeffrey R. Webber, “Cracks in Correísmo?” Jacobin, August 14th, 2015, https://www.jacobinmag. com/2015/08/correa-ecuador-pink-tide-protests-general-strike/
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constitution follows an indigenous conception of Sumak Kawsay, “living well”, and forms the foundation for a new nationwide ideological development framework, which is based on ‘alternative’ and ‘sustainable’ models of generating productivity beyond natural resource extraction.2 Back then, the Minister of Tourism, Vinicio Alvarado, stated that Ecuador’s tourism sector would be key to implementing this change.3 Buen Vivir aims to negate and re-signify the traditional models of development by including strong notions of cultural and ecological consciousness, such as the concept of “rights to nature”, which states that the living forests, mountains, rivers and seas are legal subjects, and the “the right to a dignified city” as recognized in Article 31, which states that people can exercise their full enjoyment within the city while respecting the diversity of Ecuador’s cultures.4 Further, Article 281 of the Constitution distinctly states food sovereignty as one specific objective of the government: “ food sovereignty is a strategic objective and an obligation of the state that persons, communities, peoples and nations achieve self-sufficiency with respect to healthy and culturally appropriate food on a permanent basis.”5 Taken together, Ecuador’s Constitution is comprised of a very unique rhetoric that does not exist in other many other countries around the world. According to executive director of the Institute of Ecuadorian Studies in Quito, Ecuador, Alejandra Santillana, who is also member of the Feminist Collective Las Lorenzas, she marked that the new Constitution truly did reflect the dynamics of the time and a true image that characterised Ecuador’s historical struggles.6 Overall, the constitution gained widespread enthusiasm across the country. The process of re-defining Ecuador’s newness towards a new political and economical agenda served to concentrate political power. The re-branding of a nation centered on ideologies of Buen Vivir ultimately restructured the nation’s political-economy towards capitalist modernization projects via matters of negotiation, compromising and adaption.7 After all, Ecuador has recently made some important gains in its tourism 2 Sara A. Radcliffe, “ Development for a post neoliberal era? Sumak kawsay, living well and the limits of decolonisation in Ecuador,” Geoforum, 43 (2012): 240-249; Catherine Walsh, “Development as Buen Vivir: Institutional arrangements and de(colonial) entanglements,” Development, 53, no. 1 (2010): 15-21. 3 “Ecuador Tourism Promotion Copes with Lower Budget,” Tourism Review, April 4th, 2016, http://goo.gl/6yzste 4 “Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador,” Georgetown University Political Database of the America, October 20th, 2008, http://pdba. georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html 5 Ibid. 6 Alejandra Santillana, interview by author, Quito, Ecuador, January 13th 2016. 7 Raul Zibechi,”Ecuador: A Prolonged Instability,” in Territories in Resistance A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements, translated by Ramor Ryan (Oakland: AK Press, 2012):179-186
Calling attention to the visual conditions that sell a nation to the global stage serves to question the values and identities grounded in the coerciveness of world-class destination imaginaries.
industry. For example, the capital city of Quito received the top prize in the 2015 World Travel Awards as ‘South America’s Leading Green Destination’, and was recommended by the New York Times as one of its “52 Places to Go in 2014.”8USA Today Travel chose the Galapagos Islands as its number one place to visit, and the city of Cuenca was recognized as “the best city in the world to retire” by International Living.9 If President Correa continues to highlight the qualities that make Ecuador an ideal place to invest, then, I challenge the notion of selling Ecuador as a world-class tourist destination that turns everyday life into a spectacle, performed by (often marginalized) working-class population locals merely for the benefit of tourists.10 As the AP government works to provide tourists with what they seek-security, quality service, and an attractive environmentit is a symbolic gesture that binds public authorities to the service of private capital, rather than to the provision of public services and the protection and building upon constitutional rights. Thus, present day social movements in Ecuador are revealing the realities attached to the rhetoric of the constitution and are claiming that the AP Administration is failing to deliver on promises of social programmes and income equality.11 Thus, Ecuador’s current model of governance and progressive development strategies forms a particular tension with the rhetoric of the left-government. Seen through this lens, the new national project of Ecuador 8 World Travel Awards, http://goo.gl/ahLVSY; “52 Places to go in 2014,” New York Times, Septemeber 5, 2014, http://goo.gl/aTuI8p 9 “Why Cuenca is the best city in the world to retire in,” International Living, http://goo.gl/LpQ8LN; Nancy Trejos, “Travel in 2016: Hot destinations, top trends,” USA Today, January 4th, 2016,http://goo.gl/OAgrso 10 “Las Olas meets with Ecuador President Rafael Correa to discuss its investment in Ecuador and Ecuador’s future plans to grow Tourism and expand the Ecuador Economy,” Las Olas, December 8, 2014, http://goo. gl/QYl06Y 11 Alejandra Santillana & Jeffrey Webber “Cracks in Correismo,” Jacobin, August 14th, 2015, https://goo.gl/2LBc24; Alejandra Santillana, interview by author, Quito, Ecuador, January 13th 2016.
is not just about appealing to a new international class of tourists, or the people of Ecuador’s social movements that drove the making of the Buen Vivir Constitution. It is fundamentally about the restructuring of the political-economy and governance; especially towards the restructuring of the nation-state towards private sector models of development. Inevitably, this drives a paradox between who the future of Ecuador’s promising vision of ‘good living’ is for: an international tourism audience or the city dweller’s.
2.2 Promoting Inter-Urban Competition Through Tourism and Branding: National Strategies, Trends Policies, and Plans The composition of tourism investment in Ecuador is highlighted in key national planning and strategy documents. It is emphasized as a strategic sector that can contribute towards a “sustained economic growth” because it is an industry that can develop very quickly over time if a territory already has existing unique cultural assets that can be capitalized on. Of importance, tourism is an industry that demonstrates clear and concrete changes of the material reality and brings forth strong implications to the changes of everyday lives. Thus, to investigate such material consequences hit-the-ground, I ask, how have official authorities, from UNESCO to the AP Administration to the Ministry of Tourism to the level of the municipality government, created immediate transformations to establish Quito and Ecuador as a world-class tourist destination? What follows is a brush of the ‘invisible forces’ of macro government plans, policies, budgets, tactics, and events in order to demonstrate how certain large macroeconomic visions and decisions are affecting the lives of everyday Ecuadorian people.
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A. National Branding Ecuador’s first official tourism brand, Ama La Vida, was unveiled in 2010 by the Ministry of Tourism. It has been used in international tourism advertisements and also to identify products made in the country. However, Ama La Vida is now a general national brand and has been replaced with a new tourist campaign called #Allyouneedisecuador, which was launched in March 2014. This can been observed as a response by the Ecuadorian government to take tourism development very seriously; the state administration quadrupled its budget since 2012 in order to reach international audiences through multiple media platforms. In 2012, the budget for the Ministry of Tourism was US$40 million, but starting in 2013 and until 2017, the national budget has been raised to US$150 million per year.12 However, this is also about the powerful role of appearance that because within the Ecuador’s global slogan, “Feel Again”, it aestheticizes, alters and distance the global perception of multiplicities in everyday life. Inherently, the visibility of these images launched for a global audience is connected to “the intersection of power with visual presentation” in the national imaginary of Ecuador.13 The All You Need is Ecuador campaign is part of an ambitious government strategy to diversify the Ecuadorian economy and place tourism at the heart of a long-term plan to transition away from oil-based dominance.14 Thus, with a state aim to double tourism growth from the United States in the next 5 years and expand its current 1.4 million international tourist base, the concentration of political power, capital and institutions will conceptually cater to this goal. Due to this, world-class-led development model re-orients government towards private sector models of development and spurs economically competitive urban makeovers to improve international linkages into the international circuits of capital flows and tourism.
B. National Plan(s) for el Buen Vivir Following the Buen Vivir Constitutional mandate and the right of citizens to build a system of food sovereignty, the government engaged in a planning process to write a national development plan for four years (2009–2013). The National Plan for Good Living (Plan Nacional para el Buen Vivir 20092013) was passed on November 5th, 2009 by the National Secretary of Planning and Development (SENPLADES) with the objective to outline strategic policy goals established by the new
12 “Ecuador is Serious about betting on tourism development and quadrupled the budget for that Industry,” Andes Agencia Publica de Noticias del Ecuador y Suramerica, Sept.19th, 2013, http://goo.gl/7ttOd8 13 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “ The Subject of Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 2002). 14 “Feel Again Project Documentary,” Youtube, January 6th, 2016 https://goo.gl/Udg0hD
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constitution.15 Highlighted in this new government strategy is the move towards a service economy, which includes the importance of the tourism sector. In fact, Ecuador’s national tourism push is further supported within SENPLADE’s next National Plan for Good Living for 2013-2017 where tourism is defined as a “productive structure and strategic sector”with great economic potential.16 Such terminology ultimately symbolically prepares Ecuador’s territories for the growing tourism sector. Some scholars argue that the broad use of the concept of Buen Vivir has come to “sustain post-colonial condition of development” and works as a “discursive tool” that caters to the strengthening of the State and its structures.17 Thus, unlike the building of Buen Vivir ideology for alternative development strategies, the Correa Era can be understood as a period of government commodification since the AP government has committed themselves to investing in the promotion of tourism as a strategic sector for economic growth.18 If US$110 million is the total public spending by the national tourist sector,19 then how the Ecuadorian Government utilizes “Good Living” thoughtfulness within a sector that fosters commodification, should be more publically scrutinized by Ecuadorian policy makers.
C. Change of the Production Matrix As the tourism sector continues to be one of Ecuador’s most important sectors, it also brings immediate and visible representation to everyday life. This is documented in yet another nation-wide alternative economic development model, called the Change of the Production Matrix, where the country’s nation-wide tourists assets would be ‘key’ to new economic development plans. Led by the AP Administration since the presidency of Correa in 2007, the Change of the Production Matrix seeks to re-engineer the structure of the Ecuadorian by restricting imports and decreasing the dependency on the extraction of raw materials to finance the state budget. The key industries that the Correa Administration is investing in to achieve the change in the Ecuadorian production are refineries, petrochemicals, assembly of cars, bio-knowledge, hydroelectric 15 The Republic of Ecuador, “National Plan for Good Living, 2009-2013, Building a Plurinational and Intercultural State,” National Secretariat of Planning and Development (SENPLADES), 2010, http:// www.planificacion.gob.ec/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2016/03/PlanNacional-Buen-Vivir-2009-2013-Ingles.pdf 16 The Republic of Ecuador, “National Development Plan/National Plan for Good Living, 2013-2017,” National Secretariat of Planning and Development (SENPLADES), 106. 17 Radcliffe, 2012; Walsh, 2010 18 Charles Landry, Richard Florida are two key promoters for the “creative-city” and both argue that culture is an important economic driver for cities to attain a “competitive” status 19 Ministerio de Finanzas,“Justificativo Proforma Presupuesto General Del Estado 2015,” November 2014, 34, http://goo.gl/n5eZph
dams and tourism.20 What is most significant about analyzing the non-energy sector associated with the Change of the Production Matrix, is the logic from political elites that see tourism as the country’s best renewable resource.21 Since 2007, the Ecuadorian government has been looking for ways to use its commodity resources, such as the country’s natural and cultural heritage assets, to end its struggling dependency on oil. More over, the Ecuadorian government is working even more creatively to promote tourism in light of the global decrease in oil prices since the country is currently functioning within a rapidly different economic environment compared to 2013. Thus, since Ecuador’s oil revenues were no longer able to fund alternative and diverse production means, an intense tourism promotion provided a visible perception to camouflage a ‘boost’ of the country’s economic growth. After all, the celebration of a country’s spectacle imagery is one way to mask the economic down-turns and decrease investments in public services and sectors affecting everyday life.
D. International Partnerships for Cultural and Heritage Development Plans In partnership with United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the Correa administration invested US$250 million in cultural asset development to invest in the relationship between the country’s national heritage and sustainable development to “reduce poverty”.22 The goal is to calculate the revenue contribution that cultural tourism has towards the national economy and its impact on creating jobs and economic development. In fact, UNESCO & the United Nations Development Programme, whom are both part of the institutional family of the World Bank, refers to the success of cultural development when it has a ‘transformational impact’ to attract consumers, entrepreneurship and business development to name a few.23 Moreover, utilizing Ecuador’s strong cultural and natural heritage to attract international attention, ultimately inserts
global processes of commodification for funding and marketing. The World Bank calls this the “Economics of Uniqueness”, which aids in an urban boost of development schemes and contributions to a city’s service economy.24 It can also be argued that the symbolic appropriation of Ecuador’s cultural heritage is transforming the commercial landscape of cities by utilizing exclusionary policies to prioritize sites that cater to the global tourist agenda. This is also emblematic of a global trend targeting Latin American heritage cities to turn them into destinations for tourism.25 Significantly so, this process is symbolic as to which kind of model of economic accumulation Ecuador’s Alianza PAIS Administration is favoring to boost the national economy. This includes sites where capital can be accumulated, rather than sites of non- accumulation value, such as public services and non-institutionalized cultural sites of everyday social exchange. This further reinstates the power of a value system dictated by heritage and the role of tourismled gentrification in Ecuador and Latin America that favors and caters to a population far beyond local inhabitants, their needs and everyday citizen demands.26
2.3 Promoting Inter-Urban Competition Through Tourism and Branding: Municipal Strategies, Trends, Policies, and Plans and Everyday Life If Quito Turismo, the municipal public company that manages the municipal tourism budget and coordinates tourism strategies, designates Quito as “a tourism oriented city”, “a city for investment” and “a competitive city”, an understanding of how this operates at the city level is needed to assess how this form of economic development impacts the inequality of local residents.27 For instance, a recent article by USA Today states “[Quito’s] government has made efforts to boost tourism by redeveloping blighted areas into commercial districts and
Ecuador and its attractive natural and cultural territories into 20 Vice Presidencia de la Republica del Ecuador, “Estrategia Nacional Para el Cambio de La Matriz Productiva,” March 2015. 21 Latin American Trade & Investment Associatio, “Doing Business in Ecuador,” http://www.latia.org/doing-business-in-ecuador. 22 “The Republic of Ecuador; a comprehensive strategy for sustainable development and economic growth,” Foreign Policy News, August, 23, 2015, http://goo.gl/DFVbZp 23 UNESCO & United Nations Development Programme, “ Creative Economy Report 2013 Special Edition: Widening Local Development Pathways,” (New York: United National Development Programme, 2013), 138.
24 The World Bank, “ The Economics of Uniqueness Investing in Historic City Cores and Cultural Heritage Assets for Sustainable Development,” ed., Guido Licciardi and Rana Amirtahmasebi, (2009), 125. 25 Rosemary Bromley, and Peter Mackie,“Displacement and the new spaces for informal trade in the Latin American city centre,” Urban Studies 46, no.7 (2009), 1485–506. 26 Alan Middleton, “Informal traders and planners in the regeneration of historic city centres: the case of Quito, Ecuador,” Progress in Planning, 59,2 (2003): 71-123 27 Quito Turismo, “Quito Investment Destination,” https://issuu.com/ quito_turismo/docs/nyu
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Image: Above, Ecuador’s Feel Again Campaign Source: ElCiudadano.gob.ec Image: Below, branding campaigns for Ecuador #Allyouneedisecuador & Ecuador Ama La Vida (trans. Ecuador Loves Life) Source: “All you need is Ecuador #AllYouNeedIsEcuador Campaña publicitaria del Ministerio de Turismo,” https://goo.gl/7IZNjz
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Image: August 13th, 2015 Indigenous march and people’s strike in the streets of Quito Source: Top left image retrieved from Jacobin https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/08/correa-pink-tidegramsci-peoples-march/ Source: All other images by author, Quito, Ecuador, August 13th, 2016
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increasing security in high trafficked areas.”28 This media statement is undoubtedly controversial. For example, the “blight” designation comes from an external, global media perception, which affects the lives of everyday people living within this label. This drive for an extensive revitalization of Quito for the achievement of a new local, national and global appearance is ultimately led by the visions and decisions of city officials, developed at the national level by the AP Administration, and influenced by global trends of tourism for economic development purposes. This intention is ultimately enhanced at the municipal level and is outlined in several recent metropolitan planning documents, strategies and objectives to sell Quito as a productive business fabric with a strong cultural and natural heritage. From this perspective, the re-imaging of Quito can be analyzed by looking at which sectors become prioritized for revitalization programs, development and redevelopment plans and which sectors remain in the background and experience devalorization, disinvestment or displacement. What follows is a sampling of tourism-encouraged development plans that promote the city of Quito to grow in a way that caters to large-private development and foreign needs (investors and tourists), which consciously or unconsciously fosters exclusionary policies and civic fragmentation.
A. Making a Capital City a World Class Tourist Destination Based on the political prediction that one million tourists will visit Quito by 2018, and with mega-events luring on the horizon such as the World Urban Forum UN Habitat III conference in October 2016, it is no surprise that Mayor Rodas is preparing to capitalize on Quito’s culture and colonial character of the city.29 For instance, how Quito will develop according to its productivity in sectors of tourism, business and commercial, is conceptualized and imagined in the “Strategic Plan for Metropolitan Development and Land Management 2015-2025” document, which is further supported by three other strategic development axes from the Mayor’s campaign to strengthen the city of Quito: 1) Quito: Intelligent People City, 2) Quito: City of Opportunities, 3) Quito: Solidarity City.30 The approval of these Municipal planning instruments serves to visualize the projected city and its transformations through the implementation of various municipal projects in coordination with the private 28 “Travel in 2016: Hot destinations, top trends,” , January 4th, 2016, http://goo.gl/0AFnzk 29 Quito Turismo, “Tourism in Quito increased 8.5% in 2014,” http:// goo.gl/uPfYhX 30 Alcaldía Metropolitana de Quito, “Plan Metropolitano de Desarrollo y Ordenamiento Territorio,” February 13th, 2015, http://goo.gl/8OEPN9
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sector and other government bodies. Significantly so, the tourism sector is one of the common threads in all these documents and is highlighted as an “investment attractor” in order to speculate for the prosperity of Quito’s future. Overall, these municipal documents highlight that the very identity of Quito depends on the strategic importance to the city’s relation to the nation and international scale through the attraction of natural, tourist, business, logistical and culture zones. The plan identifies “attraction zones” to demonstrate how the City envisions generating income and foreign investment in order to position the capital-city within the international tourism circuit.31 Further, in recognition of the Metropolitan Development and Land Management 2015-2025 vision, government-based investments and funds towards the designated “attraction zones”, include the UNESCO designated Centro Historico District, the redevelopment of the old city-centre airport, the development of a new airport, and renovation plans for both big urban parks and major street boulevards. For instance, the development of the old airport, the city plans to completely revitalize the 11.4 acres of land and transform it into the Conventions and Events Complex in Bicentennial Park.32 This is the city’s largest urban development project in recent years and will also include hotels and other related commercial businesses. The development of the New Quito International Airport (NAIQ) symbolically prepares Quito for the global stage as the municipality of Quito and the national government together put forth an immense effort in its construction, which began in 2006 and opened in 2013. Presently, the airport is considered to be one of the busiest in South America, bringing increased activity in the form of people, business, and opportunities. An additional US $87 Million was located for the City of Quito at the end of 2014 for new hotel investments, along with US$1.4 Billion for Quito’s first Metro Line, which is currentlybacked by the Inter-American Development Bank (US$200M), European Investment Bank (US$250M), and the World Bank (US$205M).33 More over, the Annual Operating Plan for the productive development sector of the Quito government states that the designed budget for Quito Turismo in 2015 is about US$7 Million Dollars.34 Although a small operating budget for a 31 Ibid., see section Objetivo 1.B “Mejorar el atractivo de Quito como ciudad de negocios. Se habrá fomentado el usufructo del Patrimonio Cultural y Natural del DMQ,” 104-107 32 Quito Turismo, “Quito, Capital of Tourism Investments” https://goo. gl/CqLDrB 33 “Over $87 Million in New Hotel Investment Announced for Quito, Ecuador,” Market Wired October 22nd, 2014, http://goo.gl/5l4xhV; The World Bank, “The Public Work that Will Improve the Face of th Ecuadorean Capital,”, December 6th, 2013, http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/ feature/2013/12/06/metro-de-quito 34 “Matriz Del Plan Operativo Anual-POA/Ejercicio Fiscal 2015,” Municipio del Distrito Metropolitano de Quito, Secretaria General de
Image: Quito’s UNESCO Historical District Source: Photograph by author
city, it is not surprise that the city is looking for foreign investors and international institutions to support their grandiose tourism visions to boost municipal productivity.
B. Quito’s UNESCO Historical Centre District The symbolic and substantive culture capital of Quito is vividly visible in the city’s Historical Centre District. This visibility is enacted through the ideology of cultural heritage as a strategy of economic development, which speaks to the ongoing role that public space plays in the “Latin” world as part of a global trend to target heritage cities and turn them into destinations for tourism.35 Addressing this spectacle in Quito’s historical centre is an essential step in realizing the role that urban renewal plays under the guise of urban heritage plans. As the urban anthropologist Eduardo Kingman reminds us in his work on equity, heritage, and development in the urban context, “what is at stake is something more than a mere nostalgic feeling for the past.”36 It is the impact this type of concentrated investment in the city’s prized historical core will have in the future. Overall, Planificacion 35 Michael Janoschka, Jorge Sequera, Luis Salinas, “Gentrification in Spain and Latin America– A Critical Dialogue,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, (2013): 15. 36 Eduardo Kingman Garces, “Heritage, policies of memory and the institutionalization of culture,” City & Time 2, no.1 (2006): 18
the valorization of the City’s historical centre is a measure of the exclusionary forms of economic development that prioritizes profitable urban forms, while devalorizing non-profitable and marginalized districts. Essentially, Patrimonio, the concept of heritage, is the rationale for a certain type of urban ‘conservation’ that is particularly strong in Quito. As the first UNESCO World Heritage Site (1978), the municipal and state government view a particular imaginary of the Historic Centre as a profitable impetus for tourism. The ideology behind Patrimonio is about “preserving” the character and aesthetic of the Historic Centre because it carries a certain memory that cannot be erased from history. However, this type of urban conservation is focused on physical attributes of a building, even more specifically their facades, which protects and maintains the urban character of the Centro Historico. Although Patrimonio expresses an institutionalized perspective of the importance of culture, it is also a rationale of state power for budget allocations and cultural capital investment schemes. The symbolic and substantive culture capital of Quito’s Historic Centre is exemplified in strategic mechanisms for its cultural and economic powers. For instance, the 2001 “Recovery and Rehabilitation of the Historical Centre of Quito” Program was a demonstration of the City’s commitment to the generation of income and foreign investments in order to position Quito in the international tourism circuit. However, this led to the
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relocation of some 6,000 street vendors in 2003 and reconfigured the lives of sex workers.37 In addition, with over 50% of the established cultural attractions in the Centro Historico, Ecuador`s Federal Government and the Mayor of Quito have committed to an ongoing Revitalization program for the Centro Historico.38 In the first phase, $83 million will be invested by 2017 and a total of $675 million is estimated to be invested in the project overall, with an additional support by the Inter-American Development Bank at $8 million.39 This includes a completed revitalization project to a boulevard located within the Centro Historico district boundaries called Avenue 24 de Mayo, which was funded by the Municipal and National Government and UNESCO.40 Further, the municipal government also has recently prioritized a plan to move in the embassies of several countries to the historic centre, and plans to relocate the United Nations Headquarters and the Organization of American States (OAS) Headquarters to the historic centre.41 The project has been allocated $20 million, but this budget can be scrutinized in light of the dramatic drop in the price of oil that has impacted the entire country’s 2016 deep budget cuts; hitting public services and social development projects and sectors the most.
2.4 Unforeseeable Consequences of World-Class Tourism: Processes of Devalorization & Commodification Towards Large Traditional Markets in Quito The astounding forces that contribute to Quito and Ecuador becoming a “destination”, are related to the conditions of interurban competition; a process where governmental authorities work to sell their local and nation-wide assets to the global stage for international attraction, which includes tourism and foreign investment. Thus far, this conceptualization of urban life has been essential to frame because it offers clues as to which sectors become prioritized for (re)development and which sectors, urban forms and populations remain in the background and experience 37 “Quito’s rebirth,” Inter-American Development Bank, Aug.1st, 2004, http://goo.gl/prPD5E; Sandra Alvarex and Mariana Sandoval, El Trabajo Sexual en el Centro Historico de Quito ( Quito: Metropolitan District of Quito, 2013) 38 “Plan de Revitalización del Centro Histórico de Qutio,” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5uib7jktpk 39 Inter American Development Bank, “ Quito Historic Center Rehabitliation Program Stage II,” http://idbdocs.iadb.org/wsdocs/getdocument. aspx?docnum=554236 40 International Council on Monument and Sites Advisory Mission Report on the City of Quito, Ecuador, October 2013, http://goo.gl/xPzALJ 41 El Ciudadano, “ Government is Promoting a Project to Revitalize the Historic Center of Quito,” November 23, http://goo.gl/VTLUkf
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exclusion, disinvestment, and or displacement. To see such contested macro and micro processes at play, this collective, year-long thesis project enabled a particular investigation to link how top-down inter-urban competitive strategies-based on tourism and (re)branding-produces an exclusionary city where low-income populations and marginalized districts are negatively impacted. One particular site to understand the macro, competitive, political and economic logic that works to actively undermine authentic sites of social activity and cultural and economic exchange, is through the dynamic sites of Quito’s large traditional food markets.Thus, what follows is an understanding of how the making of Quito as a world-class tourist destination creates certain conditions for the devalorization of traditional market space. This is related to the unforeseeable consequences shaping the future city and, ultimately, their future market.
Large Traditional Food Markets in Quito The characteristics of traditional food markets in Quito, Ecuador embody infrastructures of social and cultural activity and economic exchange. They foster multiple values in the form of employment for indigenous and mestizo people, as a locus of connection between rural and urban processes between the flows goods and people, and as sites that feed individual buyers and large-scale commercial buyers in order to feed the city. There are 52 markets in the Metropolitan District of Quito.Three of Quito’s large traditional food markets, Mercado San Roque, Mercado Chiriyacu/ “Camal” and Mercado Mayorista, are major wholesale markets, which supply all the other retail markets, including informal vendors.42 Specifically, a perspective on the importance of the metabolic role of the markets in the city is key to understanding the diverse conditions of Quito’s market spaces as essential urban anchors; especially when there are significant market sites that feed 34% of the city population and even supplies goods to the other wholesale markets, like Mercado San Roque.43 Additionally, it is essential to reveal the multidimensional characteristics of Quito’s traditional markets as a public body of people, interests, products, and trade. They are a direct link between town and country, a national symbol of food sovereignty, landed territories for migrants from the countryside, and sites of cultural exchange and intercultural knowledge 42 See the wordpress blog Frente de Defenza Y Modernización del Mercado de San for their quantiative and qualitative analysis on markets in Quito, https://frentemercadosanroque.wordpress.com/2014/11/24/desfile-de-los-mercados-de-la-ciudad/ 43 Ibid.
Image: Above, seafood market workers, Mercado Mayorist, Quito, Ecuador. Below, market workers, Mercado San Roque, Quito, Ecuador Source: Photographs by author, January 2016
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sharing practices. Although differences collide and competition is strong between market vendors and traders, of which who are largely mestizo, and the wage laborers, who are mostly indigenous, there is still a knowledgeable support network where indigenous solidarity and reciprocity is enacted. Therefore it is important to acknowledge that markets act as an essential social infrastructure between wage laborers, sellers and buyers within and beyond the physical infrastructure of the markets themselves. One political opinion brought forth by the Marxist Geographer David Harvey, who has spent time in certain market spaces in Quito, is to see Quito’s markets as spaces of hope.44 The markets are self-organized labor structures built upon shared networks of local-goods and customs, whom also have the capacity to neglect large authoritarian structures and global forces of tourism. In great favor of Harvey’s thought, the foundational practice of markets, as sites of diverse socialrelations, possess significant potential to oppose neoliberal economic practices and demonstrate what socially progressive politics and plurinationality actually looks like on the ground. Even Ecuador’s Minister of Culture, Ana Rodriguez, emphasizes the intrinsic cultural value of Quito’s popular markets as sites that are just as important as the UNESCO stamp even though they are not as “distinguishable” as places like Quito’s UNESCO’s Historic Centre district.45 Still, the precarious and unique spaces of Quito’s large traditional markets that mix wholesale with consumer markets functioning on a traditional trading and producing system, remain unaccredited. In fact, indistinguishable spaces are less about physical space and more about social activity and economic exchange. In accordance with the combined investigations by Anthropologist, Vyjayanthi Rao and Urban Planner and Designer, Vineet Diwadkar, on their visual and ethnographic investigations on ‘informality’, the indistinguishable characteristics of traditional market sites pertains to a certain value system unrecognized within the values of the regimes of state-government markets.46 These macro power structures predominantly respond to space that is highly visible and communicative and not towards dynamic spaces of everyday life.47 According to Architect and Urbanist, Teddy Cruz, and his work with indistinguishable spaces such as the communities 44 David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); David Harvey also spoke about the importance of market spaces in Quito at the Ministry of Culture’s “Spaces of Hope” workshops at Mercado San Roque in August 2015 45 Ana Rodriguez, in conversation with author, Quito, Ecuador, January 3rd, 2016 46 Vyjayanthi Rao and Vineet Diwadkar, “From Informality to Parametricism and Back Again,” in Informal Market Worlds Reader, ed. Peter Mortenbock, et al. (Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2015): 163 47 Ibid
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between the San Diego-Tijuana border, highly diverse sites of social and cultural ecologies are untapped sites of social capital that amplify spaces of socialization and politicization.48 Thus, Quito’s large traditional markets need to be valued more than sites of economic exchange; they are sites of socio-cultural productivity and sites that are essential to resist the global trends of entering into an already homogenized, global tourist market. Fundamentally, the micro –political -economical and -cultural situation of Quito’s markets are places of cultural activism, and creative acts where it takes multiple actors to work the economic transactions between small-scale and large-scale vendors, sellers and buyer operations. Yet, there is a cultural logic that makes Quito’s public markets a very rare place of cooperation and competition. For example, there are tacit ordinances, informal mechanisms and regulations that control the extent of competition and try to maintain some balance in the system. However, the multitude of diversity and pluralism that is needed to run everyday market life is often not valued nor legitimized within the domain of government institutions, planners and architects; thereby. This is argued to influence the negative perception of Quito’s market spaces from developers constrained in a capitalist context. The above information poses the question, “are Quito’s large traditional food markets not significant sites to assume Ecuador’s plurinational constitutional rights, including food sovereignty, good living and rights to nature?” In other words, how do you frame tourism as Buen Vivir where people can experience and learn the links of people and country without erasing the lives of the ordinary people, such as the market people, who struggle everyday to contribute to their city on a daily basis?
Markets as Contested Spaces At the core of the spectrum of market modernization forces like tourism, urbanist scholar, Ali Madanipour, emphasizes how contemporary cities have becomes sites of competing forces of social inclusion and social exclusion via spatial, political, economic and cultural realms.49 In the case of Quito, this refers to political exclusion as the workers of certain markets have been systematically blocked from decision-making powers that impact their neighborhood. Economic exclusion because the markets have been commodified or disinvested as Quito absorbs economic pressures to rapidly urbanize; cultural 48 Teddy Cruz, “Mapping Non Conformity:Post Bubble Urban Strategies,” Emisférica, 2007, http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/ emisferica71/cruz 49 Ali Mandanipour, “Social Exclusion and Space,” in The City Reader, ed. Richard T. LeGates and Fred-eric Stout (London, England: Routledge, 1998), 186-194.
...the unforeseeable consequences of world-class
tourism and rebranding: an urban wreckage of essential sites of anchorage, alimentation and civil society support networks
exclusion because the worker-population of many of Quito’s markets are highly indigenous; spatial exclusion because their distinct characteristics set them apart from Quito’s colonial and modernizing urban settings. Unfortunately, the complex social spheres of the markets continue to compound their reputation as inefficient, unorganized and un-sanitized enclaves. Although Quito’s marketplaces are site of commerce, socializing, and community, they are also spaces of contestation and inequalities, and have garnered systemic strong public and government negative perceptions. For example, Out of Quito’s 52 large traditional food markets, Mercado San Roque is one particular market that is more impacted by current National and Municipal plans and vision selling the capital city of Quito and the nation of Ecuador to the global stage. The ongoing struggle of Mercado San Roque is threatened with displacement and perceived as a site of crime and disorder by the general public, even though it sits just on the border of one of Quito’s most prized and well invested districts, the Historic Centre. It’s general negative reputation in the city is mainly due to the surrounding neighbourhood of a class that is of lower-economic status, indigenous people, sex-workers, and also included an active prison until 2014. In 2011 Mercado San Roque was publicly elected the number 1 “Anti-Wonder of the city.”50 This was an initiative led by the local newspaper Ultimas Noticias and speaks to the strong public and government perceptions towards spaces that could hinder the city’s economic plan of increasing income from tourism, which involves cleaning up the “informal” sectors of the city. Further, ongoing pressures of luxury development in the form of a 5 star hotel envisioned for the neighbourhood of San Roque and city plans to modernize the market via a strong gentrifying vision is one telling sign of the city’s larger economic plans for increasing income from tourism, which involves sanitizing “informal” sectors of the city. A market that is closely located to monumental landmarks in the Historic Centre district is Mercado San Francisco. Thus, it
is no surprise that Mercado San Francisco received a $200,000 facelift from the Municipality to create the city’s first tourist market, which is now the model that the Municipal government uses to replicate for other markets across the city. However, as a tactful place-specific development strategy, Mercado San Francisco is emblematic of an abrupt market transformation where there is no traditional market left, as it has been ‘socially cleansed’ to meet the demands of a commodified tourist-oriented market. This neo-liberal trend that is oriented towards a structural and socially sanitized form of investment, stands in stark contrast with the ongoing disinvestments around Mercado San Roque and other markets confronting similar economic pressures and ongoing negative perceptions associated with places that encompass indigenous workers and degraded neighborhood infrastructure. Moreover, it is also about what happens when such marginalized dynamics become operationalized in tourismled urban development trends and plans. Thus, understanding how certain markets in Quito are more impacted by city-policy dynamics and vested interests in flows of money is pertinent to unraveling the conditions that creates a chronic marginalization for the people of and in market spaces. After all, the market people who continue to be excluded from being involved in political decisions that impact them most, their daily living and working networks will continue to be disrupted and severed by compounding trends of disinvestment.
Conclusion
Quito’s large traditional markets face external pressures as the city drives towards sustaining itself as a world-class tourist destination. Thus, like many traditional markets around the word, they are increasingly under economic pressures with micro and macroeconomic policies enforcing commodifiable spatial forms,
50 “Y Las antimaravillas son…” Últimas Noticias, September 19th, 2011.
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i.e. large-scale investment plans for real estate development.51 The strong gentrifying vision for the modernization for Mercado San Roque is a telling sign about the combination of world-class related roces, including real estate pressures, when cities allow prime sites to be redeveloped by the highest bidder. Further, these “urban regeneration” characteristics are prompted by powerful processes of image-making, city marketing and the aesthetization of social inequality. Such specific conditions are evident within the urban terrain of Quito’s large traditional food markets and work to undermine their traditional dignity. Larger questions still remain. I ask, “what happens when Quito’s traditional market life and labor structures encounter these external forces of commodification and mass-tourism and become even more dynamic to confront? How will they adapt to the neo-liberal trend to resist structural and social sanitation forces in order to retain their traditional, dignified market space? Will they still be able to retain their productive and multidimensional assets as the city changes around them? Even if the markets are able to avoid forces related to tourism, will their precarious and vulnerable status quo remain the same?” These are important questions that both the market bodies and institutional bodies, whom are driving these tourism led processes, need to be asking. Especially since it is Ecuador’s constitutional goal to create a plurinational society to address the right to the city and food sovereignty as constitutional rights. Image making, city marketing and urban aestheticization processes put immense pressures on Ecuador’s plurinational goals when the government prioritizes tourism development over local needs. However, by camouflaging complexities of large traditional food markets in Quito’s society and denying their representation to political power, brings to the fore the unforeseeable consequences of tourism and rebranding: an urban wreckage of essential sites of anchorage, alimentation and civil society support networks. Thus, what follows is a need to investigate which of Quito’s markets are more impacted by the tactics of world-class tourism, and an exploration of how different markets and grassroots organizations are working to confront, contest and/or resist such dominating forces.
51 Informal Market Worlds: Atlas: The Architecture of Economic Pressure, ed. Helge Mooshammer, Teddy Cruz, Peter Mötenböeck, Fiona Forman(Rotterdam: nai010 publishers, 2015), 397.
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What happens when Quito’s traditional market life and labor structures encounter these external forces of commodification and mass-tourism and become even more dynamic to confront? How will they adapt to the neo-liberal trend to resist structural and social sanitation forces in order to retain their traditional, dignified market space? 47
Mercado San Roque
48
Mercado San Francisco
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SECTION 3 Reframing Quito as a World-Class Tourist Destination: Slow Violence Towards Large Traditional Food Markets in Quito 3.1 Field-Work and City Stories: The Characteristics of Tourism’s Inter-Urban Competitiveness Through the Conditions of Diverse Market Sites Generating Insights On-the-Ground Tourism, a relational event, shapes the construction of space and encounters with implications for and on those who consume place, object, and experience and those who produce culture in tourist locales. Given that my thesis contribution sheds light on linking the discursive and structural forces of inter-urban competitiveness within tourism and branding, it was pertinent to gather field insights towards exclusionary aspects of competitive urban development that impact Quito’s large traditional markets. However, before I explored this focus on interurban competition and the world-class tourist destination theme, I first wanted to investigate how Ecuador’s two national concepts of Plurinationality and Buen Vivir were establishing themselves locally. A brief summary of three field visits is as followed: August 2015 (2 weeks), October 2015 (1 week) and January 2016 (1 month). The first trip was an introduction to Quito and to the contested market site, Mercado San Roque, where the Ministry of Culture was hosting a workshop for artists, called “Spaces of Hope”. I, along with two other group members, were invited to participate in this workshop. I saw my role primarily as an active observer, using the workshop to ask questions and to see the daily lives of people working and living in and around one of the most contested neighborhoods in the city. For me, curiosity was sparked when I was first introduced to an overarching organization that works to umbrella the leaders of 26 organizations whom represent more than 3000 vendor workers of the market. The organization is called Frente de defensa y Modernización del Mercado San Roque and serves as a unity of associations, to fight against injustices and the modernization of the market, and serves as a point of entry for dialogue with
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urban authorities. Frente was a key organization to identify since they represent a series of urban and social justice aspirations for a large body of worker struggles. Further, this trip was an initial step to forming key institutional relationships with the Ministry of Culture and relationships with activist organizations working on-the-ground, such as Red de Sabres, which translates to Knowledge Network. Red de Sabres is made up of activists, artists, architects, political actors, cultural producers, economists, and anthropologists who are organized in defense of Mercado San Roque as a significant cultural site. Fundamentally, the Ministry of Culture and Red de Sabres formed a foundation for us-the collective thesis group- to pursue a trans-local partnership and to help us engage with the everyday life of the market from abroad and within. As a group, the trip in October was our first trip to Ecuador together. We aimed to collectively acquaint ourselves with the local, social, political and economic conditions, and identify collaborators and partners. Through daily excursions to the Mercado San Roque, the Ministry of Culture, the Red de Sabres and their connected partners, we expanded our insights on the historical and present external and internal pressures against, alongside and within Mercado San Roque. Pertinent to this knowledge was that it was a market threatened with displacement and perceived as a site of crime and disorder by the general public. The area in which the market is located has a strong history of crime and disinvestment, the nearby red light district and the recently closed jail have created a negative reputation in Quito’s public perception. This negative perception prevents the public and key political actors from recognizing the multiple values of the market, instead, as explained by our partner, has threatened to dislocate it or even to close it down. What became clear to our research group was the urgency to join the defense of the ongoing struggle and advocate on behalf of the locals utilizing the contested site of Mercado San Roque. After evaluating the experiences from two-trips, I had made two key observations that informed the future course of my investigation and my third trip in the field. First, it had been seven years since the making of Ecuador’s Buen Vivir constitution, however, indigenous groups, popular and social organizations are still questioning the character of Ecuador’s transitional period. This transformation is underlined by nationwide concepts: Plurinationality and Buen Vivir / Living Well.1 Thus, from observing a specific view of powerful tourist-oriented visions and projects materializing on the ground, I developed a further curiosity to link macro and structural components of interurban competition to the parameters of the struggles of Mercado 1 Salvador Schavelzon, Plurinacionalidad y Vivir Bien/Buen Vivir Dos conceptos leídos desde Bolivia y Ecuador post-constituyentes ( Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2015)
There is a gap about a certain awareness towards the structural forces of inter-urban competition and tourisms’ urban development projects that pierce socially constructed space-large traditional food markets in Quito- and contribute to everday stryggles San Roque. Further, I also developed an instinct to see which of Quito’s 52 markets are being more affected by interurban competition and world-class tourist destination processes. For instance, field-observations in Quito’s Historic Centre certainly made visible how local residents working within the district and living around it were being affected by the districts gentrification processes. After all, this UNESCO designated district is the impetus where the onslaught of neo-liberal pressures from government authorities, real estate developers, and property speculators intensely surface and sell to the tourist-eye. Mercado San Francisco’s dramatic transformation for a tourist market model, which sits within the Historic Centre boundaries, certainly speaks to the growing influence and future path of Quito’s urban economic development strategies. Moreover, after walking the streets of Quito, studying the maps of the city and projects associated with the building of Quito as a World-class tourist destination, I realized that the spillover effect of tourism-focused investments were radiating in the form of hotel projects, luxury campaigns by foreign developer’s beautification plans for large boulevards and parks, and clean public spaces for tourist activities.2 Thus, being suspicious of this urban development trend based on speculation, profit and predominantly designed for a foreign audience, I identified a gap to understand the localized, internalized urban processes that aim to support the reproduction of global interests, and to see how certain markets are more impacted by interurban competition and tourism-destination trends. This perspective was deeply developed in my longest visit to Ecuador over a course of 3 weeks. Over a three week time period, I predominately used exploratory research consisting of on-the-ground conversations, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and a focus-group meeting to identify 2 “Qatar Entrepreneurs interested in investing in the historic center of Quito,” Andes Agencia Publica de Noticas del Ecuador y Suramerica, October 25th, 2014, http://www.andes.info.ec/en/news/qatar-entrepreneurs-interested-investing-historic-center-quito.html.
preliminary themes. Specifically, the work pursued during this trip included meetings with our Quito-based research partners (the Ministry of Culture and Red de Sabres) to get input and refine our thesis inquires, visiting specific sites to gather field notes and observations, interviews, and participatory ethnographic engagement with local populations, government officials, activists, organizers, designers, and researchers. From this, I was informed how Ecuador’s and Quito’s exclusionary forms of competitive urban development schemes-in the face of tourism- were being influenced and driven at a continent, country, region, city, and neighborhood level. Through an arrangement of multiple interviews and dialogues to gather a range of insights about the contested role of the markets in relation to the city, the rural and the country, the city stories I gathered came from the Ministry of Culture, Quito Tourism, UNESCO Ecuador, The Metropolitan Institute of Heritage, scholars critically analyzing Quito and Ecuador uneven development patterns, activists working with Ecuador’s social movements, activist organizations working in defense of the markets and Market Leaders. Under the discourse of tourism and competitive urban development, these actors frame a dynamic spatial, economic and political terrain that reveal certain conditions pertaining to the disinvestment and commodification of market spaces in Quito. More over, the narratives between certain market leaders and market organization revealed two important insights. First, there is an ongoing exclusionary decision-making processes between Municipal and National authorities and the markets. Second, there is a gap about a certain awareness towards the structural forces of inter-urban competition and tourisms’ urban development projects that shape the spaces and struggles where certain market people live and work. I will briefly summarize a few stand-out and informative narratives that reveal the political, economic and cultural forces working alongside and against Quito’s multiple market spaces.
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A. Culture & Politics In an interview with the previous Vice Minister of Culture, Paco Salazar, he provided a critical National perspective of how to implement or integrate a ‘cultural’ agenda in the precariousness of Ecuadorian politics, as well as how to negotiate with the local politics when working on urban development projects.3 In context, Paco entered the Ministry in 2009 with a mandate to renew Ecuador’s culture front, including the complexities of adopting a Ministry of Culture and a Culture Law. Curious on this significant political endeavour, I asked, “How did you use your political position to create strategies, or policies that could support non-institutionalized culture spaces and places, i.e. other forms of culture beyond patrimonio?” He explained that under his leadership, his administration developed territorial strategies to promote the generation of cultural content in the country. This meant that cultural content should emerge from the territory without outsiders generating content from them; the role of the Ministry of Culture was thus to provide resources and political direction to allow diversity. However, he was not afraid to acknowledge the difficulties that came with the political management of more progressive cultural strategies under a restricted budget and a narrow-minded Administration, which continue to push for traditional concepts of arts and culture. In fact, when trying to support non-institutionalized culture spaces, Paco emphasized that there was a severe lack of a ‘political battle’ and ‘political weight’ to support more progressive culture strategies-beyond artists and entertainment districts, which was desperately needed to drive progressive ideologies from an institutional standpoint. Thus, Paco alludes to the limits of the Buen Vivir Constitution and infers that although the constitution ideologically has the potential to protect and build upon non-institutionalized, vibrant, yet vulnerable culture spaces such as large traditional food markets, how this is integrated at the city-level is not intuitive. Ecuador’s current Minister of Culture, Ana Rodriguez, would agree; long before her prestigious political position, she was part of the ongoing struggling to give political and cultural recognition to non-institutionalized sites, like the markets. She argues that such significant sites that embody social value and economic exchange are just as worthy as the UNESCO ‘Patrimonio’ standard.4 In fact, she emphasized that if spaces, like Mercado San Roque, are to cut-across these dominant cultural perspective and confront these forces of capital-city branding, luxury developments, International forces of Heritage,
3 Paco Salazar, interview by author, Quito, Ecuador, January 12th, 2016. 4 Ana Rodriguez, in-conversation with author, Quito, Ecuador, January 3rd, 2016.
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and the political economic strategies to turn traditional markets into tourism destinations, then there has to be a political will to collectively respond to such powerful conditions, both from an institutional and an on-the-ground organizational level by the markets themselves. Ana’s critical position to support everyday struggles is heralded in her political leadership to raise awareness about issues related to “the right to the city” through the current development of Ecuador’s Culture Law, which she describes as “an unpaid debt” to the Ecuadorian cities.5 Thus, at the policy level and at the level of life of a ‘Quitodiana’, her bold and refreshing political status brings in a ‘space of hope’ towards validating multiple non-institutionalized sites of culture emblematic of Ecuador’s Plurinational Constitution.
B. Tourism & Heritage Narratives Further, to understand the operational logic that successfully sells the highly attractive present and future vision of Quito and Ecuador, it was imperative to gather a spectrum of insights on the different levels working to preserve, sustain, enhance, and/ or critically respond to Quito’s development strategies stemming from tourism and heritage. This included interviews with institutional scholars and activists. Firstly, the Director of Quito Turismo, which is the municipal public company that manages the $7 Million dollar Tourism Municipal budget, provided her perspective on how tourism in Quito provides significant benefits for local level economic development and job opportunities. She further explained to me that tourism is a model that is very sensible and practical for Quito’s economy because it activates many other sectors that can take advantage of external visitors beyond resource extraction. She specifically spoke fondly of Quito’s heritage district for its cultural and historic powers that provide Quito with an international image. She also remarked how important it was to ‘clean up’ ‘infested zones’ of prostitutes that would tarnish the Historic Centre’s image.6 Hence, she noted that Mercado San Francisco, the traditional food market in the historic center, is set up for an international tourist visitor since it is clean, friendly, safe and offers multiple languages, unlike the adjacency of Mercado San Roque “that has a lot of social problems: prostitutes, drunks and an old jail.”7 However, the Director for the Instituto Metropolitano De Patrimonio, Angélica Arias, did mention the exclusionary aspects of heritage within the
5 “‘A culture law is important, it is an unpaid debt,’ Ecuadorian Minister of Culture says,” Andes Agencia Publica de Noticias del Ecuador y Suramerica, April 10, 2016, http://www.andes.info.ec/en/news/culture-law-important-it-unpaid-debt-ecuadorian-minister-culture-says.html 6 Doris Penaherrera, interview by author, Quito, Ecuador, January 13th, 2016. 7 Ibid.
...to confront these forces of capital-city branding, luxury developments, international forces of Heritage, and the political economic strategies to turn traditional markets into tourism destinations, then there has to be a political will to collectively respond to such powerful conditions, both from an institutional and an on-the-ground organizational level by the markets themselves. - In conversation with Ana Rodriguez, Ecuador’s Minister of Culture.
territory of the Historic Center District.8 She recognized the need to create a balance for the social relations on the streets beyond the facades to preserve a colonial architecture image. However, she struggles to bring a more critical and progressive voice to the very strong and technical ordinances and laws that she, as the director, has to respond to and implement under UNESCO’s conditions. To trace the complexities of heritage responsibilities to the international level was revealed when speaking with a representative of UNESCO Ecuador, Alciea Sandovac.9 She explained that the counter-partner for UNESCO Ecuador is the National government where they are binded to certain responsibilities and international instruments adhered to UNESCO’s nodes of culture and heritage.10 Jumping geographical boundaries, headquarters in Paris develop the UNESCO heritage policy, but it is the city of Quito who implements their notion of culture on the ground. Although Alciea strongly emphasized that UNESCO Ecuador instills it mandate towards ‘sustainable tourism’, the visual and anthropologist scholar, Lucia Duran, emphasis how highly contestable this is. She speaks towards the lines that address how cultural heritage has become a commodity in Latin American Cities.11 She believes that there is no possibility to analyze culture heritage separate from mass consumption. In fact, there is a political agenda that is far beyond the control of Quito’s local politics that has to do with the dynamics of cultural heritage sites, but also with the binding international discourse of UNESCO politics that caters to tourist demands for nostalgic like places. Duran’s political and scholarly vision is then to challenge Quito’s heritage-based tourism agenda via the social discourse rather than the heritage discourse, in order to break away from hegemonic definitions as a means to confront the 8 Angélica Arias, interview by author, Quito, Ecuador, January 13th, 2016. 9 Alciea Sandovac, skype interview by author, New York, USA, February 1st, 2016 10 Ibid. 11 Lucia Duran, skype interview by author, Quito, Ecuador, January 14th, 2016.
social struggles masked by the visual power of heritage itself. Hence, from a discussion with Paola de la Vega, the founder of an independent and interdisciplinary organization called Gescultura, it was refreshing to know that there is passionate activist body working to confront the uneven systemic issues raised by the tourism sector. Her biggest struggle when working on projects to reveal the politics of cultural management in Quito is to get the people driving public policy that affect tourism development to understand that their ongoing interventions are “killing” the living social fabric of the sector.12 For example, she says, “you see how the community in the Historic Center District is losing population, businesses are closing due to increase in property prices, and the vibrant noise on the streets is lost due to the removal of street vendors.”13 Unlike certain institutional sectors that are binded to implementing UNESCO’s criteria, such as the Instituto Metropolitano De Patrimonio, Gescultura’s work contests the idea of aesthetics and works to build a ‘patrimonio critique’ by working with small groups of people to reveal living social memory and living social networks. To her, Gescultura is more interested in the community process to address the coerciveness of culture sectors, like tourism; it’s a matter of producing social links between public policy and the people most impacted by unjust provisions projected by Municipal authorities. Thus, at the core of this brief composite of tourism and heritage-based interviews, it was essential to synthesize a few narratives ranging from the most institutionalized (UNESCO Ecuador, Quito Turismo, etc) to the activist social scholars and/or organizations confronting traditional cultural and heritage values. This lens strengthened my research parameters to critically address the successive plans for tourism activating the city, especially in districts like the Historic Center with actions that have ranged from the “relocation” of informal trade, the “cleanup” of Mercado San Francisco, the “removal” of sex workers, and the gentrification of specific sectors within the Historic Centre itself, like La Ronda. 12 Paola de la Vega, co-interview by author and Sinead Petrasek, Quito, Ecuador, January 14th, 2016. 13 Ibid.
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C. Quito’s Food Markets and their Ongoing Struggle
Image: Market workers of Mercado Mayorista Source: Photograph by author, January 2016, Quito, Ecuador
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The locus to this collective project is initially based from the highly contested site of Mercado San Roque because it is threatened with displacement and perceived as a site of crime and disorder by the general public. The market’s struggle to resist the pressures of urban development is emblematic of other market struggles across the city as well. Thus, pertinent to this collective project, it was important to make a contribution that goes beyond Mercado San Roque’s individual situation, and investigate how urban development schemes associated with tourist destination advertising discourse, national branding, visual imagery and their consequences multiply towards other markets. Hence, January’s field work ranged from visiting markets experiencing complete municipal disinvestment and neglect (i.e.,Mercado San Roque, Mercado Mayorista) to markets able to retain their traditional qualities while catering to a new class (i.e.Mercado Inaquito, Mercado Santa Clara), to an almost completely commodified, tourist market space (i.e. Mercado San Francisco). Importantly, a portion of the field-work was also oriented towards becoming acquaintanced with other grassroots organizations working to support and defend the struggles and dignity of Quito’s market sites. First, I re-entered the field with Red de Sabres by visiting Mercado San Roque and the ongoing struggle of its umbrella organization, Frente de Defensa (Frente). This was a significant entry point because Frente holds a particular power position to influence and transfer knowledge about what is happening within and outside the refines of Mercado San Roque. Yet, the tensions and problems of the organization are ongoing since the leaders of the associations who are involved in Frente are not unified on a shared vision and not everyone is involved. There is also a notable tension between the perspectives of the association leaders between the ‘formal’ part of the market (the inside of the structure) and the ‘informal’ part of the market (the vendors selling on the street outside of MSR’s physical structure). Thus, a surface-level understanding of Frente’s organization struggles and their agenda through which it defends, is key to understanding in order to search the broader context for clues that are affecting market tensions. Further, one vital interview that brought Quito’s diverse market transformations to the fore was a co-led interview between myself and a leader of Red de Sabres (our activist group partner active in Mercado San Roque), Luis Herrera, with Victor Sanchez, a leader of Federación de Comerciantes Minoristas de Pichincha ‘FEDECOMIP’ (trans. Federation of Minor Retail Traders in Pichincha) since 1997 and who is also a representative of CUCOMITAE (Confederación Unitaria de Comerciantes
Minoristas y Trabajadores Autónomos del Ecuador; trans. United Confederation of Retail Traders and Self-employed Workers of Ecuador).14 FEDECOMIP’s fundamental action is the defense of the right to work with dignity for the retail workers in Quito and Pichincha (i.e. the Province). His broad perspective on the struggles of multiple markets across the city as they confront urban plans, laws and regulations, provided a more holistic view while still respecting the situated struggles of Quito’s 52 popular markets. In conversation, Victor first revealed to us his frustrations with how the local newspapers make a big deal when municipal money is used to ‘fix’ the markets infrastructure problem and then celebrate their ‘cleanliness’ and ‘improvement’ when it’s over. This was in reference to a local newspaper article that shot off the press the morning of our conversation, which celebrated the physical infrastructural improvements, in terms of pipes and water, but masked the ongoing oppressive work conditions that require political support and intervention far beyond physical repairs. Thus, to Victor, the main weapon that the market workers and traders have is to organize and mobilize to strengthen their position and build defense fronts against a system that sees the market structures as objects, rather than active forms. He remarks that, “we traders have seen mayors, presidents, commissioners, managers, passing by the associations. Each one as cocky, as brave, as arrogant and authoritarian as the next. And after a year there is nobody in the streets.”15 Thus, Victor’s vision is to fertilize a triangle of alliance between Community, Municipal and Commercials, while also connecting Quito’s popular markets to other social movements in Ecuador. Significantly, what Victor’s conversation sparked between Luis and I, was the idea to organize a focus group meeting with other market leaders because they have a broad understanding of how their ‘own’ market works and the struggles within. This meeting aimed to connect our collective understanding of the negative perception of Mercado San Roque (MSR) to one that connects the struggle of MSR to other markets under the umbrella of uneven urban development forces. Thus, on January 15, 2016, a focus group was held with members of our thesis research team, Luis, Victor Sanchez and a small group of market leaders. Together, the meeting brought people who represented Mercado San Roque, Mercado Mayorista, and Centro Comercial Popular Ipiales del Sur, CUCOMITAE (Confederación Unitaria de Comerciantes Minoristas y Trabajadores Autónomos del Ecuador; trans. United Confederation of Retail Traders and Self-employed Workers 14 Victor Sanchez, co-interview by author and Luis Herrera, Quito, Ecuador, January 7th, 2016. 15 Ibid.
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16 Focus group meeting held at Mercado Chiriyacu, Quito, Ecuador, January 15th, 2016 co-hosted by thesis team members (Tait Mandler, Gamar Markarian, and Sinead Petrasek), and leader of Red de Sabres, Luis Herrera 17 Ibid.
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Field-Work Summary After returning from the field for the third time, I was able to direct my suspicions for how inter-urban competition and the making of Quito and Ecuador as a world-class tourist destination multiplies across the city. However, out of the 52 markets that co-exist in Quito, there are certain markets that are affected more by these parameters than others. Thus, through multiple conversations, encounters with different markets, the support of my team and project partners, I came to frame how Mercado San Roque, Mercado San Francisco and Mercado Mayorista are more impacted by Quito and Ecuador’s economic development schemes of tourism and branding. For instance, Mercado San Roque is at the top of this list because of its strong relationship to the UNESCO Historic Centre district, which is the number one tourist attraction district across the city. The fact that the Historic Centre is a prioritized district in the city for funding, tourism and a marketing discoursing, it puts external pressures of disinvestment and commodification alongside and against Mercado San Roque since city authorities prioritize sectors of capital accumulation over social relations. Thus, as municipal, national and international funds continue to be poured into improving this tourist-oriented zone, Mercado San Roque continues to experience disrespect from the municipal authorities, which further deteriorates and strains Frente de Defensa’s relation to negotiate and understand the politics and economic growth of the city. Moreover, Mercado San Francisco is an essential example that visualizes the consequences of what happens when a market in Quito fully transforms towards an audience beyond local residents. Although the physical infrastructure of the market improved, what was pursued to achieve this upgrade was a cleansing of the multiple social relations in and around the space and a significant loss of its traditional market dignity. Mercado San Francisco has lost its vibrancy, noise and multiplicities as it is now one of the quieter and more lonesome sites in the Historic Center district. Further, Mercado Mayorista, one of Quito’s biggest markets, is also under threat of continuous disinvestment and lack of recognition for it’s perceived disorderliness by the municipal authorities and their constant battles against tax and laws. Moreover, Mercado Mayorista also geographically location sits in-between the “Strategic Plan for Metropolitan Development and Land Management 2015-2025”, “attraction zones”, meaning that the zones around the market will be prioritized to receive financial resources for urban (re)development schemes, while they will remain on the periphery; this suggests exclusionary forms of development. Significantly, as a tactic that pertains to multiple markets, in one Metropolitan Document, “Quito, A City of Opportunities”, it states the need to remove informality in all sectors of the city since the Municipal authorities are looking
Framing Theory With On-The-Ground Insights Inter-Urban Competition: World-Class Tourism, Branding & Everyday Life Inter-Urban Competition: World-class Tourism, Branding & Everyday Life Value Extraction
Competitve global drive to sell valuable urban assets for (foreign) attraction Concentrated urban investments in profitable sectors
Global Inter-Urban Competitiveness Speculative Urbanism
Power of speculative political scales over socially constructed space
Ecuador Inter-Urban Competitiveness Branded Nation
Deconstructing sites of uneven development
Quito Inter-Urban Competitiveness World-Class Destination City
Local grassroot struggles over non-community controlled change
Profitable
Non-Profitable
Invested Districts
Disinvested Districts
Non-Prioritzed Zones
of Ecuador), and Red de Saberes (an activist group active in Mercado San Roque). The goal of the conversation was to open up a dialogue to listen, learn and share views around the possibilities of how Quito’s popular markets can collectively bring their struggles to the table, organize and support each other. For instance, a representative of Mercado Mayorista shared their significant efforts, stemmed from a 20 year history of organization, to tackle government efforts that have worked to create competition between their workers via penalties and ordinances. For example, the Municipal government says the workers, notably the 290 ‘tricicleros’ who transport goods around the market, need to be more regulated with uniforms and identification. Hence, it is the Municipal plan to implement a $950/year tax for each ‘triciclero’. On the other hand, according to the representative leader of Centro Comercial, she was greatly concerned about the City’s intense 13-year drive to clean the streets of Quito to make them ‘prettier’, which includes new infrastructure in the form of malls. Centro Comercial is surrounded by the infrastructure of mall development, which she described as “killing the markets, little by little.”16 Further, during this dialogue, Victor Sanchez notably remarks the bigger picture of the markets struggles as one that is part of a greater national network trying to deal with the country’s socioeconomic problems. For instance, he emphasized how Quito has successfully and consecutively concentrated municipal investments to capitalize on Quito’s natural and cultural heritage for tourism, notably under the provision of Quito’s Previous Municipal Administration under Augusto Barrera and the present Municipal Administration under Mauricio Rodas. A memorable, translated quote that collectively brought the differences in the room together was “We struggle against the capitalization of Quito. Now it is a major tourist destination, but at what cost? Yes, Rodas gives us an audience but he doesn’t act on what we say.”17 Thus, there is certainly truth to the strategies of the Municipal government that divide the people of the market, between strata, between merchants and between the markets themselves. More over, there was a clear frustration for a lack of engagement between city authorities and the market leaders to coordinate and negotiate demands, differences and concerns.
Mercado San Roque Grassroots Organizations
Mercado Mayorista De-Valued Living Built Form
Mercado San Francisco
UNESCO Center Historico District
City’s Land Management Strategy to invest in “Attraction Zones”: Commercial, Business and Tourist Sectors
Prioritzed Zones of Attraction Value of the Built Form
Exclusionary Economic Development
Creates uneven growth & spatializes the class and race struggles of working-class and vulnerable communities
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for ways to attract foreign investors, tourists, and capital relies via improved urban space. Unfortunately, a strong collective imaginary in Quito has centred large-traditional markets within this informality lens, which contributes to their exclusionary territory as not being an important part of the political and urban agenda. Thus, such plans shed light on the discursive and structural forces that are powering this process of intense urban renewal and revitalization projects that surround and affect the territories of the markets themselves. Moreover, even with the support of other grassroots organizations in support of the market struggle, like FEDICOMP led by Victor Sanchez, the struggles are isolated and situated as some markets are dealing with commodification where there is no traditional market left and completely oriented to tourists, while other markets are being disinvested or threatened with noncommunity controlled upgrades. Notably, from the few market organizational structures whom we conversed with, it was made clear that they find it difficult to challenge the economic aspects that actively contribute to the decline towards their spaces. Thus, it isn’t to say resistance, independence, and self-management for Quito’s markets are the answer because that’s unfeasible within the powers of the current system fostering entrepreneurship and driving foreign and local investment. What stems is a need to navigate, mediate and ground the unforeseen consequences of the slow violence of the markets within a political terrain to bring to the fore the coerciveness of Quito and Ecuador’s new tourism structures and national branding strategies.
3.2 Within Tourisms’ Local Global Discourse: Towards Building an Awareness Pertinent to this dialogue is that the struggles of Quito’s markets apply just as much as it does on the neighborhood scale to the global scale. In a wider economic system that prioritizes the national measured growth of a restricted range of sectors, such as tourism, over local economic attributes, communities face huge struggles in holding onto and developing new and established local economies. While the pressures on traditional market spaces may be experienced locally, they are part of larger city-wide processes and have cumulative effects which are producing serious social, economic and environmental problems for Quito. Thus, the disinvestment and/ or regeneration of traditional market spaces is one that represents a significant urban case to speak more provocatively too. For instance, when local or national authorities identify windows of opportunity to aid economic recovery and growth, plans, strategies and visions
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towards leisure, commercial, and business, tend to represent developers and real estate agents’ views of the potential for new commercial development, rather than an assessment of the existing diverse economic activities already taking place. Fundamentally, while new development may bring external investment, the financial values will quickly leak out of a local area if it does not generate the local supply chains that keep money circulating and multiplying for the benefit of the local economy. It is a common urban pattern of how municipalities aim to visualize their presence on a global stage, which inevitably corresponds to trends that capitalize investments, stimulate commerce, activate tourisms, and camouflage political nice. Hence, from tracing the idiosyncrasies and ruptures in the political, legal, economic, social and spatial organization of the urban, facilitated by strategies of tourism development and rebranding and encouraged at the level of the global, prompts a need for an urgent discussion. Significantly, it is useful to understand how people are encouraged to confront and take part in the processes of political, economic, and spatial contestation. I briefly highlight three different organizations/people who I think successfully reveal, prompt and mediate contested spaces between public policy, organizations and everyday struggles to negotiate unjust structural plans.
A) Dialogue, Policy & Action: Women in Informal Employment,Globalizing & Organizing [WIEGO] WIEGO is an organization that helps to develop international, regional and national networks between organizations of informal workers, research and statistical institutions, and development agencies. At their core, “WIEGO seeks to bridge the ground reality of informal work and mainstream discourses and debates, to mediate between organizations of informal workers and mainstream institutions, and, together with those organizations, to use [their] credible grounded knowledge of the informal economy to leverage supportive policies, services, and resources for the working poor in the informal economy.”18 As an organization that works inbetween multiple institutional bodies and on-the-ground workers, I thought it was pertinent to reach out to the director of the organization to understand how WIEGO works across physical, social and political spaces to aggregate a wide range demands. She explained to me about how they work and connected a Latin American project with one of their projects in Lima, Peru where they are working with informal street market vendors, leaders of
18
WEIGO, http://www.wiegoinbrief.org/about-wiego-2/
What stems is a need to navigate, mediate and ground the unforeseen consequences of worldclass tourism making within Quito and Ecuador’s contested political terrain market organizations and municipal authorities guiding exclusionary policies that impact the perception and work of street and traditional food market laborers.19 For example, one of the forces that hinder vendors’ work is the fact that the city’s regulatory frameworks and planning policies have not included street vending or perceive street vending as a problem. Thus, the vendors also see the metropolitan government in a negative light because of restrictions within the legislative framework, failure to deliver licences and lack of control over the corruption of the municipal police. As part of WIEGO’s work, which is to raise awareness, build the capacities of workers, generate new knowledge, create bridges for dialogue with Government authorities, and achieve policy progress for the working poor in the informal economy, they have helped to set up spaces for dialogue that were made permanent over time. This has been an important contribution of WIEGO’s work in Lima where they have brought representatives from the Ministry of Labour, the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion and City Government in organized conversations with the workers to improve their understanding about the issues of access to social protection by informal workers. WIEGO also assisted to organize collective platforms of demand and proposal of all sectors of informal workers to be shared with the candidates running for the position of Mayor of Lima, and President of Peru in the election of 2010 and 2014.20 One project success led by WIEGO over 3 a year process was in 2014 when the Metropolitan Lima City Council approved a new Ordinance that will regulate and protect street vending in the public spaces of Peru’s capital ( provided that the last update was in 1985 and that more than 60% of Lima’s population is in the the informal retail trade). Significantly, it is WIEGO’s work that brings to the fore the lived experience of vendors in interacting with local authorities and legal-regulatory structures, which is a process that must be brokered in Quito to see more justice and political recognition brought forth to the markets.
19 Sally Roever, skype-interview by author, New York City,USA, March 3rd, 2016 20 http://wiego.org/sites/wiego.org/files/resources/files/WIEGO-Lima-Brochure.pdf
B) Visualizing Change & CounterMapping: Iconoclasistas In Argentina, Pablo Ares and Julia Risler co-use design, research and a passion for social justice to visualize complex situations into an accessbile and engaging formats for collobrative practices with communities and everday epople. Through research and graphic design they make materials dealing with social issues to conduct collective mapping workshops with social movements, community organizations, communication collectives and art groups. They use maps and visual devices to transfer complex forms of knowledge and experiences in ways that collectively shape an accessbile narrative about territorial changes. Signficantly, their visual materials serve as critical and creative pedagogical tools to influence the social imaginary, not only as a means of resistance, but also as a space for thinking about meaningful change or action. Fundamentally, their work explores the question of power and tactics of struggle, while unraveling the situation at hand through a facilitated dialogue about a scenario of why things are the way they are and proposing what things ought to be. This is a step that offers a way to reveal the embeddedness of Quito’s market spaces in unsurmountable forces of tourism and catalyze conversation within and between the markets and government authorities themselves .
C) Challenging the ‘Creative City’ through Socially-Engaged Arts Practice: Jeanne van Heeswijk Jeanne van Heeswijk’s, a visual artist in Rotterdam, contributes to the current debate on the commercialization of society by exposing underlying mechanisms and alternative strategies through cooperative cultural production. Her project in Rotterdam is situated within a working class and ethnically diverse district, Afrikaanderwijk, and it became activated because the Afrikaanderwijk district is an area under threat of
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being sold and being transformed by large scale speculative urban development. However, as part of Jeanne’s “Freehouse” organization, she became involved in the development of the Afrikaanderwijk district through the site of the Afrikaander Market, a wonderful large-scale market of people, products and things and an essential neighbourhood cultural asset. Through the Freehouse project, Jeanne worked with the residents and businesspeople of Afrikaanderwijk to assist in awareness building of their neighbourhood’s cultural wealth and economic potential. For example, in her Freehouse–Market of Tomorrow project of 2008, van Heeswijk sought to revitalize the Afrikaander Market. Working with vendors, artists, designers, and local shopkeepers. She developed a detailed sketch of the ideal market of the future, devoting more attention to diverse high-quality goods and services, and new skill-based collaborative projects. While drawing up the plan, Jeanne challenged government regulations that were preventing vendors and the community from establishing sustainable sources of income. Some of these proposals were then implemented in the new governmental plan. I believe that Jeanne’s project is an inspiration on the elaboration of possibilities for organizing large number of inhabitants for taking control of the processes that produce their urban environment.
Common Threads Although WEIGO, Iconoclasistas, and Jeanne van Heeswijk’s approaches are different, they powerfully target multiple levels of people and spaces-from the everyday to the institution- in order to transcend existing urban imaginaries and political logics that fail to see significant urban sites affected by the urban. They are able to capture the hidden cultural, social and economic value of more vulnerable populations while working in-between bottom-up cultural activism and conventional top-down planning institutions. Ultimately, a certain level of awareness to the everyday struggles is brought forth to understand who, how and what is impacted by certain development strategies and tactics. Thus, gaining inspiration from people and organization, what is needed to bring heightened awareness towards non-community controlled urban changes is to reveal how the dynamics between certain macro and micro tourism-driven economic development plans creates certain conditions for the commodification, forced displacement and or the disappearance of market spaces in Quito.
3.3 Introduction to the Proposal: Revealing the Future Impacts of World-Class Tourism Making Summarizing Key Research Themes My research thus far can be summarized into a number of key insights. First, I have identified that out of Quito’s 52 traditional food markets, several of them are significant cultural sites of social and economic exchange and central to the city’s alimentation. Second, a multi-scalar analysis of the policies, plans, visions and strategies related to tourism and branding are excluding Quito’s traditional market spaces into the future landscape of the city. Third, I connected the micro struggles of the markets to the macro-level of Ecuador’s new National project striving to build ‘newness’ through branding the ideology of Buen Vivir. Importantly, I interpreted this nation-wide rhetoric as a contradicting strategy to how it translates and materializes at the scale of the city. Tourism, one of the key sectors aiding the construction of Buen Vivir as an alternative mode for economic development and growth within the country, has committed Quito and Ecuador to the generation of income from foreign investors. Thus, the effects of the tourist circuit related to luxury hotels, churches, museums and emblematic streets, accelerates the displacement of small businesses and non-institutionalized sites of significant cultural exchange, such as Quito’s market sites. Although Article 31 in the constitution justifies that, “people are entitled to the full enjoyment of the city and its public spaces, under the principles of sustainability, social justice, respect for different urban cultures and balance between the urban and the rural,”21 the exercise to the right to the city is actively undermined through cuts to public spending, and the generation of new inequalities.External foreign investors pierce Ecuador’s vision of pursuing alternative forms of economic development, following a Buen Vivir discourse, and inhibit active means for constructing social justice in the city. Instead of becoming fixed in the urban branding realm of tourism, heritage, culture, marketing, and/or media alone, I have framed these acts within an overarching insight: that the competitive global drive to sell valuable urban assets for (foreign) attraction de-values and excludes socially constructed spaces in the city. This wider framework of inter-urban competitiveness situates the political, economic and social restructuring processes that the markets are in an ongoing and contested relation with. Further, this framework is a lead to enter the built urban form 21 “Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador,” Georgetown University Political Database of the America, October 20th, 2008, http://pdba. georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html
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To contribute to an existing struggle and an emerging solidarity network between individual markets, and before even advancing into any policy recommendations in Quito, there needs to be a heightened awareness of strategic, exclusionary urban development plans and projects. with a critical eye to interpret the conditions on the ground locally, and allows one to think beyond the material forms of new representations of urban development. This approach also opens up dialogue to question the general strategy that sells cities, regions, and nations for direct (often foreign) investment. Thus, it is one analytical framework to connect the coerciveness of macro and micro tourism and branding forces shaping new geographies in Quito. This is argued to be based on profit and speculation and choreographed to a foreign population such as foreign investors and international visitors. From this particular perspective as Quito and Ecuador anchors itself to becoming a world-class tourist destination, a slow violence can selectively be traced towards certain markets affected more by interurban competition and the world-class destination rhetoric.
Proposition: Building Awareness & & Catalyzing Discussion From field-work, observations, dialogue and experiences in the city of Quito and the market sites themselves, my insights have led me to identify that top-down inter-urban competitive strategies based on tourism and branding work to sell Quito and Ecuador to a global stage in an existing crowded global tourist market. This produces an exclusive and exclusionary city for low-income and working-class populations and marginalized districts, which can be traced towards the devalorization processes towards Quito’s large traditional markets. I believe that there is a need to communicate Quito’s recent urban development and urbanizing landscape as a world-class tourist destination into a storytelling tool. By engaging the markets, their organization structures and other grassroots organizations about the macro tourism and branding forces shaping their everyday life fills a critical gap; a link between the present and future impact of Quito’s world-class tourist-oriented city with the individual struggles of certain markets. Importantly so, the public policies and private investments that accelerate the
making of Quito and Ecuador as a world-class tourist destination creates a shared narrative of unjust and uneven development across multiple different markets, their struggles and their shortcoming. Therefore, to build further capacity amongst an emerging network of solidarity between markets and grassroots organization resisting non-community controlled change, my narrative-based proposal brings forward a collective awareness about the unforeseeable consequences of Quito’s world-class destination making. This proposal aims to stimulate reactions through an accessible, organized and spatial narrative that demonstrates a shared urban struggle pertaining to politics of scale and exclusionary economic development. Building awareness is key because although the present effects maybe not be as clear, it is the negative impact that this will have on Quito’s future urban landscape; a city that anchors itself and financial resources to the tourist landscape binds itself to the services of private capital, rather than a just management of city resources in an era calling for more equitable distribution. In order to support the ongoing individual struggles of Quito’s market sites and the market organizations that I have made contact with, the proposal brings the markets and their organization to a point where they can become more aware about the macro and micro competitive, world-class tourist forces in order to present a catalyst for thinking about how to act within these forces. Thus, through storytelling, it is a matter of activating a critical reaction for the markets and their supporting organizations to think about how they can take matters into the their own hands, rather than enforcing an external proposition. After all, to contribute to an existing struggle and an emerging solidarity network between individual markets, and before even advancing into any policy recommendations in Quito, there needs to be awareness of these strategic and exclusionary urban development plans and projects.
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Stakeholder Map //& Actors of World-Class Tourism Making Tracing Conditions
Ministerio de Turismo
Secretaría Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo
Secretaría de Territorio, Hábitat y Vivienda
Secretaría de Planificación Instituto Metropolitano de Patrimonio
Agencia de Coordinación Distrital del Comercio
Quito Turismo
UNESCO Ecuador
Unidad de Policia Comunitaria
Foreign Investors
National Authorities
Foreign Investors
UNESCO
Inter-American Development Bank
Municipal Authorities
Municipal Authorities
National Authorities
MACRO-LEVEL
Tracing a Point of Entry for a Design Intervention Inter-American Development Bank
Ministerio de Turismo
Secretaría Nacional de Planificación y Desarrollo
Secretaría de Territorio, Hábitat y Vivienda
Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio
Red de Sabres
MICRO -LEVEL Grassroots Organizations
Build Awareness
Critical Visual Narrative as a Pedagogical Tool
Project Partners
Red de Sabres
Diversity of Struggles
UNESCO Ecuador
Unidad de Policia Comunitaria
Project Partners
Catalyze Reaction
Social Space of Intervention
Shared Struggle Market Leaders
Market Leaders
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Instituto Metropolitano de Patrimonio Quito Turismo
Ministerio de Cultura y Patrimonio
Individual Markets, & Associations
Secretaría de Planificación
Agencia de Coordinación Distrital del Comercio
MESO-LEVEL
Grassroots Organizations
UNESCO
Individual Markets, & Associations
Knowledge
Strong Institutional Relationship External Political Pressures Knowledge
New Knowledge
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SECTION 4 A Design Contribution Towards an Ongoing Market Struggle: Critical Visual Narrative as a Pedagogical Tool 4.1 Proposal Purpose: Grounding Awareness The advancements required to become a world-class tourist destination has extraordinary impacts on the future landscape of the city of Quito. Therefore, it is necessary for local and vulnerable sites, such as the traditional food markets of Quito, to understand the macro, world-class tourist destination forces that shape their everyday struggles. Through active fieldwork, synthesizing on-the-ground knowledge, and a long-distance relationship between a key project partner, Red de Sabres, a gap has been identified that contributes to the existing and ongoing daily struggles of certain market sites; specifically Mercado San Roque whose ongoing public negative perception contributes to its exclusion from Quito’s political agenda. My contribution, as an urbanist and designer working from New York City, is to bring forward a critical visual narrative as a pedagogical tool to support Red de Sabre’s existing work with Quito’s markets as contested city spaces. Using Mercado San Roque as the heart of the story, “The Future of Two Markets” is an accessible, entertaining and politicizing narrative to catalyze a more controversial conversation about the macro and micro forces piercing everyday life. The underlying value of this storytelling narrative is to build awareness and capacities for local organizational structures of and related to the markets to understand the unforeseeable consequences shaping their future city and, ultimately, their future market social spaces. After all, the making of Quito as a world-class tourist destination is only the beginning of a comprehensive strategy to restructure the character, makeup and politics of the city; a tangled, slow-changing, and controversial reality.
Process: How Would a Story-Based Design Tool Work? Given that this collective thesis project deals with a matter of distance between Quito and New York City, it was necessary to understand how to enter into a particular urban political context and situate a design proposition from afar. An important consideration of my proposition was that it had to be designed
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in a convenient and useful way that would be of service to our project partner in Quito-Red de Sabres.It became my goal to develop a tool of social justice to enable Red de Sabres to engage the markets about how their own spatial reality is connected to larger processes beyond local threats of neighborhood changes and individual market struggles. Therefore, at future market meetings and/or market organized events this design-tool could be used to mediate dialogue across different market organizations to frame macro and exclusionary tourism-making forces that impact their daily struggle. “The Future of Two Markets” is a linear narrative compiled into a mini booklet. The story situates two driving forces behind inter-urban competition-tourism and (re)brandingin order to visually explain the the influences penetrating exclusionary forms of urban development towards marginalized city districts. The narrative sequence begins at the macrolevel and ends at the micro-level to narrativize how the macro, competitive, political and economic logic works to actively undermine Quito’s large traditional food markets as significant sites of social activity and cultural and economic exchange. I end with a particular frame to situate the future landscape of Quito’s city: a commodified landscape performed by locals merely for the benefit of foreign user (tourist or foreign investor) versus the value of an active social scene of everyday market life. The purpose of this is to frame a choice to think about how the markets and their supporting organizes can play an acting role in the forces formulating the future of their city, and their future market(s). Through the locus of Mercado San Roque as the heart of the story, the contestation of San Roque’s situates other markets and their common struggles within current national and municipal plans and visions that are aimed at selling the capital city of Quito and the nation of Ecuador to the global stage. Hence, this narrative framework serves to mediate and catalyze discussion beyond the plan for a proposed luxury star hotel and more towards a greater understanding of the grounded coerciveness of world-class tourism making and (re) branding processes.
The Story Design Working from afar while maintaining an ongoing relationship with Red de Sabres became an ideal entry point to propose a new visual design tool. This is because they have on-the-ground contact with market leaders and grassroots organizations connected to my field work such as, Mercado San Roque, Mercado San Francisco, Mercado Mayorista, Frente de Defensa and Federación de Comerciantes Minoristas de Pichincha (‘FEDECOMIP’). Importantly so, since the visual tool will be distributed to Red de Sabres from a far distance (New York City to Quito), the choice of materiality was a significant factor for how it could be easily printed and distributed on their end. Hence, I designed my narrative tool using a black and white scheme on a 8.5’’ by 11’’ layout; an easily printable and inexpensive format for Red de Sabres to print and distribute at
Image: Foreground, Garcia Moreno Prison, Mid-ground Mercado San Roque , background Libertad neighborhood district Source: Photograph by author, January 2016, Quito, Ecuador
future market meetings and/or market organized events. To design this story, I have been greatly influenced by the incredible work of Iconoclasistas who make their graphic design work publically available for anyone’s use. Thus, I have used and adapted a variety of entertaining pictograms from Iconoclasistas and other characters and symbols, from the capitalist to government actors to grassroots organizations to the markets, in order to visualize a simple, yet complex story. By visually situating the complexity of processes of inter-urban competition through a pedagogical tool, disseminates forms of sophisticated knowledge in a more entertaining, yet, politicizing manner. Fundamentally, visually dramatizing the conditions that spatialize exclusionary processes of economic and uneven development connects the people of the market with their own spatial reality to forces beyond their own spatial conditions.
Outcome and Imapct: The Value of an Entertaining and Politicizing Narrative A more linear, communicable and visual narrative that spatializes the multiple forces and political scales of inter-urban competitiveness, tourism and (re)branding can enable Red de Sabres to mediate a more structured and controversial dialogue during their work and interactions with the market(s) struggle. A projected influence of this story, “The Future of Two Markets”, positions the markets at the foreground of the exclusionary actions of Quito’s “world-class tourism making” in order to narrativize and confront the pressures of government policy and international capital-driven urban development. This serves to situate and imagine the continued value of the social
life of Quito’s traditional market spaces against certain structural forces impacting the ongoing struggles of Quito’s multiple market spaces This entertaining, yet politicizing narrative is one small piece to contribute to the contested struggles of Quito’s public markets that have already been attempting to create a solidarity network. Thus, the underlying value of “The Future of Two Markets” is for capacity building purposes and to provoke a lived experience that clarifies the present conditions and future impacts towards everyday life.
Moving Forward Next steps for this project include translating the story in spanish, working with Red de Sabres to edit the story and to continue to brainstorm ideas and objectives for how, where and when to use this pedagogical tool. This conversation will continue from afar, but it is hoped that the next on-the-ground conversation will take place in October 2016 during the Habitat III conference in Quito with our project partners and market leaders. Finally, this project’s research and design proposition will culminate with the group’s collective thesis work for an exhibition in January 2017 at The New School’s Aronson Gallery where this knowledge will be shared with academics, students and the general public to continue the conversation on uneven urban development in Ecuador.
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Working from a Distance | Identifying a Gap, Purpose, and Meaning for a Design Tool
The Story | “The Future of 2 Markets�
Build Awareness Pedagogical Tool
Project Partners
Individual Markets, & Associations
Market Leaders Social Space of Intervention
A critical visual narrative as a pedagogical tool to support the work of Red de Sabres
Catalyze Reaction
Red de Sabres
Grassroots Organizations
Contribution
Joint Struggle, Integrating diversity
Visualize Spatialize Entertain Politicize Purpose
Convenient Accessible Communicable Design
Build Capacities Outcome
Knowledge New Knowledge
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A Critical Pedagogical Tool
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Daily life of Markets & the contested struggle of a world-class tourist destination
The Future of Two Markets
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This is a visual tool to bring awareness and to prompt discussion about the exclusionary impacts of the making of Quito and Ecuador as a world-class tourist destination. Urban development plans, strategies and visions for the present and futuremaking of Quito is one where working-class populations and marginalized city districts are most impacted as Municipal and National Government authorities work with international actors to “boost� the economy. This is a process where local, national and international government and private actors coordinate strategies towards selective ways of investing in existing built forms that are considered profitable, such as the Historical Centre District, and new built forms, such as luxury hotels, in order to (re) develop urban ammenities to attract international visitors (tourists and foreign developers). These developments have extraordinary impacts on the future landscape of the city and it is necessary for vulnerable and everday sites, such as the traditional food markets of Quito, to understand the macro, world-class tourist destination forces that shape their everday struggles.
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#1: A Competitive & Crowded Global Tourist Market
International
Tourist
National Government
Growing Economy
Municipal Government
Politican
Other
Neighborhood
City
Capitalist
National
Legend: Characters, Symbols, & Conditions
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What a homogenous tourist market the world has become! I have an urging need and desire to find the next best place with unique attractions!
International Institutions
Branding
Traditional Food Markets
Where else can I find such new spaces to invest and accumulate wealth to feed a global, competitve, and expanding tourist economy? Heritage
Everyday life is a struggle
‘Informal’ Workers
55kg
Grassroot Organizations
Future
City activists
Investment
Market Workers
Sanitize
Garcia Moreno Prison
New Development
Luxury Development
The desire for cities to become world-class tourist destination is part of a global strategy to attract a foreign audience, including tourists and investors, but excludes working-class populations and marginalized city districts.
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#2. Contesting Dominant Models of Development
#3. Reclaiming Economic Wealth for Ecuador
ak Sum say w a K
Calling for a new National project in Ecuador! Implement alternative forms of development!
E FO cu R ad SA or LE
S
S LA -C LD ISM OR UR W TO
But this continent is already too crowded with tourist sites! I need a DESTINATION site that is EVEN MORE ATTRACTIVE than the rest!
Under global pressures to become sites of world-class tourist destinations, cities and nations in Latin America project themselves utilizing their unique culture and natural references for economic growth. In 2008, the South American nation of Ecuador rejects this form of dominant development and demands an alternative model.
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Under citizen pressures, the rise for a new National project was brought forth by the National Government under the 2008 National Plan for Buen Vivir. In hopes of shifting to new social and sustainable forms of development beyond the extraction of oil and outside international market pressures, the Ecuadorian Government proposed a Change in the Production Matrix. The key industries that change was invested for was reďŹ neries, petrochemicals, assembly of cars, bio-knowledge, hydroelectric dams and tourism.
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#4: A ‘Brand’ New Political Economy A NEW stable, inclusive & progressive State
#5: Building & Sustaining a WorldClass Tourist Desintation
Build luxury hotels & luxury (re) Developments! The tourists will come & your economy will grow!
Quito’s 2015-2025 Development & Land Management Plan: ES Attraction Zones for O Tourism, Z N N O Business & Commerical Sectors CTI A
R ATT
But to compete with the global tourist agenda, you must REGENERATE your built assets in your Downtown core. The World Bank calls this “The Econonmics of Uniqueness” “A
!
Vivir Buen
55kg
Pl Co urin ns at tit io ut na io l n Ri th ght e Ci to ty
y
nt
ig od re Fo ove S
El Buen Vivir? Everyday we struggle to get on the political agenda
Downtown Core
Co m Ci peti ty ris ” tive m Ci Or ty ” ient ed “A Inv City est f me or nt”
“A
When does our new future begin?
To u
QUITO, ECUADOR #1 Tourist Destination in South America!
55kg
UNESCO and Inter-American Development Bank, helps us develop new international imaginings of Ecuador in our capital city of Quito!
Ecuador’s new plan for ‘Good Living’ intended to serve as an alternative to the status-quo global modern economy. It incorporated platforms of the indigenous movement including rights for the protection of Pachamama (Kichwa for Mother Earth) and a right to the city. However, the possibilities to enact a Buen Vivir development model shifted towards a profit-driven economy, affected by international economic conditions.
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An extensive revitalization of Quito for the achievement of a new local, national and global appearance is influenced by global trends to spur growth in the sectors of tourism, commerical and business. Quito’s new future urban development plans of “attraction zones” is a telling sign about the city’s economic plan of increasing income from tourism, which involves cleaning up “informal” sectors of the city.
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#7: Our Market(s), a Socially Sanitized Future?
#8: Tourism’s Expanding Pressures: Neighborhood Economic Makeovers
Mercado San Francisco, a market within the Historic Centre district, encountered a dramatic transformation of its traditional market qualities. Now a totally sanitized market performed by locals for the benefits of tourists, it has lost it’s tradtional dignity and market qualities. Yet, the municipal government authorities see this as Quito’s future market model.
The future plan envisioned for the redevelopment of Mercado San Roque is a telling sign about a combination of forces, including real estate pressures, when cities allow prime sites to be redeveloped by the highest bidder. This process can devestate market sites as they loose their local authenticity when forces like tourism and modern developments work to undermine or displace the existing site.
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#9: Stregthening Social Networks Towards a Collective Future
Cleanse Sanitize Displace
Mercados
Joint Struggles! Public Issues! Our markets, Our city! Towards a dignified future!
In the end, we have a choice between the conditions that affect two different market spaces: one market that sanitzes and displaces everday social life and another market alive with the local community. Here lies a possibility to imagine a future of the latter and to become active in the making for vibrant market spaces.
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