The Staff

• Urban Sociology
• Architecture and Cultural Heritage
• Visual Anthropology
• Gender and Migration
• Affect Theory

Contested Urban Constructions: Valparaíso’s Ascensores as Cultural Heritage and Critical Infrastructures

The widely visible presence of Valparaíso’s public funiculars (ascensores) is one of the city’s most distinct features – a unique infrastructural response to the natural topography of the bay area and the abundance of steep hills that surround it.

Although they are operating infrastructures, the ascensores are at the same time already musealized. Their competing functions as a mode of transportation for residents and as an attraction for tourist visitors indicates a broader rift between the politics of their material quality and representational practices/interpretations.

What is driving the transformation of Valparaíso’s ascensores from a critical infrastructure for locals to a vehicle for tourist visitors, and what are the sociotechnical implications? – Focusing on the criticality of these systems, and their construction, I examine how access to infrastructure became a contested right. I ask how bodies, power, and mobility intersect within the contemporary city, and what forms cost-effective governance takes on in a highly marketed, urban environment.

My study of the material and discursive maintenance of Valparaíso’s ascensores will link infrastructure and tourism research, contribute to the ongoing debate on how infrastructure is shaped by juridico-political practices and specific visions of modernity, and add ethnographic data on the material experiences on which different social actors, groups, and institutions ground their identities.