Lumbisí and the suburban (re)colonisation of Quito’s valleys: de-facto housing policies and indigenous dwelling struggles in plurinational Ecuador

Abstract

Building upon ongoing engagement with leaders, advocates, and inhabitants of Lumbisí and other communal territories in Quito’s Metropolitan District, this contribution exposes the city’s suburbanisation as state-sponsored (re)colonisation. Through qualitative socio-spatial analysis, we unpack the relation between Quito’s de-facto housing policy and Lumbisí’s dwelling struggles with three main aims: (1) to unravel the involvement of housing and land policies in the predatory transformation of Quito’s north-eastern valleys; (2) to illustrate their impact on Indigenous dispossession, elimination, and assimilation; and (3) to uncover how dwelling forms elicit and articulate dissent. Setting the grammars of dissent mobilised by local, regional, and national constituencies of Ecuador’s Indigenous Movement in dialogue with settler colonial theory, we reposition ongoing struggles within enduring colonial trajectories. Our case study of Lumbisí complexifies existing frameworks of gentrification, neoliberal urbanisation and capital accumulation. It foregrounds how Quito’s de-facto housing policy systematically relies on communal territories to externalise demands for land and labour, instrumentalising them as ‘informal’ settlements or ‘vacant’ land to extract ‘affordable’ housing and ‘natural’ assets. The (re)colonisation of Quito’s north-eastern valleys thus unfolds as the ongoing physical and ontological occupation of Indigenous territories. Within this context, comunas simultaneously absorb transformations and articulate dissent.

KEYWORDS: :

• Word
• Quito
• Pueblo Kitu Kara
• Indigenous territories
• settler colonial urbanisation
• dwelling struggles

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Fernando Cortez, Darío Iza, Nanci Simba and Floresmilo Simbaña, alongside UCCIL’s communal councils, inhabitants and interlocutors for their continued insights and generosity. We appreciate the constructive feedback and suggestions provided by Lorena Burbano, Ma. Paula Granda, and the blind peer reviewers, which significantly helped us shape and improve this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Fernando Cortez, walking interview. Lumbisí, 19.08.2021. All interview quotes are our translation.

2 Our understandings draw from the ongoing engagement of our action-research team with Pueblo Kitu Kara leadership, as well as elected representatives, inhabitants, and intellectuals from different communal territories in Quito. Since 2021, this has included the main author’s extended periods of ethnographic participant observation in La Toglla, Tola Chica, Alangasí, Santa Clara de San Millán and Lumbisí, alongside continued dialogue and exchange with key collaborators in the form of personal communication and semi-structured interviews.

3 90 is the number used by PKK. Throughout the text, we use the term comunas to refer to all communal territories, including comunidades.

4 See also Bustamante (1992).

5 CENEDET in Spanish.

6 Not even the fact that Bolaños Pamba’s most prominent spokespeople share last names with Ambrosio Ninahualpa—last Kitu-Kara cacique or chief of these territories—has been enough to dispel accusations of so-called informality.

7 Historical base map from: AHN (1762). Medida o mapa topográfico de las tierras que poseen los indígenas de Lumbisí y las monjas de la Concepción [Map]. Serie Indígenas. (ANH.MP.01.04.11.IND.0104, Caja 79, exp. 1, p275). Archivo Histórico Nacional, Quito, Ecuador.

8 Though unusual in Ecuador, we use the “-x” suffix to neutralise gendered nouns.

9 We borrow “siege” and “invasion” from Kitu Kara intellectual Floresmilo Simbaña. Interview, 22.08.2021. Videocall, 07.04.2023.

10 Fernando Cortez, videocall. 26.03.23.

11 Notably, the January 2022 landslides in ancestral Santa Clara de San Millán, in Quito’s centre, warned other comunas and evidenced the racialised biopolitical division of who gets to live and die in the urban.

12 Yolanda and Ma. Juliana, interview. Lumbisí, 19.08.2021. Pseudonyms used.

13 See Note 9.

14 Darío Iza, videocall. 06.04.23.

15 The term pelucón is used in Ecuador to name the local elite. It references the pelucas, or wigs, used by European baroque aristocracies.

16 Yolanda and Ma. Juliana, interview. Lumbisí, 19.08.2021. Pseudonyms used. See also Rayner (2017) and AE (2017).

17 https://botaniqo.uribeschwarzkopf.com/Accessed 05.04.2023.

18 See Note 8.

19 https://blog.sanpatricio.com.ec/punto-por-punto-el-desarrollo-de-san-patricio-smart-living Accessed 04.04.23.

20 https://www.sanpatricio.com.ec/san-patricio-gardens Accessed 04.04.2023.