As I cycled along Avenida Reforma one afternoon in autumn 2019, I enjoyed the feeling of overtaking the slow-moving cars on my left. I was using the protected cycleway that is one of Mexico City's most emblematic stretches of cycling infrastructure. Taken together with the double-decker red bus service that runs along the avenue and the public bicycle sharing system, Ecobici, the area is a showcase of a changing mobility paradigm for the megalopolis. The bus, officially part of the Bus Rapid Transit system called Metrobus, is the only double decker used as public transport in the city. Avenida Reforma – a hub for financial institutions, museums and other leisure activities – has helped normalise the use of bicycles for many urban dwellers. ‘When someone working in one of the buildings needs to visit a colleague close by, it is now common for them to take an Ecobici bike, which is way easier than driving, dealing with traffic jams and paying for parking’, Francisca, a former activist turned government official in charge of sustainable mobility, told me before adding: ‘when they do, it is important for others to see them in their suits riding bicycles’. In her mid-thirties, highly motivated and very eloquent, Francisca has made mobility her specialisation. During several events where I heard her speak to audiences, she invited activists to devise ways of measuring the use of bicycles in the city to gather evidence. She deemed this evidence crucial to convince government officials that cycling deserved more investment into infrastructure and better laws. Her mantra was: ‘what is not counted, doesn't count’. After attending various interventions, protests, meetings, talks and dialogues, I grew to appreciate this short phrase as a summary of strategic aspirations among activists. With it, Francisca insisted on using technocratic means (i.e. the means of quantification) to stress the righteousness of the bicycle as a transport option. I also noticed that it was not only activists using such methods, but also workers in non-governmental organisations (NGOs), foreign development agencies and international financial institutions.
In this article, I tell the story about how an alliance between activists, NGOs, international financial institutions, foreign aid agencies and local Mexico City government officials has engaged in a technomoral form of governance for urban mobility. It has done so by using technical information as a fundamental aspect of moral appraisals of several issues within the mobility arena. A few years ago, Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma identified what they called ‘technomoral politics’ in India as ‘the complex, strategic integration of technical and moral vocabularies as political tactics’ (2016: 77). In their view, both state and non-state actors claim to be defenders of rights and champions of the public interest in moral projects which they often translate ‘into technical, implementable terms as laws or policies’ (2016: 77). I refer to governance instead of politics as what occurs in Mexico City's mobility arena is a negotiation among stakeholders to shape new policies and infrastructure. Despite differences and tensions and friction among stakeholder groups – which I refer to collectively as the mobility milieu – they have reached agreements that have brought about noticeable changes in the megalopolis. As I followed meetings, technical presentations, activist marches and protests, I noticed a key characteristic of the technomoral: it was ‘less of an ideological struggle between “right” and “left” parties and groups, and more of a moral struggle between right and wrong’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016: 78).
The aim of the mobility milieu is to deliberate on the priorities for transportation and infrastructure that will determine what streets and avenues look like and how they work. While for some groups this means promoting public transport and cycling, for others it means advancing the use of electric vehicles. All agree that the city needs to change; it is just about deciding how. There are major influential sectors involved in such decisions, especially at the scale of a megalopolis like Mexico City. Construction companies, for example, have for decades pushed the narrative that only large road infrastructure, like bridges, tunnels or elevated expressways, can solve Mexico City's mobility challenges. The automobile industry, on the other hand, promotes the idea of private car ownership as the pinnacle of individual achievement and well-being. But as moving through the city has become ever more difficult due to increased traffic and road congestion, there is urgent need for change. In order to build agreements among all groups involved, some participants have sought to address specific items one by one within the vast network of issues related to mobility. They do so by promoting accords among stakeholders. This step-by-step approach is tactical to ensure advancing a wider agenda while allowing for manageable debates and frictions. I name the resulting concurrences technomoral doctrines. Activists, advocates and foreign development agency workers also start preparing other items in bundles they seek to turn into similar doctrines. I call these aspirational propositions technomoral tenets. I expand on both below.
It is common for drivers to claim, for example, that cycleways cause more traffic because they reduce the space for cars; that reducing parking spaces negatively affects shopping patterns; or that cyclists’ practices pose unnecessary dangers for drivers and pedestrians. Cycling promoters counter these arguments with technical studies that discredit each of those assumptions (Castanier et al 2012; Guy 2009; Knoflacher 2006). To such reasoning, many opponents frequently repeated a mantra through which they sought to neutralise them: ‘this is not Amsterdam’. I heard a similar iteration on several occasions from drivers in protests or interventions. This is why Francisca and other cycling advocates insist on the need to quantify what is happening in Mexico City itself. ‘If we can show how quickly people take up cycling with better infrastructure, then we can convince more people to do it’, Francisca explained to me in an interview, before adding, ‘and the more people take it up, the more normal it becomes for everyone’. For this purpose, her office installed three cyclist counters that were bought from a Dutch company that specialises in the technology. In a public event that marked the end of a meeting of leading cycloactivists from around the world, Mexico City's Minister for Environment referred to such counters: ‘With cycling infrastructure, the logic is that once it is installed more people will use it, so the preliminary measurements that are needed are simply pointing to where demand would be located.’
The ethnographic research on which this article is based took place between 2018 and 2020. I spent eight months in Mexico City attending debates, campaigns, protests and other events within the mobility milieu. I met and interviewed activists, non-governmental organisation (NGO) advocates, government officials, experts, academics and users. During my visits, I cycled alongside activists and recreational cyclists, I used public transport and walked in the city. Although I am originally from Mexico City, I have not lived there since I was a teenager in the 1990s. It had never occurred to me that one day I would be crisscrossing the city on a bicycle. Attention to my own embodied experience in traversing the city via various forms of transportation was crucial for my interpretation of campaigns and assessments.
In what follows, I argue that the arrangement cycloactivists have established with NGOs and other institutional actors has helped achieve significant changes in Mexico City's mobility. These include the building of hundreds of kilometres of cycleways, the improvement of public transport, upgrading pedestrian infrastructure, and amending mobility laws and regulations. In order to develop my arguments, this text is divided into three parts. The first expands on the building blocks of Mexico City's urban mobility technomoral governance, which I call technomoral doctrines and tenets. The second provides an ethnographic context of Mexico City's mobility milieu as an arena of technomoral governance. The third and last are the conclusions pointing towards a novel type of politics that the diplomatically disposed organisations (NGOs, activists, foreign aid agencies and financial institutions) are shaping through their networked technical expertise and moral atonement.
Technomoral Doctrines and Tenets
Early one October morning in 2018, I arrived at a square outside the Alcaldía Cuauhtémoc – one of Mexico City's municipalities – for an event promoting cycling to school. Sarah, who worked at the Institute for Transportation and Development (ITDP), a renowned international mobility NGO with a strong presence in Mexico, came to say hello. She had invited me to the event. I could identify some of her colleagues from ITDP, workers and officials from local and city governments, and a few instructors from a cycling school group. There were also reporters, police officers and observers from different institutions. While I was talking to Sarah, a policeman came to ask her about the plan for the coming hour. At the same time, a group of fifteen teenagers wearing their school uniforms arrived. Three cycling instructors gave each of the teenagers a black T-shirt with a logo and the name of the event: ‘Day of walking and cycling to school’. They then demonstrated some warming up exercises and before long we all went out cycling to the street. The purpose was to pedal together to the teenagers’ school, one kilometre away. We rode alongside the students, while a few police officers and photojournalists followed on motorcycles or scooters. It was not an easy ride for some of the students, who seemed hesitant or not in complete control of the bicycles, betraying that they were not used to cycling on city streets. The early morning traffic was loud and appeared menacing, although students were very much protected by cyclists who had strategically positioned themselves around them.
Once we arrived at the school, the students posed for group photos with a booklet prepared by the NGO, and we all went into an auditorium for a panel presentation to talk about the campaign. Sarah was the master of ceremonies, and duly introduced the topic and speakers, who were Mexico City's Minister of Environment, the head of the school, the director and deputy director of ITDP, and a representative of the Ministry of Health. Sarah spoke about the many benefits of cycling and walking to school, especially highlighting the fact that these students are more attentive during the day than when they are driven or take public transport. ‘Active mobility oxygenates the brain and helps students concentrate and reduces the likelihood of becoming overweight’, she said. Sarah also added that if more children would cycle or walk to school, traffic and air pollution would also be considerably reduced, as thousands of parents drive their children to school every day. In part, the purpose of the activity was to highlight the need for safer cycling infrastructure to reduce any risks for cyclists.
This activity turned out to be the first of an annual campaign that has grown in number of supporters and attention, not only in Mexico City but around the country. It is a good example of a technomoral approach, as in their talks and published material ITDP uses technical information to inform its moral assessment of the need to change the current situation. In the guide they produced in 2018, for example, ITDP highlighted the fact that Mexico held first place in child obesity in the world and that traffic accidents are the highest cause of death for children in the country. Improving road safety, therefore, was imperative.
Drinking a coffee days after the event, Sarah seemed to be much more realistic. ‘There is no magic wand to improve road safety from one day to the other’, she said, ‘but in the meantime what we do is to make sure that urban dwellers and government authorities keep thinking about this so that changes happen’.
From this and other campaigns I started to understand the work of activists and NGO advocates as a complex process of adding layers of accords that may eventually reach a tipping point to achieve changes in government policies or projects as well as in the everyday behaviour of urban dwellers. A common position or understanding was necessary, several of my interlocutors told me in different ways, so that all those involved can support measures – policies, projects, laws or regulations – as acceptable. Because mobility encompasses so many different aspects of life and policy-making, activists and NGO advocates promote basic building blocks that avoid opposition in order to advance their agendas. While anyone would say that cycling and walking to school are good ideas, the necessary changes to achieve this practice in scale are complex.
My choice of ‘technomoral doctrines’ as a name to identify these agreements seeks to set them apart from other issues where no such concurrence occurs. I use doctrine to refer to a set of goals that include measurable data as well as a moral assessment of a desirable direction for government policies. I have identified two doctrines as essential for the mobility milieu: reducing air pollution and improving public transport. These two doctrines are both technically measurable and good for the city. They serve to inform, justify and legitimate a wide variety of policies and projects. Both were reached through debates in the public sphere and through a series of negotiations among stakeholders and actors, sometimes through lawsuits or with highly visible mediatised conflicts. Although they are not legal doctrines, in that they do not establish judicial precedent, they are translated into the ‘rationalized institutional system across state bureaucracies’ (Sharma 2018: S75). They set a pattern of practice and understanding. Although NGOs have been fundamental in working at a level I would call technical diplomacy, from various interviews and comments I heard, I have concluded that local activists have had a major influence in shaping debates in Mexico City's public sphere. This was confirmed to me by the executive director of the Mexican chapter of the World Resources Institute, an international NGO that provides specialised technical expertise for various mobility projects to governments around the world. With decades of experience in Mexico City, the director, a Brazilian woman in her forties, told me cycloactivists have been fundamental in spurring productive synergies in the megalopolis. It was their loud and visible campaigns, she said, that ensured that several important actors in the milieu established dialogues and collaborative projects to enact changes.
The technomoral doctrines only achieved such status when all stakeholders in Mexico City reached agreements about the issues they entailed. In the case of reducing air pollution, cycloactivists carried out a series of public performances to denounce the high levels of contamination in the city and the right of its urban dwellers to clean air. In one case, in 2013, Mexico City activists coordinated a day of protests with numerous groups in twenty-six cities in the country, to denounce the fact that the federal government did not even respect its own environmental guidelines to limit the quantity of pollutants in fuels that end up in the atmosphere. They highlighted the fact that, according to the World Health Organization, 14,700 people died every year due to air pollution in Mexican cities. Regarding the improvement of public transport, on the other hand, the most influential cycloactivist group, Bicitekas, published a report, together with a local neighbour association, about the economic benefits of ensuring that the streets are friendlier to pedestrians and cyclists, including safe and decent (digno) public transport (Tolley 2015). Through campaigns and actions like these, agreements emerged that shaped not only a common consideration of what would be desirable for the city, but also a sense of co-responsibility about it.
Before the said agreements emerged, policies had taken place from above – that is, without involving other actors (Gopakumar 2020). The best example is one used to reduce air pollution, a circulation restriction policy for private vehicles, called Hoy no circula (‘today [your car] does not circulate’). It was started in 1989 and consisted of a one-day-per-week car ban determined by the ending number of the car licence plate. Contrary to what was expected, pollution levels did not go down in a significant manner (Davis 2008), as many middle-class families simply resorted to buying a second vehicle (Guerra and Millard-Ball 2017). While other policies did work better, like relocating heavy polluting manufacturing plants away from the city (Aguilar 2002), pollution levels in the city remained high. For improving public transport, the city government already collaborated with a few international NGOs and aid agencies in redesigning the public transport network, starting with the establishment of the Bus Rapid Transport system (BRT) line in 2004 and adding six more lines in the years since. But the reorganisation of public transport routes took place slowly, facing resistance from both transport entrepreneurs and users. Since the 2010s, however, widespread agreements have emerged that have helped expedite policies and projects. The key difference is that by engaging in various ways, all stakeholders involved have evolved a style of mutual obligation that links technical information and assessments with moral considerations.
A factor that added diplomatic knowhow to negotiations was the sense of urgency from international agencies and intergovernmental panels to address urban greenhouse emissions. This took place after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, a United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. On one side, this meant that large sums of money started flowing to NGOs and development agencies to achieve transformations that would have a lasting impact on the global environment. On the other side, the process of allocation of resources and experimentation included processual methods that enhanced support of local civil society organisations and expertise. This helped shape a global strategy of what I call urban diplomacy, where development assistance flowed directly to city governments for specific changes to reduce greenhouse and polluting emissions, especially to Global South cities (Birch and Wachter 2011; Guzman et al 2020; Venter et al 2019). Mexico City was renowned as the megalopolis with the most polluted air in the world (Gilbreath 2003). It is therefore no wonder that attention and resources flowed in that direction.
International attention and resources, however, do not ensure that local actors assume agendas as their own, several NGO leaders told me. This is where the role of local mobility activists – mainly those promoting the bicycle – proved crucial. Their frequent campaigns and events have ensured public debates on numerous issues around mobility in the city. These deliberations have in turn generated political pressure that resulted in improvements, namely hundreds of kilometres of cycleways, thousands of bicycle signs warning drivers of cyclists’ right of way, massive free bicycle parking lots in key transport hubs, and a comprehensive overhaul of city and national laws and regulations.
In October 2018, I took part in an international meeting of Bicycle Mayors, an initiative by a Dutch social enterprise called BYCS advocating the goal of achieving 50 percent of all city trips by bicycle by 2030 (BYCS 2020). It was only the second international meeting of bicycle mayors, and the first to take place in Mexico City. Bicycle mayors are local cycloactivists who fulfil the criteria set out by BYCS, which means they could be elected by other local activists or selected by BYCS if there is no competition. Apart from their title, they get technical assistance, ideas and contact with Dutch embassies and various aid agencies, which help their mission of promoting cycling. In the October meeting, a mayor from Lebanon said he was impressed after cycling with all the participants in Mexico City: ‘If this can happen here, it can happen anywhere!’ His comment drew laughs and nods of agreement among all participants. Alicia, a renowned activist from Bicitekas in her fifties, who at the time of fieldwork had been Mexico City's Bicycle Mayor since 2017, happily agreed and proudly spoke of local activists’ achievements before leading a workshop on how to carry out effective campaigns.
I met Alicia on many occasions during fieldwork. As an educated and eloquent woman with many ideas, she thrived on taking part in numerous events and dialogues. She divided her time between taking care of her two small children and activism, as she had no other job. In her frequent public talks, daily social media presence and in various conversations we had, Alicia often referred to the hard road ahead, and insisted that much more needed to change for there to be a significant impact in the city. Several other activists shared that caution and were prone to not want to celebrate any type of success. They would keep on working towards reaching new agreements that would take their cause further. From several campaigns and public performances, as well as declarations and documents they shared widely, I identified two issues as bundles of practices and policies that I surmise activists would like to see become doctrines. I call these ‘technomoral tenets’ to distinguish them as propositions. These are ‘discouraging car use’ and ‘promoting active mobility’. These face stronger resistance from influential actors like the auto or construction industries. Nevertheless, activists have strategically used the increasing appeal of cycling in the city to discuss these tenets in the public sphere.
Mobility activists have learned to pay attention to changing trends in public discourses and often allude to wider discussions to justify their positions. During my fieldwork, I noticed the multiplicity of approaches and debates that were shaped by activists with contrasting sources of inspiration and contextualisation. A common thread, however, was the search for specialisation, for learning more technical aspects of street design, public transport and mobility in general. Some activists tended to join the NGOs to hone their technical skills, or they went abroad or signed up to local universities to carry out graduate studies on the subject. Some, like Francisca, also joined government offices to implement the changes they had been campaigning for. This makes Mexico City's mobility milieu a dense web of individuals who share a passion for mobility. For this reason, the next section is dedicated to the mobility milieu as a site of technomoral governance.
Mexico City's Mobility Milieu as a Technomoral Governance Arena
Cycloactivism in Mexico City went from small almost invisible groups in the 1980s and 1990s to a massive network of established groups that are very much present in the public sphere and on city streets. One of the first recurrent activities that made them visible was a weekly ride on Wednesday evenings convened by Bicitekas. This activity, known in Spanish as paseo nocturno (night ride), started in 1998 and still takes place. Through the years it inspired and motivated numerous other individuals to start their own group rides. Today, there are cyclo-excursions every evening of the week. Some convene experienced cyclists wanting to go long distances; others summon inexperienced individuals wishing to explore the city with a group, while yet others are only for friends or acquaintances. ‘In all cases,’ Karina told me over a coffee, ‘part of the purpose is for drivers to see us, cycling . . . some may think: “oh, I'd like to do that”, and others might also start taking us seriously’. Karina, a young single mother of two with a day job in Mexico City's Culture Ministry, is a frequent participant of the Bicitekas night rides. With a friendly and open disposition, she often welcomed new arrivals to the night rides – as she did with me. At the start of my fieldwork, Karina appeared keen to socialise and enjoy the night rides; but as my research progressed, I noticed she took an increasing interest in outright activist pursuits. When I asked if my assessment was right, that she was becoming more of an activist, she agreed without hesitation, and replied: ‘I notice that others can make a difference, and I also want to do my bit.’
The key moment for Mexico City's cycloactivism came in 2004, when the first major infrastructural roadwork was being inaugurated after years of lack of investment in Mexico City. Ironically, the large-scale project in question – an elevated freeway – was financed with international funds to reduce urban greenhouse emissions because, according to the city government, it would ease traffic congestion. The agency in charge of its construction was the Ministry of Environment. As officials were getting ready for the press conference to inaugurate the structure, a band of cyclists rode past the security guards to the area where politicians would speak in front of the press and went straight to the bridge's tarmac to perform a ‘die-in’, or the appearance of having died besides their bicycles (Hayes 2006; Rodriguez 2016). The action, combined with a comprehensive press release explaining their opposition to more infrastructure for motorised vehicles and calling for better conditions for cyclists, made it to several newspapers’ front pages. It gained activists a symbolic seat at the governance table, as they were invited by the Ministry of Environment to explain their position. As a result, the Mexico City government decided to build the first city cycleways using the funds dedicated to the elevated freeway: one to the neighbouring city of Cuernavaca, along an abandoned railway, and another built beside the elevated freeway.
The learning curve that followed was collective, as all the different stakeholders started putting each other to task in seeking better ideas for policies and projects. This communal process shaped the technomoral governance that eventually emerged. Key changes were the approval of a new mobility law and its accompanying regulations by the Mexico City Assembly; the creation of the Ministry of Mobility, which merged several areas that used to be in separate ministries; and the cited cycling infrastructure. Also, dozens of polluting and chaotic bus and minibus routes have been replaced by seven BRT system routes; three aerial lift transport systems (Cablebus) have considerably shortened times for communities in hard-to-reach hills in the outskirts of the city; and the different public transport systems of the city have been integrated in design, information and payment options.
Despite the considerable progress, Mexico City mobility has persistent problems and inequalities. On the one hand, some affluent areas have benefited from several layers of mobility infrastructure. This has been especially the case in the Condesa and Roma neighbourhoods, an area known as the ‘bubble’ (la burbuja), which is a favourite of foreign tourists, digital nomads and so-called expats. When I met Mexico City's Minister of Mobility in his office, he explained to me that so much investment in the ‘bubble’ served as a showcase of what is possible, as it is an area where many people work or visit. Nevertheless, he insisted that there were many projects in progress to ensure that marginal areas had working cycling networks and other infrastructure of their own. This points to how, on the other hand, numerous impoverished areas lack basic infrastructure. Inequalities in mobility – that is, the differential access to modes of getting around in the city – reveal a host of underlying disparities that overwhelmingly affect those less well off (Yazici 2013). Shorter commuting times have become a marker of distinction in the megalopolis (Whitney et al 2023).
All of these issues are also part of deliberations in the public sphere, which emerge in social media debates (as denunciations of abusive behaviour from drivers towards cyclists, for example) or through traditional media channels (after opinion columns or editorial comments in newspapers, radio or television shows). It is therefore common for activists and advocates to seek fairer transport infrastructure that addresses environmental issues (reduction of pollution or noise) together with social issues (reducing inequality). Knowledge production, through studies and assessments of infrastructure and services, is crucial to bridging existing divides and reducing inequalities (Bautista- Hernández 2020). But it needs to be a political objective for such assessments to be influential in new policies and projects. In fact, the technical information and analyses included in many evaluations reveal the priorities set from the start (Vigar 2013). When looked at in detail, many of the studies that abound in mobility circles, with their graphs and statistics, contain moral distinctions about what is desirable and what is not. It is therefore evident that the NGOs involved in Mexico City's mobility milieu are protagonists of the arena's technomoral governance.
The fact that both ITDP and WRI are part of an ecosystem of technical expertise and diplomacy that has characterised highly professional advocacy networks (Stone 2002) does not reveal all their cards on the table. For any visitor to their websites going through their publications, it might appear as if they are solely focused on technical studies that provide expert information for policy-makers. On a closer look, however, one notices the nuances. ITDP, for example, has two recent e-book whose titles already hint at moral evaluations: Mejores calles para México (Better streets for Mexico) and Menos cajones, más ciudad: el estacionamiento en la Ciudad de México (Less parking spots, more city: parking in Mexico City).1 WRI, on the other hand, announces its initiative of ‘New tools for mobility’ as one striving for a ‘secure, inclusive and sustainable mobility’.2 Their discourses, therefore, intertwine technical with moral views.
Perhaps the best example of this is a ranking carried out by ITDP of what it calls ‘ciclociudades’, that is, of cities’ policies, infrastructure, regulations and projects fomenting the use of bicycles (Pérez Campos et al 2022). Originally launched in 2013 as a type of competition among cities in the country, it was devised as a quantification of policies and projects to promote cycling (Medina 2021). The original idea, a member of ITDP told me, had been to spur enthusiasm among city governments to incorporate innovative projects and policies. Every year, the city that got the highest grade received a prize in a public ceremony. In 2015, Guadalajara won the prize, but local activists interrupted the award ceremony, splashing red paint on the government official receiving the prize in a sign of protest. ‘The city had won, but there were still dozens of deaths of cyclists; it made no sense’, one of the activists told me years later. ‘That scandal made us think harder about how to do it’, Sarah, from ITDP, told me over a coffee in the Condesa neighbourhood. After that ceremony, ITDP paused the programme in order to completely redesign it. In 2018, with the help of the World Bank and the German Agency for Development (GIZ), ITDP relaunched it with a novel approach to quantify more elements per city without a single ‘winner’ but allowed for each city to be evaluated with respect to previous evaluations. Crucially, the ranking now also involves activists as well as government officials in collecting the relevant data that ITDP processes. This ensures an engagement of all parties interested in cycling in each city. It also offers a fascinating insight into what can be quantifiable, as civil society organisations and local governments involved qualify with points a series of predefined indicators of eleven thematic areas. These are: environment, institutional capacity, education and promotion, intermodality, investment, monitoring and evaluation, other incentives, city planning, cycleway network, regulation and road safety. ITDP evaluates the different answers for each city and establishes a final value per indicator per city.
With its ranking strategy, ITDP taps into a widespread aspiration for transparent quantitative evaluations including a variety of indicators. But the measurements used are not rooted in objective facts, but in perceptions among a wide variety of actors and experts. This brings their work close to what Latour described when he invited us to consider ‘matters of fact’ as ‘only very partial and . . . very polemical’ (2004: 232) items that are made possible by ‘matters of concern’, which entail a ‘rich set of connections’ (2004: 233) in every branch of scientific work. The mobility milieu, therefore, works as an arena where issues are defined as matters of concern in order to determine priorities for plans, projects and infrastructure. On one hand, this process is a communicational one (Melucci 1996); but on the other hand, it is a moral one (Fluehr-Lobban 2006). NGOs designate indicators that already include moral qualifications of desirable outcomes or undesirable effects. By involving a wide array of actors and experts, NGOs also manage to bring to light issues that had not been identified in government circles as problematic.
As with other forms of technomoral governance, cycling advocacy has relied on a combination of right–wrong distinctions informed by technical indicators. Pollution is wrong, because it is harmful, therefore must be reduced. Public transport is good, so it should be improved. As policy goals, these and other principles do not in themselves mark the swift changes that would solve the root problem. For Gerardo, the deputy director of ITDP in his mid-thirties, ‘they are steps in the right direction’. The key, he told me in his office, was to develop technical arguments that were so convincing and easy to put in practice that they would persuade all actors involved. ITDP has helped shape several policy initiatives with a combination of technical guidance about infrastructure design (for example, defining criteria for cycleways) and its companion legislation. ‘Without a sound legal basis, good proposals for changes in the city can simply remain stuck in the almost-there category’, Miriam told me. Miriam studied urbanism at the national university (UNAM) and started working as an intern in ITDP after applying nine times for the position. After my fieldwork, she was awarded a grant by the British government to study a mobility-related graduate degree and is now back in Mexico working for yet another NGO involved in the milieu: C40.3
The rise of mobility as a matter of concern in the international political arena shows how scientific studies regarding the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions in urban areas were acted on (Banister 2011). Efforts to revamp public and private transport, including rearranging infrastructure and public services, have been packaged in development aid projects within an overarching concept of mobility (Creutzig et al 2015). This has technical implications, as an array of specialised studies in universities, research centres and NGOs have been promoted in order to search for ways of improving systems to reduce emissions. But like any other complex field where policies and projects involve private and public interests, solutions are never straightforward (Hochachka et al 2022). This is where the technomoral governance approach kicks in. NGOs and other international actors have sought to qualify certain levels of emissions as morally wrong for the planet (Markowitz and Shariff 2012). At a local level, such considerations play only a partial role in local solutions, as the equation of what is right and wrong must apply to each city and its inhabitants. In Mexico City, mobility issues are directly related to the hierarchical and unequal social contract through which the megalopolis functions. This is precisely what activists have managed to tap into, by persuading powerful actors and urban dwellers alike of considering changes to urban mobility. That is why Francisca insisted on the need for men in suits to be seen cycling.
The change in how urban policies had been dealt with has been stark. As was the case for most policy areas in Mexico City, everything related to urban mobility used to be part of wider corporatist and clientelist networks. What defined priorities was political support (major road works would help gain the vote of car-owners), and a corrupt web of favours and kickbacks (underground lines were built not following projections of demand or need, but to please construction companies with large contracts). This type of twisted urbanism, which prevailed for most of the twentieth century, was due to the centralisation of power in the single-party regime (Davis 1994). At the end of the century, a combination of circumstances led to the crumbling of the semi-authoritarian regime and towards what has been called a democratic transition. As more political parties competed more openly for office, policy priorities started to change. Government offices increasingly sought to apply technocratic measures to solve accumulated problems. Their implementation, however, proved difficult to achieve. Civil society voices joined public debates over what types of works and policies should be prioritised. Some groups, like NGOs or private consultancy firms, chose to remain in the shadows: in private meetings with politicians and government offices. Others, like activist groups and academics, preferred to intervene openly in public debates, sometimes even loudly and creatively. This took place at the time that international agencies sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by streamlining mobility as a policy-bundling concept. The purpose was to bring together areas of government policy-making that used to belong to different ministries: roadworks, traffic rules and regulations, and public transportation.
Debates about new directions in urban mobility, thus, sought to right the wrongs that had been accumulated after decades of malpractice. Two major issues became guidelines in moral debates on mobility: environment and justice. The first is a general point, crucial for all inhabitants and traversers of the city. Atmospheric pollution due to traffic congestion and inefficiency affects all urban dwellers. Reducing it should be a priority to improve the quality of life for everyone. The second one, however, goes to the heart of a highly unequal city. Those who spend longest commuting in the worst kind of conditions, including with risks of robbery or sexual assaults, already suffer from other scarcities. Changing priorities in urban mobility, thus, became immersed in central discussions about novel social arrangements. International standards relating to what is known as the new urban agenda, seeking to reduce urban inequalities became all the more relevant (Caprotti et al 2017). In this context, the bicycle gained ground as a powerful symbol (Vivanco 2013). As a low-cost mode of transport, its promotion signifies an effort of inclusion and levelled playing field for all urban dwellers. Its promoters, however, have had to face long-standing hierarchies and prejudices through which car-owners seek to maintain their privileges.
Urban mobility cannot be reduced to cycling, but cycloactivists have been fundamental in positioning debates about mobility in Mexico City's public sphere. They have done so by navigating legal and political discourses with technocratic approaches and moral evaluations. In this process, the help from technocratically minded NGOs has been fundamental. They have bridged the work of activists with government officials through policy knowhow (Shore et al 2011; Sosa López 2021), especially attuned to bureaucratic knowledge (Hoag 2011). Activists and advocates thus combined what I have elsewhere referred to as the bodily knowledge of cycling and walking the city (Acosta García 2018) with policy-relevant data-driven knowledge made up of technical measurements (Douglas-Jones et al 2021). It is information distilled into categories and numbers that can be translated into charts and graphics that illustrate collective practices and their implications (Charnley 2010). On top of this, and following a transparency strategy of the Mexican government, the Ministry of Mobility offers data on all Sunday Rides – among other programmes – on its webpage. Sunday Rides are weekly events in which the government closes off several kilometres of streets and avenues to motorised vehicles so that cyclists, runners, skaters and others can use them as public space. At the time of my fieldwork, the length of the circuit was 55 kilometres. The government-provided data, the result of a counting exercise by a few government employees, thus offers anyone the possibility of doing their own analyses or using the data for publications. Every Sunday, furthermore, the organising team would also publish a summary with an official estimate of attendees, which it sent out to newspapers, radio stations and television news programmes. But of course, the ‘data’ referred to here is numerical. Quantities of riders, kilometres, public bicycle uses, time, etc. The obsession for such quantification and measurement responds to an effort of representation through which governments seek ‘communicative objectivity’, to signal a ‘new aesthetic and practice of truth; a valorization of analysis and pattern seeking’ (Halpern 2015: 14). In mobility activism, the patterns sought were an increase in users and trips on bicycles and public transport, which would translate into a decrease in the use of automobiles. Such trends served government mobility officials to legitimise their constant requests for more infrastructure for cyclists and public transport, and for more restrictions for the use of automobiles (like limiting the number of parking spaces).
Conclusions
Mexico City urban mobility has joined the wave of emerging configurations of data-driven and technically transferrable logics of policy-making. The form that such configurations have taken, however, reveal ongoing negotiations over moral views regarding environment, inequality and social justice. The result is a peculiar case of technomoral governance at play, in which activists, NGO advocates, financial specialists, development agents and other stakeholders engage moral agendas with technically implementable terms and information. It is not a case of technologisation of moral perspectives, but rather a technocratic operationalisation of moral standpoints. The scale and complexity of all that is involved in urban mobility (e.g. infrastructure, private and public vehicles, public transport, streets, sidewalks) require manifold negotiations and multilayered agreements. My analysis shows how activists and advocates prepare accords over issues that serve as building-blocks for different policies and projects. Technomoral doctrines and tenets thus function as elements of governance that all stakeholders can agree on. As the lowest common denominator combining technical information and moral perspectives, they provide useful units that help the mobility milieu move forward.
Acknowledgements
Research for this paper was carried out within the Urban Ethics Research Group, funded by the German Research Foundation with Professor Eveline Dürr (DFG Research Grant No. 240207984).
Notes
https://mexico.itdp.org/publicaciones/ (accessed 6 May 2024).
https://es.wri.org/proyectos/nuevas-herramientas-para-la-movilidad (accessed 6 May 2024).
https://www.c40.org/ (accessed 7 May 2024).
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