Navigating the urban fringe: Socially embedded adaptation of informal transportation amid Bogotá’s urban gondola investment

This paper capitalizes on the opening of Bogotá’s first urban gondola, locally known as TransMiCable, to examine the socially embedded character that shapes the adaptation of informal transportation markets to urban change. Drawing on GPS-assisted route mapping techniques, field observations, and semi-structured interviews with community leaders, informal transportation providers, and planners, findings reveal that the informal transportation market expanded following the opening of TransMiCable. New route associations were formed to connect the sprawling periphery with TransMiCable, and others reoriented their service toward the project. These adaptations were shaped by a complex interplay of social dynamics, including negotiations involving informal transportation, cooperative heads, neighborhood organizations, and the state, as well as a historical process of informal land development that continues to push the urban fringe outward. While informal transportation undeniably fills service gaps left by conventional public transit, as other scholars have long argued, this study underscores the social dynamics that, together with peripheral urbanization processes, shape how these markets emerge, adapt, and persist in cities in the Global South.