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.