Land at the three-year-old airport in Quito, Ecuador, grab a taxi into the city — and your driver is likely to tell you about the old airport. The one right in downtown Quito that’s now Parque Bicentenario, the city’s biggest park. The transformation is one of many to the capital’s infrastructure in recent years. Some of those projects have come with more controversy than others, and when it comes to mobility, that’s not a surprise. How we move around our cities is inseparable from concerns about employment, housing and social justice.
That new airport got a workout this week, as tens of thousands of people who are thinking about the future of cities arrived in Quito for Habitat III, a United Nations conference on urban development that could influence the planning world for the next 20 years. Watch Next City’s Quito Dispatch below to hear experts and officials attending the event talk about transportation design for a more equitable future.