eCuenca, Urban Electromobility Plan (GIZ / TUMIVolt)

Year: 2021–2023  |  Client: GIZ (TUMIVolt) — Municipality of Cuenca (DGM)  |  Country: Ecuador (Cuenca)

Cities Forum led the co-creation of Cuenca's Urban Electromobility Plan, branded "eCuenca", as the pilot city of GIZ's global TUMIVolt programme, part of the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative (TUMI). Rather than delivering a plan to the city, the assignment was built to build the plan with the city: a roadmap to 2030 constructed together with a municipal working team through training, mentoring and expert support, so that Cuenca would own both the strategy and the capability to implement it.

Our approach

The work unfolded in four phases, concept and baseline, vision and objectives, measures and study cases, and an implementation framework with indicators, delivered through more than fourteen hands-on workshops and expert-led sessions with the city's Dirección Municipal de Gestión de Movilidad. The baseline was grounded in Cuenca's realities: a UNESCO World Heritage city of some half-million-plus inhabitants with the highest per-capita car ownership in Ecuador, around 1.5 million tonnes of CO₂e a year (over half from ground transport), and an existing platform to build on, a tram operating since 2020, a public bike system and a growing cycle network alongside Complete Streets and superblock plans.

What we delivered

From this foundation the plan defined a vision, objectives and a concrete package of measures, tested through three real pilots: a total-cost-of-ownership analysis of electric buses and taxis, an assessment of e-bikes as a car replacement, and a last-mile logistics pilot with the municipal pharmacy company Farmasol. The plan was aligned with major parallel investments, including a KfW-financed low-emission historic-centre project and the EU SOLUTIONSplus initiative, and produced as a professionally designed final document.

Impact

eCuenca gave the city a robust, locally owned roadmap to decarbonise mobility, together with a trained team and a set of validated pilots to begin implementation. As the flagship of TUMIVolt, it also became a reference for other cities, and consolidated Cities Forum's Latin American electromobility practice, demonstrating a distinctive model in which capacity-building, mentoring and expert delivery combine to leave a city genuinely able to carry the transition forward itself.