A Captivating Place

Abstract Cuenca, Ecuador, is a city that captivates very different people, from popular entrepreneurs to North American expats, in large part due to the UNESCO-designated heritage architecture of the old town and associated promises of authenticity, belonging, and success. Beyond established, often reductionist assessments of this kind of context in terms of tourist simulacra and gentrification, I explore the city as a more complex ecology of multi-directional, contingent capture. This ecology, I argue, is shaped by the iconic, in its double sense of city emblems and semiotic signs. Icons capture people and their diverse investments—from attention and affect to money and life projects—while also offering them the possibility of creative appropriation to redirect the trap.