Counterepistemologies of Insecurity and Renewal

Hernando had gestured to Colombia’s prolonged history of violent displacement, a history intimately tied to the country’s tumultuous and rapid urbanization during the twentieth century. With guerrilla and paramilitary violence reaching new heights by the turn of the century, the desplazado (internally displaced person) had become a ubiquitous urban figure, one that populated everyday spaces and the public imagination. The phrase “the displaced of Manzana Cinco” reappeared many times in conversations with local residents and in their communications with government agencies. By calling on the imagery of rural warfare and dispossession, property owners reframed the ostensibly technical processes of expropriation and redevelopment as forms of violence. They mobilized long-standing repertoires of insecurity and directed them back at the state and its instruments of governance. If official epistemologies had previously rendered city spaces and populations into battlefields to be pacified and reconquered, residents now construed bureaucratic artifacts and legal instruments as themselves constituting a terrain of danger and insecurity. In this way, they condemned one of the most central aspects of Colombia’s history of warfare: what Francisco Gutiérrez Sanín calls the “interweaving of armed extortion and juridical technique.”²

In one sense, the Manzana Cinco project was emblematic of a form of “structural violence … enacted through everyday practices of bureaucracy,” to borrow Akhil Gupta’s terms.³ In this vein, one local scholar described the plan as a form of “quotidian … silent and slow violence.”⁴ Bureaucratic violence appears in this context as an arbitrary, indirect effect of the dispersed and contradictory operations of the state. This is a form of violence defined by the lack of discernible intentions and identifiable perpetrators. But in Manzana Cinco, far from unaware, passive targets, residents proved to be acutely attuned to the violence of bureaucratic paperwork and procedures. They actively traced and rendered visible the specific contexts, means, and actors responsible for those otherwise diffuse modes of structural violence.⁵ Ultimately, they unsettled reified visions of the state as they aimed to tease apart the various governmental arms, agents, and things involved in their dispossession.⁶

The materiality and aesthetics of bureaucracy—what Julie Chu calls the “atmospherics of law”—became central to locals’ critical elaboration of and response to urban renewal.⁷ Property owners did not merely recognize the extent to which the things and forms of bureaucracy crucially mediated processes of destruction and displacement.⁸ They also conceptualized official documents and notices as perilous bureaucratic artifacts and, in so doing, denounced institutional injustices and assigned political accountability. Through the production of knowledge about urban bureaucracy and law, residents “performatively materialize[d]” official artifacts and spaces into sources of insecurity and transformed them into a medium for sociopolitical dissent.⁹ This chapter seeks to illuminate such modes of street expertise and reveal their significance and limits as counterepistemologies of urban planning and renewal.

The displaced of Manzana Cinco were ultimately unsuccessful in their battle to block the project or obtain greater compensation, but their legal engagements rendered visible the lopsided negotiations surrounding downtown renewal. Moreover, they proved to be powerful enactments of dissent with lasting effects on the city’s circuits of urban expertise and policymaking. At the same time, such modes of opposition were predicated on and constrained by an epistemics and affectivity grounded on liberal conceptions of property and the state. In this sense, residents’ knowledge of insecurity and its materialization in the things and spaces of urban governance emerged as a platform for the praxis of urban politics, albeit one constrained by the grammar of warfare and victimhood.

In the following pages I attend to the ways in which the epistemic engagements of the displaced of Manzana Cinco were mediated by the forms and materiality of social hierarchies, property regimes, and state sovereignty. The crucial question here is how people composed and materialized knowledges out of the fabric of everyday urban life and what kind of politics such knowledges shaped. How did the residents of Manzana Cinco come to think of their neighborhood as violently razed land? Why did bureaucratic documents and officials appear to them as agents of terror? How did they come to view themselves as victims of violent displacement, and with what political implications?

In one sense, these are phenomenological questions about the lived experience of inhabiting the city and, more specifically, about how dwelling shapes ways of knowing the urban world.¹⁰ It was through their everyday, practical orientations that residents encountered bureaucratic and urban things as materializations of violence and insecurity. “Orientations,” as Sara Ahmed argues, “shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward.”¹¹ Individuals’ locations vis-à-vis Colombia’s sedimented histories of violence fundamentally shaped residents’ knowledges and those knowledges’ materialization in a landscape of urban things and bureaucratic artifacts. Social and political relations mediated the constitution of spaces and objects as particular sites and instruments of warfare.¹²

In Manzana Cinco, residents’ pursuit of middle-class urbanity—a sense of respectability and industriousness—was closely entangled with regimes of individual private property, racialized and class-inflected notions of social propriety and progress, and ideals of state legitimacy and authority. The “warscape” that emerged was thus not unlike renderings of Colombia’s armed conflict centered on ideas of state absence and the weakness of law.¹³ In this manner, property owners directed their critique of institutional violence primarily at indolent bureaucrats, corrupt functionaries and judges, and inept officials, and not at the juridico-political and technical logics behind downtown renewal. The implication was that displacement would have been avoided had the law been enacted in more technically sound and legitimate ways. Locals’ grievances were thus less about the violence of renewal and more about not having been spared by the city’s bureaucracy given their aspirational status as lawful, propertied citizens.

Significantly, many of the block’s residents had arrived in the area in recent decades to achieve their own investment and development ambitions. “My neighbors were also to blame,” Hernando once told me reluctantly, explaining that they had demolished “many beautiful homes” long before planners set their sights on the area. So even though residents experienced the materialities of bureaucracy and renewal as forms of warfare, theirs was not a critique of the insidious links between state power, property regimes, and long-standing violence and injustice. Instead they denounced an allegedly rogue institution, the ERU, and appealed to the state as victims of “illegal” and “irregular” operations that had imperiled their entitlement to property and development. Local critiques of bureaucratic and juridical insecurities were thus more about securing existing visions of urban order, legality, and progress than about directly challenging planning epistemologies and structures of dispossession. A central question I explore here, then, is what it means for urban political horizons when renewal is confronted as bureaucratic violence and the defense of property rights is mediated by the class and racial politics of liberal citizenship.

Waiting for the State

The story of Francisco, one of Manzana Cinco’s largest property owners, brought into focus the paradoxes of local epistemic practices. Francisco was a savvy businessman in his eighties, an “old fox,” as a city planner once told me, who had been buying property on the block for decades, ultimately becoming the owner of one-sixth of its total area. Although his business had seemingly seen better days, Francisco’s social and economic standing set him apart from his neighbors. Educated as a chemist, he had worked for years in pharmaceutical and textile firms in Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city and the capital of Antioquia. He had moved to Bogotá in the 1970s and decided to “put [his savings] into something that would not lose value.” This was the beginning of his career as a downtown real estate investor and independent business owner. He ran a plastics manufacturing company in a middle-class residential neighborhood to the west of the city center and lived in an affluent, leafy district in north Bogotá.

We met in the two-story, modest concrete house in west Bogotá that he had converted into his small factory. The living and dining rooms and kitchen were now the shop floor, and the second-floor bedrooms and den had been turned into offices. Francisco recounted his long history in Manzana Cinco in a small meeting room that looked out into a larger office in which two aging secretaries counted wads of bills surrounded by mid-century metal desks, overflowing file cabinets, and typewriters. Dressed in a slightly worn, classic suit, he sat back and talked slowly in a deep, throaty voice. The formality of his speech and the way he dragged out the ends of his sentences evoked the figure of the downtown cachaco—an early twentieth-century archetype of the cultivated and cosmopolitan Bogotano. As our conversation unfolded and Francisco poured glasses of whiskey, his Antioqueño origins became more palpable in his frequent shift to the melodic accent of paisas, as Antioqueños are known, and, more significantly, in his enactment of paisa ideals of self-reliance and pragmatic industriousness.

“It was a heist,” Francisco stated. “[The city] violated the law at each step along the way.” He drew on detailed knowledge of urban law, fiduciary trusts, and real estate development to describe a string of bureaucratic manipulations and abuses. If his neighbors had channeled their middle-class aspirations into their denunciations of bureaucratic violence, Francisco’s critique of urban renewal was colored by his experience as a real estate investor and his ambitions as a developer. In his account, he gave full expression to the liberal ideals of property and citizenship that residents had tacitly upheld in their construal of renewal as bureaucratic insecurity. Crucially, his outlook on urban life brought him tangibly close to the epistemic space inhabited by city planners and real estate promoters. In a narrative tinged with longing for both a bygone past and an unfulfilled future, the city center emerged for him as a malleable medium for the materialization of ideals of nationhood, progress, and sociopolitical belonging.

Much like urban experts, in his navigations of the urban world Francisco rendered the city into an ensemble of legal and sociopolitical forms ready to be reimagined and reassembled.¹⁴ After arriving from Medellín, he had initially considered real estate investments in the downtown neighborhood of La Perseverancia. This was a barrio obrero that had been built over decades by workers at the Bavaria beer-brewing factory, one of Colombia’s oldest and largest companies, and had eventually become a working-class enclave surrounded by museums, financial institutions, and up-and-coming residential neighborhoods. In a manner resembling planning fieldwork techniques, or what some experts framed in security terms as intelligence gathering (see chapter 2), Francisco had carried out “detective work,” he told me, spending time in bakeries and shops to get a sense of local sociospatial dynamics. What he saw in his stints as a neighborhood ethnographer—following the gossip and quarrels on the street, as he put it—turned him away. Noting that I, as an anthropologist, would appreciate his forensic reasoning, he explained: “So what was the problem? That La Perseverancia, and here comes the anthropological part, does not work [for real estate development]. It is subdivided into very small lots with all kinds of family disputes, possessions [posesiones], and property tenure issues. In other words, the only way to do it is with a very firm official intervention; it is the only way to transform that neighborhood.”

This led him to Las Aguas, where he purchased his first property from a “broke intellectual” who lived in an aging republican-style house. Francisco allowed the man to stay as his tenant, as he continued to buy adjoining properties during the next fifteen years. During this period, he crafted a vision for the block in which investment agendas became indistinguishable from a larger political project. At that point, Francisco said to himself, “I’m going to take care of this block, because this is a truly tremendous block for Bogotá to shine globally.” Ironically, what he envisioned then was not far from what the ERU would seek to implement more than twenty years later at his and his neighbors’ expense.

In 1983, Francisco drew on his personal connections with a member of the city council from the Liberal Party to propose a redevelopment plan for the block. He drafted a study on the neighborhood’s socioeconomic conditions and its potential as a cultural and tourism hub. The eighty-page proposal, which included statistical appendices, urban plans, and relevant legislation, was titled “Guidelines for the Project of a Metropolitan Cultural, Recreational, and Tourism Center in Las Aguas Neighborhood.” The typed manuscript—which Francisco located in his overflowing file cabinets after a few days of searching and shared with me—followed the conventions of a governmental report, as well as well-established planning narratives about urban decay and renewal. According to the study, renovating the area would restore “national dignity and pride” to what had become downtown’s “chaotic environment of abandonment, filth, and misery.” Las Aguas was ideally suited to these purposes, the document continued, because it concentrated “touristic, landscape, recreational, economic, and social values” that would “come to light in all their splendor” through an adequate legal and spatial intervention. The proposal went nowhere, and Francisco was left sitting on several properties for decades as he waited for a new opportunity to come along.

While Francisco had come to understand Manzana Cinco as a “government heist” and a form of “legal theft,” his critiques of the plan and visions for the block ultimately obscured the constitutive violences and inequalities of Colombia’s liberal sociopolitical order. In contrast to the ERU’s mainly speculative project, he argued, his project would materialize “the coexistence [convivencia] of social classes and political ideas” and help “erase the image of Colombia as a violent country.” His use of the term convivencia was revealing. It recalled a policy trend, inaugurated in Bogotá by Mayor Antanas Mockus in the late 1990s and taken up by city administrations around the country, that focused on the creation of a so-called convivencia ciudadana (citizen coexistence) and cultura ciudadana (citizen culture). Aimed at fostering civism and law-abiding behavior through pedagogical interventions, such initiatives elided questions about entrenched structures of inequality and violence.¹⁵ Convivencia also had an earlier history from when political elites of the Liberal and Conversative Parties formed the Frente Nacional in the late 1950s to share power for almost two decades. Also known as convivencia, this period embodied a “politics of civility” that rested on long-standing and violent hierarchies and geographies of class and racial difference.¹⁶

Tellingly, one of my last conversations with Francisco took an unexpected turn as we talked about the failures of the city’s bureaucracy and the difficulties of meaningful political engagement. “We have to recover our Hispanidad!” he exclaimed, looking at me intently with his small gray-blue eyes as he described Colombia’s troubled national identity, where “‘Indio’ is an insult and ‘Spaniard’ is shameful.” His yearning for Iberian culture bore the marks of what Aníbal Quijano calls the “coloniality of power”: the Eurocentric systems of differentiation and domination that have defined knowledge production, state making, and capitalist development in Latin America from the conquest to the present.¹⁷ Within such long-standing elite regimes of mestizaje—where racial mixing allegedly held the promise of whitening—Antioqueños like Francisco had been portrayed “as intrepid white pioneers who civilized a wild frontier” through a vibrant coffee-growing economy, and as forerunners of a brand of industrial capitalism based on moralistic paternalism.¹⁸ Francisco channeled this entrepreneurial spirit of civism and progress when he told me that “the best way to optimize the utility of any [real estate] operation [was by] making it useful not only for oneself but also for the community.”

In saying this, he reached back to a conception of the public good that perpetuated exclusions under ideals of civic pride and economic efficiency. Here again, Antioquia’s history of urbanization was instructive. As a successful industrial center and national model of technocratic governance, the regional capital of Medellín had been built on “the careful balance of elite hegemony and economic access,” in the words of historian Mary Roldán.¹⁹ Investments in public services, education, and homeownership were very effective at keeping popular mobilization and contentious class politics at bay.²⁰ At the same time, Medellín’s elitist and moralistic establishment proved incapable of absorbing the growing numbers of urban poor within this regime of control and conformity. Mounting exclusion along with a rising drug trade created the conditions for explosive urban violence in the city’s tugurios (shantytowns) by the 1980s and 1990s and for an increasingly distrusted and coercive state apparatus. These trajectories of power and exclusion came to mind not only as Francisco talked about his vision of convivencia and a profitable “common good” but also in his decrying of the neighborhood’s “slumification [tugurialización],” as he put it in his 1983 plan, and what he described as the “unfortunate necessity of displacing a certain number of inhabitants from the area” in order to fulfill its civic and economic potential. His critique of Manzana Cinco as bureaucratic theft was, therefore, far from an indictment of state authority and existing property regimes. Instead, Francisco seemingly invoked the restoration of statehood and its attendant ideals of property and citizenship. For him, the block took the form of a beleaguered and abandoned territory in need of state presence and intervention. As he put it, “I saved those lots for the state for over thirty years!”

In a sense, then, he framed his role in downtown as a proxy of the state, an agent of sovereignty working toward the future materialization of ideals of governance, property, and belonging. Such views resonated with the violent contestations over territorial control that have been integral to state making in Colombia from urban shantytowns to rural areas. Within this history of fragmented sovereignty, the state has emerged as an always tentative proposition, a claim to rule taken up and disputed by a host of actors—from guerrilla and paramilitary forces to criminal organizations and business syndicates.²¹ In critiquing the ERU, Francisco was thus opposing what he construed as a competing, illegitimate actor seeking to exercise some form of sovereignty: “The ERU, as an institution, can offer public-sector jobs, construction licenses, administrative privileges. And what can we property owners offer? Nothing!” In questioning Manzana Cinco as a political project, as well as the motives of the ERU, he nonetheless evoked the image of an idealized state modeled after his conceptions of convivencia and the common good, with the exclusions they implied. He had been waiting for the state—as he put it, “taking care of those lots”—only to become the victim of an illegitimate bureaucratic takeover orchestrated by the ERU.

The Apple of Discord

Such histories of conflict and sovereignty were mediated by the block’s material and cultural transformations. Its sensorial and semiotic qualities had become closely entangled with local understandings of state and property and had ultimately shaped residents’ critiques of bureaucratic insecurity. After Manzana Cinco was launched in 2006, the block remained under construction for more than a decade, its gradual ruination embodying the conflicts and contradictions of the plan. Hernando and one of his neighbors had managed to keep their houses standing for several years, eluding demolition through tactics of evasion and making visible the intense legal confrontation that residents and the city had been embroiled in. For an even longer period of time, half the block had remained empty as the administration scrambled to create a project for a public amenity. This void was significant, as Manzana Cinco had been originally launched and partly justified with a plan to construct a cultural center funded through Spanish international cooperation. After six years, and as a result of Spain’s 2008 financial crisis, the Spanish government had ultimately canceled the project. For the next few years, the only visible development on the expropriated land was the construction of the upscale residential and commercial complex. The half-demolished block was the crystallization of the brand of entrepreneurial urbanism epitomized by the ERU:²² an opaque assemblage of public and private partners that invoked “social interest” (interés social) and mobilized urban laws to create new land for real estate speculation.²³

By 2018, there was almost no trace of the old Las Aguas block. Thirty properties had been demolished, two towers for high-end student housing had been inaugurated, and the construction of a public cinema and media library (cinemateca distrital) was almost complete. The housing complex stood on three levels of commercial space, including brand-new Starbucks and Juan Valdez coffee shops with outdoor seating. Signs advertising the new development, known as CityU, were visible around the area, and private security with dogs guarded the “permeable public spaces”—a term employed by designers—at the base of the structures. One afternoon I walked along the storefronts with Camilo, an expert in urban law and redevelopment who had followed the Manzana Cinco plan closely. As we talked about the uneasy juxtaposition of private and public spaces—itself a clear embodiment of the character of the plan and its implementation—Camilo shared his sense of discomfort. “It feels strange to be here,” he said. He hinted at the erasure of the former neighborhood and its social and material histories. Only the early twentieth-century stone-and-brick bridge uncovered during previous rounds of construction remained under overgrown grass and on the edge of the glistening new complex. It was an uncomfortable ruin that pointed to the block’s history and to the disappearance of almost all traces of the people and things that had been there before.

For the residents of Manzana Cinco, the material and symbolic resignification of their neighborhood—the layering over and reinscribing that it became subject to—was from the start a contentious affair. For many locals, the official nomenclature employed in the plan—“Manzana Cinco”—had itself constituted an affront, a stripping down of the local histories and sociocultural practices tied to Las Aguas. Property owners responded to official categorizations by talking about the block as the city center’s “apple/block of discord.”²⁴ Beyond its religious and mythological symbolism and its tacit critique of the conflicts unleashed by the block’s reconstruction, the expression was connected to local history. Residents were referring to Don Chinche, one of the most popular shows on Colombian television, which aired from 1982 to 1989 and was set in one of the neighborhood’s old houses and in several locations on the block. The original and less-known title of the series had been Manzana de la Concordia (The apple/block of Concord), a reference to the nearby historic downtown neighborhood of La Concordia but also, according to the show’s director Pepe Sánchez, a celebration of local forms of solidarity among unemployed and impoverished urban residents, most of them rural migrants from across the country.²⁵

The sitcom followed a construction worker and jack of all trades, nicknamed Don Chinche, in his daily exploits to makes ends meet in the bustling city: a paradigmatic urban rebuscador. In contrast to most telenovelas, the show was unique in its neorealist style; it was filmed with a single movie camera in local interiors and exteriors and it documented everyday life in a working-class barrio. It was not only a rare primetime TV portrayal of working-class urban culture but also a hopeful depiction of rural migration and ordinary life in the midst of the ravages of war and urban violence.²⁶ The show, as Sánchez explained in an interview, reflected the “great exodus toward the capital … that had started in the 1950s,” subtly weaving social critique into humorous, everyday urban scenes.²⁷ An example of this was the story of the recurring character Doña Berthica, the owner of a small neighborhood restaurant who had come from the department of Huila with her son Eutimio, Don Chinche’s sidekick. Over the course of the series, it emerged that Doña Berthica’s first husband had been killed by the police in her rural village. Eutimio, in turn, seemed constantly out of place, with his pet pig and provincial naiveté, in his daily adventures in the big city.²⁸ Without making it obvious, the comedy exposed, arguably for the first time in primetime television, the everyday trials of displaced populations in the capital. In 1983, one year after the show aired, an edition of Semana magazine illustrated the underlying relationship between the series and the country’s deepening violence. The issue featured Don Chinche on its cover, calling it a “TV phenomenon,” while also publishing the magazine’s first article on the rise of the infamous drug cartel leader Pablo Escobar, the “Robin Hood Paisa.”²⁹ Don Pablo, as people called him, would become an emblematic antihero in Colombia’s popular imagination: a “pariah capitalist” who amassed extraordinary wealth and became both the benefactor of the urban poor and a ruthless criminal with a penchant for excessive violence.³⁰ Don Chinche, in contrast, emerged as an ordinary hero who responded to the injustices of Colombian society with the humility of manual labor, the solidarity of rural life, and the cunning of the urban hustle.³¹

In referring to the “apple of discord” and remembering Don Chinche, residents were doing more than simply recalling the neighborhood’s quaint history. They indexed an urban ethos, a lived experience and atmosphere linked to working-class urban culture and its enduring rural sensibilities. According to one of the few scholarly analyses of Don Chinche, the series presented an “urban sensorium,” a form of affective knowledge that resonated with audiences precisely because of how it evoked viewers’ everyday life and engaged their aesthetic and sensorial dispositions.³² These sensibilities constituted an epistemological, performative, and aesthetic medium that became integral to Manzana Cinco residents’ political outlook and opposition to the plan. Hernando and his neighbors’ tactics of deferral, the way they shrewdly avoided eviction proceedings over several months, could very well have been the plot of a Don Chinche episode. The deployment of street knowledge and the idea of outsmarting authorities and developers, a key trait of the urban rebuscador, became integral to how residents confronted the threat of renewal and navigated bureaucratic and juridical insecurities.³³ On one occasion, for instance, Hernando was telling me about his frustrating encounters with ERU officials when he called me to the side and lowered his voice as he pulled a small recording device from the front pocket of his shirt. He whispered that he was on to city officials and had been recording meetings to gather evidence of their inconsistencies and deceits.

Residents became attuned to the power differentials encoded in bureaucratic performances, and they embodied the middle-class aspirations at the core of Don Chinche’s humorous caricatures. Another scene recounted to me by various residents was their first public audience with senior officials from the ERU, who informed them about the urban project and their inevitable fate. One elderly property owner told me with indignation how the agency’s director had talked down to her and her neighbors, how the woman had “scolded them” and boasted about her familiarity with cities across the world. The condescending official had implied that residents did not know enough about contemporary urbanism to understand the significance of the plan. The elderly woman then recalled with satisfaction how the son of one of the block’s oldest and most well-to-do property owners responded to the functionary, telling her that although he had just returned from graduate studies in England, he, unlike her, did not “humiliate people or raise his voice.” The anecdote, which I heard several times, pointed to residents’ vindications of the dignity of working-class propertied citizenship and their willingness to question official expertise and its classist overtones.³⁴

These performances were intimately connected to a distinctly working-class and bucolic urban sensorium of sights, smells, and textures. Most residents opposed the new sensory regimes of urban renewal and longed for the neighborhood’s disappearing stores, restaurants, community spaces, and distinctive architectural forms. Miguel, a longtime baker and one of the first residents to be evicted from Manzana Cinco, dwelled on the neighborhood’s “traditional [típica]” atmosphere. I met him on an April morning in 2012 in his busy cafeteria: an old terra-cotta plaster-and-tile house similar to his now-demolished home across the street. Amid the loud clatter of coffee cups and plates, and with the smell of fresh bread and empanadas wafting from the ovens and deep fryers in the back, Miguel recounted his arrival in Las Aguas in the late 1950s. Like many others, he had come from the countryside to reunite with relatives who lived in the area. He settled into a large house in which he and his family ran a successful tejo court for decades (tejo is a popular sport with pre-Columbian roots in which a metal disc is thrown from a distance into a box with clay and gunpowder packets that explode upon impact). Lining the streets, he recalled, were stores, cafeterias, and piqueteaderos—barbecue restaurants typically associated with the countryside and rustic settings. While some piqueteaderos continued to operate in the area, the more common practice among local residents in recent years was to pull out grills onto the sidewalks in the afternoon and sell food to university students and passersby. Hernando, for instance, had described this as one of the activities he engaged in to earn income until his very last days in his family house.

Also close by, Miguel noted, had been the “famous chichería El Gallo.” This reminiscence was evocative, as chicha, a traditional fermented maize beverage that was consumed widely in Bogotá, was associated with rural habits, backwardness, and disorder. Its production had been banned in the late 1940s as part of the government’s modernizing reforms. The “battle against chicha” was also an important step for the expansion of the beer industry and other “hygienic” alcoholic beverages—a history particularly meaningful in Las Aguas as the home of one of the city’s main beer factories.³⁵ By the twenty-first century, the legacy of chicha halls was still visible, though it was rapidly fading in downtown’s dwindling beer parlors and pool halls. These aesthetic and sensorial qualities were integral to what Miguel described as Las Aguas’s “traditional” and “authentic” character. Like many of his neighbors, he invoked Don Chinche to make this point: “This neighborhood was so traditional that Don Chinche was filmed here. My house, the historic house that was taken away from me, was the restaurant of Doña Berthica [in the show]. It had a huge courtyard and the entrance was one and a half meters wide. They filmed inside and around the block, in the stores and cafeterias.” Calling attention to the material textures of these urban atmospheres, Miguel remembered with sadness how the very matter out of which the neighborhood had been built had painfully disintegrated during the demolition: “When they knocked down my house you could see the eighty-centimeter walls were all made of pure stone!”

Most residents, however, recognized that the dissolution of these affective and material ensembles had started long before the Manzana Cinco plan. Small apartment buildings had been built in the 1970s and 1980s, and many owners had willingly demolished their own properties to create parking lots. Gustavo, a former carpenter and restaurant owner, described the many defunct businesses that had dotted the area: a hat factory, a beer and bottling company, butcher shops, traditional cheese makers, and bakeries. “Eventually,” he lamented, “all that beautiful commerce had died and would never come back.” Yet locals were intent on recovering and making visible the traces of this urban sensorium during their property battle with the city. Critically, such sociomaterial and affective experiences framed their juridical and political opposition to the plan. The neighborhood would be materialized as an urban village, one in which, as in Don Chinche, rural identities and working-class sensibilities harmoniously converged and implicitly supported the figure of a socially ascendant urban dweller. Most importantly, this rendering of the neighborhood brought to life an idealization of individual ownership closely tied to the rural smallholding (minifundio), a form of property that had been central in the Andean coffee-growing areas—from where many residents like Francisco and Miguel had migrated—and within the country’s political economy of capitalist expansion. In Colombia, the ideal of small-scale property became integral to the fashioning of a modern middle-class subject and the rooting of an ethos of individual entrepreneurialism, both of which closely aligned with the country’s violent history of sociopolitical fragmentation.³⁶ In Manzana Cinco, such notions formed the trappings of a shared epistemological and affective framework through which residents reconceptualized renewal as a form of state violence akin to land dispossession and bureaucratic misappropriation. This was the backdrop against which the urban intervention’s new sensory regimes would be rendered visible and contested and an idealized understanding of propertied citizenship and state authority would be reinscribed and defended.

Cursed Terrain

A host of signs, things, and people started to invade residents’ everyday routines soon after the ERU launched the Manzana Cinco plan. The urban worlds that people had inhabited unraveled before their eyes as new landscapes of bureaucracy and real estate took hold of their lives. It was the dissipation of what Kathleen Stewart calls “little worlds” and their “rhythms and labors of living,” and the irruption of the new materialities and sensibilities of urban renewal.³⁷ Inherent to such shifting “atmospheric attunements” were residents’ lived, practical epistemologies—“textures of knowledge” ingrained in the aesthetics and affectivity of everyday urban life.³⁸ Crucially, as inhabitants became attuned to these world-making things and practices, they assimilated them to the contentious history and cultural politics of Colombia’s armed conflict. Far from becoming simply absorbed or burdened by the creeping aesthetics and unsettling moods of renewal, they actively rendered them meaningful as part of the political atmospherics of juridical insecurity and property violence. For them, the city’s plan constituted a siege on modes of urban dwelling tied to rightful ownership and contested territorial sovereignties.³⁹

Residents’ intimate and politically inflected knowledge of sociomaterial environments was made apparent to me a few weeks after my first conversation with Hernando. We met once again in front of his house, at the time still spared from demolition, so he could recount in more detail some of the key events that had sent shock waves through the neighborhood. Hernando recalled how one day, without warning, people had come “to measure the land [tierra].” His choice of words and inflection were revealing. His intonation dropped when he uttered the word “land,” and he also smirked and paused. He didn’t talk of functionaries or topographers but rather of an “old guy who came to threaten us, to trample on us, [saying], ‘You have to go because they are going to demolish all of this, they’re going to knock it down.’” The scene of misappropriation and displacement resonated closely with Colombia’s history of land violence. It was a portrayal of intimidation at the hands of anonymous men, stand-in officials, who had ignored property rights, treating people’s homes and lots as open land (tierra) and terrain (terreno). Hernando’s emphasis on the measurement of land was haunting given the centrality of boundaries (linderos)—of their manipulation and enforcement—to the country’s long history of violent land grabs.⁴⁰ He thus conjured an atmosphere of dispossession intimately tied to what scholars have described as Colombia’s enduring modalities of “primitive accumulation” in the countryside—the amassing of land and resources through a combination of overt violence and legal force.⁴¹ In this sense, the theatrics and materiality of eviction in Manzana Cinco constituted a reenactment of modes of violent expulsion and accumulation integral to the country’s civil war. They illuminated a continuum of legal and property violence, from the rural frontier—from which many downtown residents had migrated or been violently displaced, and whose sensibilities had been woven into their everyday lives—to the center of the modernizing urban core.⁴²

During those first months of 2006 when the plan was launched, residents had received repeated phone calls from “alleged social workers,” as one local inhabitant put it, who “threatened” and “harassed” them. The calls and unannounced visits made them feel enveloped by an increasingly “oppressive atmosphere [un ambiente pesado],” a sensation that would only get worse. One day, Hernando and his neighbors woke up to discover that signs had been posted on their doors and front walls. In large black and red letters, the white placards proclaimed, “This lot is property of the Empresa de Renovación Urbana de Bogotá D.C. Entry without permission is forbidden under penalty of incurring the corrective measures established in Article 164 of District Agreement 79 of 2003 ‘Police Code.’” The announcement was a display of official legalese; it included names and seals of government institutions and the citation of relevant regulations. For residents, it was one of the ERU’s most “abusive” actions. Not only had the government not yet acquired all the lots, but a handful of lawsuits were still being considered in court. Most unsettling, however, was the fact that the ERU had declared the ban even as owners were still using and residing in their properties. According to locals, the signs’ graphic elements were an eloquent demonstration of the legal statement’s threatening qualities: the word “forbidden” written in large red letters in the middle of the sign, and the mention of the “Police Code” at the bottom. The specter of legal force soon became all too real for residents. “Officials started coming at midnight to get us out,” Hernando recalled, “and they came with the police and patrols.”

The notices were the first of several inscriptions through which the ERU laid claim to the land and enacted a vision of the new urban world to come. At its core, and as residents were quick to recognize, the announcements emerged as a dubious performance of urban sovereignty, one that invoked a muddled amalgam of public and private institutions and emblems. It constituted, along with the signage that cropped up on the block in the following years, what Joe Hermer and Alan Hunt call “official graffiti”: the standardized and impersonal signs that dot streetscapes with a visual order of imperatives, instructions, and prohibitions.⁴³ At work here was an economy of material signs that operated through appropriation and that involved the “assertion of an implied authority.”⁴⁴ In Manzana Cinco, official inscriptions not only indexed the distant and inchoate authority of the newly formed ERU but also served as crucial enactments of property.⁴⁵ Together with the workings of legal instruments and courts, the deployment of placards, notices, and enclosures gradually eroded existing property forms and relations and rematerialized them as open parcels of land ready for occupation.

As evictions and demolitions moved forward, the ERU encircled the site with a fence and billboard promoting the project. Architectural renderings and new signage adorned the temporary tin walls with phrases such as “the renewal of downtown Bogotá,” “two projects that will transform the center of Bogotá,” “housing,” “public space,” “entertainment,” and “culture.” The official graffiti further indexed the implied authority of urban renewal, as it attempted to legitimize the plan by conjuring an imaginary audience of citizens centered on abstract sociopolitical ideals. At some point, the private development company that won the public tender installed a sales office and new billboard on the south side of the block. Facing toward the city to the west, with the Monserrate mountain and the historic Las Aguas neighborhood behind it, the sign announced, “The rebirth of the center of Bogotá starts here.” The emblems of the city administration and the ERU now appeared next to the logo of the private development company QBO. The urban inscription was an amalgamation of public and private entities, real estate interests and civic ideals. This problematic juxtaposition was not lost on residents. Commenting on the withdrawal of the Spanish government from the project and the cancelation of the cultural center, Hernando pointed to the billboard and said, “They already changed the project’s facade, the Spaniards don’t have money so now they came up with another story, now apparently there’s a consortium in our lot.”

When half the land was officially turned over to the private developer, a new wave of unofficial inscriptions began to appear on the lot’s temporary walls, superimposed over the city’s slogans. The phrase “public space,” for instance, which had been stamped by the ERU all over the fence, was repainted to read “pribate space [sic] [espacio pribado]”: a critique of the plan’s unfounded expropriations and its profit-seeking, privatizing agendas.⁴⁶ In 2013, after months of legal pressure, Hernando’s and his next-door neighbor’s houses were finally demolished. The corner, which for years had symbolized the last bastion of resistance, was gone. But it was exactly there, where their houses had stood, that some of the most damning graffiti emerged. On top of the city’s official catchphrases, now papered over with peeling posters of all sorts and indecipherable tagging, a final round of inscriptions condemned Manzana Cinco as a form of urban land grabbing and enclosure. One of these was a drawing of a skull and crossbones next to the phrase “ERU thieves!” Further along the fence another graffiti read, “Rotten ERU, the new urban guerrillas.”

With the block in ruins, locals increasingly drew parallels to war zones and to the countless armed takeovers of Colombian rural towns. Margarita, a longtime property owner, described the plan as an armed incursion: an act of pilfering and violence. On one occasion she told me, distraught, “This has been savage, they stole the block from us so savagely.” Echoing the long history of colonialism and racial violence, Margarita decried the city’s treatment of residents as “if we were little Indians in loincloths [indiecitos con taparrabos].” Her remarks were a forceful accusation of the ERU’s schemes to “steal our land,” as she put it. Her evocation of the racialized imagery of colonial dispossession of Indigenous land was also a jab at the early role of the government of Spain and its planned donation of a cultural center—echoes of colonial conquest in the form of global capital and so-called international cooperation. At the same time, Margarita’s indignation and choice of words indexed her own class and racial aspirations. She and Hernando, like others on the block, were lighter-skinned, propertied urbanites who had struggled to rise from their working-class, provincial backgrounds to something that resembled an urban middle class. By sharply distinguishing themselves from the indiecitos con taparrabos, they asserted their status as dignified, deserving property owners. The implication was that it would be their aspirational status as middle-class property owners, not their trajectory as marginalized urban dwellers or racialized subjects, that would legitimize their rights claims and their status as victims of the bureaucratic takeover.⁴⁷

Manzana Cinco’s changing atmosphere became a fundamental medium for the articulation of critical knowledges about urban renewal. Far from an abstract or mystified construct, this was a lived and textured ideology emanating from the very stuff of everyday existence. It was thus that the old neighborhood materialized class aspirations, property ideologies, and the national communities so memorably depicted in the Don Chinche series. The arrival of the signs and things of urban renewal appeared as forceful incursions into this idealized urban village, brutal events of violence and dispossession. Such imagery of territorial violence—from colonial conquest to modern civil war—was most vividly captured in one last graffiti that simply read, “cursed terrain [terreno maldito].” In one sense, the scrawl called attention to the unsettling qualities of the neighborhood’s material textures now that homes and businesses were in ruins. It epitomized what Yael Navaro-Yashin describes in her work on postwar environments as the “eeriness discharged by a territorial space and material objects left behind by a displaced community.”⁴⁸ In another sense, the material resignification of the razed block as “cursed terrain” pointed to what residents viewed as the gradual corrosion of urban property and its transfiguration into barren, “irritable” terrain.⁴⁹ Although residents articulated a forceful critique of the urban operation, putting their eviction into the epistemic frame of territorial warfare, they ultimately experienced the materiality of dispossession as urban homeowners and, primarily, as an assault on their rightful ownership, not as a process integral to unequal property regimes and state violence. Something similar would be at work in residents’ composition of counterbureaucratic knowledge.

The Counterforensics of Bureaucratic Knowledge

Margarita and Humberto were an elderly couple of retirees who had for years owned a parking garage on the block. They also became the neighborhood’s leading legal activists. Hernando, Francisco, and other neighbors urged me to get in touch with them if I wanted to truly understand their juridical battle. After being evicted from their property and losing their main source of income, the couple had moved into their son’s modest apartment a few blocks from the Manzana Cinco site. Surrounded by kitschy porcelain figurines and crystal decorations, they welcomed me with a glass of juice and the formal hospitality of a rising middle-class family. The couple mentioned with great pride how their granddaughter, whose portrait stood on a living room mantelpiece, was about to enroll as a medical student at the elite Universidad de los Andes—Colombia’s premier private university and Las Aguas’s most powerful neighbor since the 1950s. Making clear the significance of this milestone for the family and the depth of their loss when the city government approached them with the expropriation notification, Margarita noted that “all we had, we built from nothing.”

As our conversation shifted to the Manzana Cinco project and the ensuing legal processes, the couple became agitated. They moved and talked hurriedly, as if they had incorporated the frenzied rhythm of their bureaucratic ordeal into their ordinary routine. Then, as I pulled out my voice recorder, Humberto told me he preferred “to display the facts on their own terms” so I could judge for myself what had happened on the block. His reluctance to be recorded seemed to be both a reflection of the wariness resulting from his involvement in protracted juridical proceedings and an indication of his newfound legal expertise. For Humberto the burden of proof was so conclusive that explanations were superfluous. Margarita, on the other hand, was more than willing to share her experience and interpretation of the events. In particular, she was keen on elaborating on the violence encoded in the materiality and aesthetics of bureaucratic artifacts. Like others on the block, she had become finely attuned to the ERU’s legalistic attacks. Margarita recognized that the law was being wielded as a weapon by state actors, even as she herself mobilized legal instruments to pursue some measure of justice and accountability. Hers were not simply metaphorical allusions to the technical battlegrounds of lawfare or abstract invocations of the force of law.⁵⁰ Rather, in her engagements with the materiality of bureaucracy, Margarita continually reenacted the intimate relationship between law and violence, or what she conceptualized as the continuum between legality and warfare.

While Margarita recalled many of the scenes that others in the block had recounted, she trained her attention on the aesthetics and affectivity of official paperwork. Setting the tone for our conversation, she started by narrating how she and her neighbors had first learned about the redevelopment plan when they received “pamphlets without a signature or anything” in their homes. “Can you believe it?” she repeated. “Just pamphlets there [on our doorstep], not even signed.” In Colombia, pamphlets (panfletos) are one of the central “mimetic performances” of state power through which armed groups and criminal organizations have intimidated and extorted populations for decades,⁵¹ primarily in urban peripheries and rural towns. In talking about the documents’ pamphlet-like appearance and missing signatures, Margarita invoked a genre of bureaucratic materiality associated with violence and usurpation to question the ERU’s authority and legitimacy. By attending to the performative and tangible qualities of bureaucracy, she and her neighbors composed critical local knowledges about the illegibility and injustice of state action, which in turn informed their counterdocumentary practices.

Anthropological work has shown that the appropriation of the language and aesthetics of bureaucracy—through imitation and forgery, for instance—can become an integral part of people’s attempts to overcome projects of state domination.⁵² In the case of Manzana Cinco, however, more than simply mimicking documentary forms, locals became fixated on the materiality and form of bureaucratic artifacts with the hope of disentangling the plan’s contradictions and deceptions.⁵³ In their own paperwork, furthermore, they recharged bureaucratic forms affectively and politically with ideals of state justice. This involved what Winifred Tate calls the “aspirational state.”⁵⁴ In her analysis of state formation in the contested Colombian frontier region of Putumayo, Tate argues that inhabitants developed an “aspirational critique of present politics focused on the qualities of the state, its affective ties to its citizens, and the state as an ideal form: caring, responsive, generous, and abundant, rather than distant, repressive, and extortive.”⁵⁵ Such visions have not been restricted to war-torn peripheries. The displaced of Manzana Cinco and their struggles against legally enforced dispossession show a similar kind of political imagination at work. As self-formed bureaucratic and juridical experts, residents developed an oppositional and materially attuned knowledge of urban law. Crucially, these critiques were both enabled and limited by ideologies of statehood and victimhood intimately tied to Colombia’s history of warfare.

Margarita and Humberto’s emergent bureaucratic knowledge was further evinced once we moved from the living room to a small study where they had a computer and a large file cabinet. Drawing on Margarita’s past experience as an administrative secretary, the couple had assembled a voluminous archive documenting the Manzana Cinco project. They had carefully collected hundreds of official letters and documents, newspaper clippings, copies of decrees and laws, and videos of local reports and hearings. Margarita leafed through the files, muttering names of functionaries and technical jargon, visibly distressed. “Receive a warm greeting,” she read to me from one letter derisively, and then she sighed, saying, “They’re phonier than a leather coin.” As she continued sorting through the documents and rehearsing the timeline of events that she had meticulously reconstructed, it seemed that the couple had increasingly latched on to the cumulative materiality of paperwork as their property physically disintegrated. The archive had become the last recourse in their struggle, a politically and affectively charged embodiment of their counterepistemic practices.

In one sense, Margarita and Humberto had been carefully reading state documents “along the grain,” as Ann Stoler describes the combing of archives’ “unexplored fault lines, ragged edges, and unremarked disruptions to the seamless and smooth surface.”⁵⁶ They had rearranged records and facts, searched for gaps and inconsistencies, and reflected on the conditions of documentary production. By scouring official and unofficial records, the couple had directly questioned the state’s archival power.⁵⁷ At the same time, Margarita and Humberto’s work as amateur archivists proved to be a form of intense emotional labor. They were driven by what seemed like an imperative, almost a compulsion to follow the paper trail left by Manzana Cinco.⁵⁸ Such urgency was the reflection of the desire to unearth the political motivations behind the project and to counter, in some measure, the physical disappearance of their neighborhood: to ward off amnesia. Although the homemade archive bore the promises of memory and justice, its material excesses also proved burdensome, a tactile presence that overwhelmed residents’ sense of loss.⁵⁹ As Margarita lamented, still ruffling through the files, “Oh, I have so many papers … I’m fed up!”

The couple’s counterarchive was punctuated by the sensibilities and anxieties of knowledge production amid political violence and, increasingly, under the sign of the postconflict. Their struggle to reassemble and destabilize state narratives about urban renewal had unfolded as the country was becoming fully immersed in public debates about transitional justice, memory, and peace. In 2005, just around the time when property owners in Las Aguas were receiving eviction notices, the national government had created the Comisión Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación (National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation) through a law known as the Ley de Justicia y Paz (Justice and Peace Law).⁶⁰ The commission was established by the administration of right-wing President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who repeatedly denied the existence of an armed conflict, characterized guerrilla warfare as terrorism, and was primarily interested in the demobilization of paramilitary organizations. Most problematically, although the initiative aligned with discourses of solidarity, it eschewed accountability and, more specifically, any admission of state crimes—issues that have plagued transitional justice mechanisms in Colombia ever since.⁶¹ And yet the commission opened spaces that became important sites of social critique and political dissent. The Grupo de Memoria Histórica (Historical Memory Group), for instance, which was launched as part of the commission, became a vital “agent of knowledge production about a violent past,” according to scholars and activists Pilar Riaño Alcalá and María Victoria Uribe.⁶² The group’s mandate included the promotion of the “right to truth” and the “duty of memory” through the “preservation of” and “access to archives.”⁶³ Crucially, according to Riaño Alcalá and Uribe, it became the platform for “comprehensive and plural narratives about violence” centered, for the first time in Colombia, on “victims’ voices and perspectives.”⁶⁴ This focus was deepened in the following years with the creation of the Ley de Víctimas y Restitución de Tierras (Law of Victims and Land Restitution) and the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica (National Center of Historical Memory).⁶⁵ Victimhood became a potent lens, a critical affective epistemology at the core of expanding and increasingly visible modes of memory work in the country’s troubled transition to the postwar era.

Margarita and Humberto’s archival project bore the imprint of this historical juncture. In collecting and reinterpreting the documentary traces left behind by the urban intervention, they engaged in something akin to what Eyal Weizman calls “counterforensics”: an investigative practice that “turns the state’s own means against the violence it commits.”⁶⁶ Margarita and Humberto viewed their work as a process of evidence gathering aimed at uncovering the crimes committed by the state. During their investigation the couple had carefully documented the unfairly low appraisal of their properties as well as how the ERU had mistakenly processed and consigned their expropriation funds, leaving the money frozen for years in the wrong account. Their meticulous recording of the demolition and construction process, which included dozens of photographs, supported one of their main legal arguments against the project: the fact that the delayed start of the development warranted, according to existing laws, a reversal of the expropriations and a restitution of property. Finally, Manzana Cinco residents and their lawyer had carefully tracked the actors behind stalled rulings and unfavorable juridical decisions, finding troubling connections between at least one judge and a functionary involved in a highly publicized and large-scale infrastructure corruption scandal known as the “contracting carousel [carrusel de la contratación].”

Residents’ efforts to demonstrate the government’s “thievery” and “forceful takeover” ultimately pointed to the broader universe of activism integral to postwar and postdictatorship politics in Latin America. For Margarita and Humberto, their struggle was essentially of the same nature as the search for desaparecidos (disappeared persons) or the investigation and denunciation of human rights violations and state violence.⁶⁷ Crucially, as urban archives became key sites of “postconflict empowerment,” to use Kirsten Weld’s term, property owners also emerged as victims pursuing reparation and restitution.⁶⁸ In this sense, residents’ legal and political claims were mediated by their adoption of the subject position of victim. Practices of citizenship and ownership became, in this manner, closely entangled with repertories of trauma and injury.⁶⁹ What Kimberly Theidon calls a “contentious politics of victimhood,”⁷⁰ linked to understandings of property and class, became central to how residents came to embody urban victimhood through juridical performances and paperwork practices.

The Mise-en-Scène of Urban Victimhood

The entanglements between practices of counterexpertise, ideologies of property and citizenship, and repertories of victimhood became apparent in the sociomaterial contours of residents’ juridical dispute. Carlos, a young attorney who represented several of the block’s owners, articulated these connections and made them an integral part of residents’ legal strategy. As I waited for Carlos in one of the city’s expansive new malls to the west of the city center, I expected to meet a traditional downtown lawyer. These are typically unscrupulous attorneys, pejoratively known as tinterillos (ink spillers), who hover over social disputes and legal troubles in their well-worn suits and ties, looking for opportunities to profit. Instead I was greeted by a young man draped in denim, with close-cropped hair and a backpack, who looked more like an activist. Contrary to the typical loquaciousness of litigants, Carlos’s demeanor was understated and grave. As we talked over coffee, he described himself as a “lawyer of the poor” and confessed his personal obsession with the Manzana Cinco lawsuit. Significantly, before taking on the case, he had worked for years investigating forceful disappearances as an attorney for victims of the armed conflict. The experience still weighed on him, Carlos hinted, as he recalled the many difficult hours spent “reading those files.”

Most importantly, the epistemics of legal activism in the midst of war became ingrained into his approach to the Manzana Cinco case. For Carlos, the property dispute mirrored Colombia’s armed conflict and was structured by the same logics of state and land violence. The “administrative irregularities” that had permeated the process, and which he was contesting in court, were for Carlos essentially maneuvers to “displace people.” The violence of such administrative displacements, he noted, had wide-ranging significance. “Colombia,” he stated, “is a country of desarraigados [uprooted persons].” With the term desarraigado, he conjured the imagery of banishment and expulsion, giving urban displacement a shade of meaning directly linked to rural warfare. The implication became clearer as he elaborated: “Here in the urban sector we are doing the same thing [as in the rest of the country]; the difference is that we don’t use rifles, but rather laws, which are being twisted and manipulated, so that what isn’t done with a rifle is done with paper, by force. Because after issuing the expropriation resolution and registering the property in the office of public instruments and register, the administration can go with the police and evict people. And that, in any case, is displacement.” This critique of urban renewal as a form of juridical insecurity—of warfare by legal means—was materialized through aesthetic and affective enactments. Carlos led his clients through judicial itineraries that included news reports and interviews, a congressional hearing, and appeals to local and international human rights organizations. It was a mise-en-scène of legal activism that aligned closely with the trappings of justice and victimhood that, according to Theidon, characterize Colombia’s perpetual “prepostconflict” moment.⁷¹

Back in their home office, Humberto and Margarita played several videos they had filed in their counterarchive as key pieces of evidence in this regard. The first was a news report about the Manzana Cinco project that had aired on a local TV station in 2010. The video’s editing, its visual rhetoric and linguistic turns, shaped a distinctly victim-centered testimony. The segment started with images of the semidemolished block and a camera pan across Hernando’s rustic tile-and-plaster housing as a melancholic guitar played in the background. The camera then trailed behind Margarita as she strolled, holding Carlos’s arm, in front of the fenced site and along the street where her property used to stand. A narrator, in voice-over, introduced the story: “A dream for Bogotá became a nightmare for several families. This is the other side of Manzana Cinco.”

Next, Margarita appeared in her son’s apartment, her face shown in close-up as she stated firmly, “I want to make a public denunciation of the arbitrary acts, the robberies, that the ERU is carrying out.” Carlos was then shown explaining the legal irregularities that plagued the project since its inception, followed again by an interview with Margarita and her account of the abuses and manipulations that residents underwent during the process. These testimonies were accompanied by scenes of Margarita and Humberto inspecting sheaves of documents in their son’s dining room and standing at the edge of the demolition site looking over the rubble. The narrator then summed up the injustices of the project, stressing the social and emotional damage it caused: “The project was imposed without the participation of the owners of more than thirty lots and it quickly led to a distressing expropriation process that razed [arrasó] the future of many.” The imagery of devastation, of violent arrasamiento, was followed by more pointed remarks about the government’s crimes against residents. “[Margarita], along with her husband,” the journalist continued, “was a victim of abuse that in the blink of an eye finished what she had built to reach old age with dignity. The harm that was done to these families is irreparable.”

The report ended with Margarita saying, “We worked all our lives, so we could have something,” to which the journalist, out of frame, casually asked, “And how are you doing now?” Margarita covered her eyes, breaking into tears, as the camera moved toward her face in slow motion, capturing a grimace of pain she was trying to hide. Back in the studio, the show’s host expressed surprised at how “land was being taken [la manera cómo se están tomando los terrenos].” Hinting at violent land grabbing, he wondered whether urban displacement would “entail the savage expulsion [salida salvaje] of many people who have historically lived in the city center” or if the law would prevail. As we watched these final scenes on the old computer monitor, Margarita turned to me, scoffing at such pretenses of bureaucratic judiciousness and legal politesse.

Margarita and Humberto turned back to the computer and played a second clip. It was a hearing at the Congress’s Chamber of Representatives in which both Margarita and Carlos had testified. The chamber’s First Commission, whose legislative and oversight functions included issues of territorial ordering (ordenamiento territorial), had invited former residents and city officials to a public meeting about the Manzana Cinco renewal plan. The grainy video had been aired on the Congress Channel. With its national-flag-inspired logo at the bottom of the screen and characteristically uncinematic, still camera shots of talking heads, at first glance the clip contrasted sharply with the overtly narrativized and dramatic depiction of the news report. It seemed to epitomize the official gaze of the state and to display a performance of legal rationality and accountability. First on the screen were the commission’s congressional members, sitting at a central desk in the back of the room, on an elevated platform, under a large Colombian coat of arms on the wall. Former residents, lawyers, and families were positioned in front of them and slightly below their gaze, behind a large elliptical table enveloping the room, a layout that reinforced their status as subjects of the state pleading for justice.

The congressional hearing room was an aesthetic and material ensemble through which ideals of justice and legality were enacted in particular ways. Similar to courtrooms, the commission room emerged as a spatiotemporal enactment of law. It was a “chronotope,” as Mariana Valverde argues, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin, “in which a specific temporality … shapes and helps define the space” and “space is constitutive of judicial time, official legal time.”⁷² So even though the hearing was supposed to be simply an informative meeting designed to give citizens a chance to voice their complaints, its rhythmic textures and architectural forms gave it a distinctly juridical quality. The representative who was chairing the meeting was emphatic about the timing of the interventions. Holding his wristwatch in his hand, he moderated the proceedings, moving back and forth between officials and citizens, central desk and general seating. As the meeting unfolded, such enactments of official business gave way to more emotionally charged testimonies and exhortations. Participants’ embodied performances lent force to and materialized a particular rendering of justice centered on state accountability, reparation, and victimhood. This is what Kamari Clarke calls “affective justice”: “[complex assemblages] materialized through expressions, representations, discourses, and feeling regimes that shape the way that justice is embodied and expressed by people.”⁷³ What was supposed to be a routine congressional hearing quickly became a more complex legal and political performance through which residents resignified urban eviction as a crime and staked their claims as victims.

Carlos was the first to speak. After greeting everyone and saying he would read quickly to stay within the allotted time, he started to “narrate [relatar] … [Manzana Cinco’s] current decay, represented in great filthiness, breeding grounds for vectors [of disease] and rodents, drug trade, among other things, which stimulate the increase of theft and mugging every day in the area.” He went on to stress that “all of this resulted from the displacement of the original owners [raizales].” His use of the latter term, an inflection of raíz (root), was significant. It recast the residents of Manzana Cinco, many of whom had bought property as recently as the 1980s and 1990s, as original inhabitants, rooted in place. Furthermore, the use of raizal had distinct connotations linked to ethnic identity and geographic belonging. Raizales is the name for the Afro-Caribbean communities indigenous to the San Andrés archipelago, a Colombian territory with a long history of colonial and postcolonial sovereignty disputes. Although officially one of the country’s thirty-two departments, with their 2002 declaration of self-determination (autodeterminación), raizales epitomized a form of local struggle against cultural, economic, and sociopolitical pressures from the Colombian mainland. While Carlos was not directly referencing this history, his gestures to rootedness, along with his assertion that insecurity was the result, not the cause, of state action, mirrored class- and race-inflected narratives of violent dispossession and Indigenous resistance.

He had also framed his intervention as a relato, a testimony. A rich body of scholarship has followed “the globalization of the testimony” in postconflict settings,⁷⁴ showing how the testimonial narrative is integral to struggles over memory, justice, and the construction of victimhood.⁷⁵ While cohesive “national narratives” about the country’s recent history of violence are still arguably lacking in Colombia, Myriam Jimeno notes, there has been a “proliferation of testimonial narratives that register the most terrifying and varied experiences of the violence of the past decades.”⁷⁶ Significantly, the production and circulation of the testimonies of survivors of state, guerrilla, and paramilitary violence have shaped collective imaginaries and repertoires of injustice and victimhood. They are at the core of an emergent yet deeply contested politics of accountability, reparation, and memorialization. Carlos indexed these cultural and political repertoires in his narrative performance at the congressional hearing. His intonation and use of words were telling, as he gravely called on the representatives to understand the “merciless delay” that residents had been subjected to after being “forcefully expelled from their land.” He stressed residents’ suffering at the hands of city officials and mentioned how the ERU had sent “emissaries specialized in the psychological abuse of the owners and dwellers of Manzana Cinco.” To conclude his statement, Carlos returned to his preferred metaphor about state violence and urban renewal, by now a frequent trope among Manzana Cinco residents. “All this to simply conclude,” he said, raising his voice as he grasped a sheet of paper, “that in the countryside the population is displaced by armed actors, and here in the capital district, displacements are caused by the ERU. There it is with the use of force and weapons, and here with the tortious [torticera] and crooked [amañada] application of norms under an apparent cloak of legality.”

Along with the sociopolitical coordinates outlined in Carlos’s narrative, residents’ testimonies channeled distinctive affective and experiential force. They called forth what Jimeno describes as relatos’s capacity to create an “emotional community.”⁷⁷ This became apparent when Margarita took the microphone. Dressed in a gray suit and blue silk shirt—probably one of her outfits from her days working as a secretary—she addressed the men at the main table with both humbleness and resolve. In sharp contrast to the city official who had spoken immediately before her using bureaucratic generalities and making vague promises, Margarita’s remarks were decidedly personal as she interpellated the individuals and motives behind the city’s machinery of bureaucratic dispossession. With her voice slightly quivering, she turned directly to the invited city functionary and said, “Dr. Jiménez, in relation to Manzana Cinco you haven’t said anything. So, I ask: If the Alcaldía Mayor is the boss of Renovación Urbana [ERU], I have to think they are not informed of all the abuses they have committed against us, the displaced of Manzana Cinco.” Margarita framed her intervention in distinctly moral terms, appealing to the city official’s goodwill while subtly holding authorities accountable: “I don’t understand how it is possible for the Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá to not have realized all these abuses were happening with all the reports and the audits that the Concejo [City Council] and the Contraloría [City Government Accountability Office] carried out. [To not have seen] how they trampled on our fundamental rights. So I ask, Dr. Jiménez, please, if you are not aware of this, if you need documents, we have countless documents of all the mistakes committed by Renovación Urbana.”

Her account of bearing witness to and documenting the ERU’s misdeeds became increasingly emotional. No longer simply a respectful citizen pleading with a representative of an indolent state, she turned to her suffering as a victim of theft and displacement by evoking the imagery of warfare. “This is where all our lives we worked to have our shack [rancho] and our business,” Margarita continued, “and then Renovación Urbana came like a guerrilla force, worse than the guerrillas, and kicked us out without rhyme or reason [sin ton ni son].” While many downtown residents talked about eviction as a militaristic takeover of their “shacks” and “lands,” they often drew parallels to paramilitary groups. They thereby called attention to the violence of the state and to the continuities between paramilitary land grabbing and exclusionary urban property regimes. Comparing the ERU with guerrillas, as Margarita had done, had different sociopolitical connotations. In the context of the capital city, it hinted at the typically middle-class, urban fear of Colombia’s Marxist peasant guerrilla group, the FARC. Furthermore, it implied that the ERU was something like an “illegitimate,” rogue institution that had merely deviated from the city’s legitimate governmental apparatus. At stake here was a reinstating of the boundaries between legality and illegality, peace and war, as well as the reaffirmation of residents’ status as respectable citizens governed by a lawful state and legitimate property relations.

Further asserting the dignity of propertied belonging as the basis for her understanding of bureaucratic violence and her own sense of victimhood, Margarita concluded her testimony with a note about her family’s social decline: “Look, we’re living in my son’s apartment; if we didn’t have that apartment we’d be living under a bridge. We would be living like any street dweller [habitante de calle]. Look, the fact that a state agency did this is incredible, for God’s sake; that thieves do it is all right, but that a state agency because it had a building permit kicked us out and stole everything from us is impossible.” Then, sitting up slightly to straighten her suit in a gesture of dignified propriety and looking politely again at the city functionary, she said softly, “Forgive me for what I said and thank you.”

Affective Oficios and Performing Bureaucratic Dispossession

The Chamber of Representatives had served as a critical medium for residents’ enactments of legality and justice in the affective registers of victimhood. Margarita and her neighbors drew on what Kimberly Theidon, in the context of postwar Peru, describes as a “collective narrative … that proves systematic violations of human rights and tends to foreground suffering.”⁷⁸ Former residents of Manzana Cinco materialized this “sense of traumatic citizenship,”⁷⁹ with all its ambiguities and contradictions, not only through the legal space and performative aesthetics of TV news reports and congressional hearings but also through paperwork and documentary forms. In their many oficios (official letters) to local, national, and even global institutions, they combined legal parlance with personal testimonies of distress and abuse at the hands of city officials. In all our meetings, Hernando would pull out at least one of these oficios and read fragments hurriedly, sometimes trailing off and mumbling to himself as if reliving one of the many injurious moments in the long-running dispute with the city. Limited literacy and the stylistic features of Colombian legalese hampered residents’ ability “to master the conventions of bureaucratic documentation,” as Matthew Hull argues in his study of urban bureaucracy in Pakistan.⁸⁰ And yet, to borrow again from Hull, it was precisely by “contravening the conventions” of bureaucracy—its allegedly “context-free, abstract language” and emotionless formulas⁸¹—that residents’ oficios gained affective force. The typically stale and formulaic instruments of urban bureaucracy reemerged as critical materializations of suffering and dispossession. At stake in such oficios was what Francis Cody, writing about literacy and bureaucratic activism in India, calls the “performativity of the signed petition.”⁸² If paperwork is the “material infrastructure of citizenship,”⁸³ as Cody suggestively puts it, then residents’ letters reworked such material media to embody the affective and contradictory modalities of citizenship shaped by the country’s histories of violence and insecurity.

One of Hernando’s oficios, which he and his family had addressed to the city’s Contraloría Distrital (Accountability Office), reproduced in semibureaucratic fashion the sequence of events since the ERU had first notified them about the Manzana Cinco project. This was a citizen audit that at first glance unsettled the genre of the oficio through its irregular grammar and punctuation and its variable use of numbering and bold and uppercase fonts. Most importantly, Hernando and his family had woven into the list of procedures (trámites) and complaints (quejas) a narrative of state absence, injustice, and pain. The informational tone of the letter was punctuated by the irruption of expressive clauses and notes, informal language, and tacit references to places and moments, giving the communication a distinct experiential and affective quality. The opening page started, without introduction or context, with a list of the ERU’s communications with residents and relevant decrees. A few lines down, a note appeared, inserted between two items: “Note: under pressure from the ERU’s lawyers and SANDRA GÓMEZ social Worker $46.000.000 A ROBBERY.” The oficio continued with a bullet point for every letter the “familia Casas” had filed (radicados) with embassies, national and local institutions, and politicians:

1. a) EMBASSY OF SPAIN: November 7 of 2006 (they didn’t respond to the complaint)
2. b) EMBASSY OF FRANCE: November 23 of 2006 (they didn’t respond to the radicado and complaint)
3. …
4. g) COUNCIL OF STATE: 8 of November of 2006 (we were told that it couldn’t do anything and that the ERU or the Alcaldía would solve the problem).
5. h) CONSTITUTIONAL COURT: 6 of November of 2006 (there was no solution at all)

Each parenthetical comment on the list—“they didn’t respond,” “there was no solution”—revealed the family’s mounting frustration. The letter’s narrative features, its “emplotment,” to use Paul Ricoeur’s term,⁸⁴ mediated Hernando and his family’s practical experiences of state violence and displacement. If the initial annotated list indexed the indolence of governmental agencies and agents across scales and jurisdictions—a sense of state abandonment—the rest of the letter brought to life the family’s plight. This was apparent in a longer bullet-pointed list that followed the letter’s telegraphic list of bureaucratic events and communications. With scarce punctuation and a distinctly conversational tone, the paragraph unraveled the linear temporality of officialdom and rendered a phenomenological elaboration of abuse and distress at the hands of the agents of the state:

On June 21 there was a negotiation with the ERU there was a phone call the previous day that is on June 20 we were threatened on the telephone in a call at 11:00 a.m. by ESTELA MORENO and the Dra. Attorney SOLEDAD who called us under threats and abuses that no; that we would face the consequences if we didn’t sign that they would remove us with the police and psychological pressure and in several calls ordered by the acting Manager of the ERU with pressures in that negotiation in Notary 21 with the social worker ESTELA MORENO and the Attorney ESPERANZA, the day 21 of June at 5:00 p.m. with tears my mother the señora MARIA TERESA MARTINEZ with the Doctor from the Veeduría [city’s Oversight Office] and I notified the personería [the municipal agency charged with defending human rights] which didn’t come. My brother WILSON recorded with a small voice recorder the entire cassette remains as forceful proof that we signed under threats and pressure of the ERU and especially of ESTELA MORENO Social Worker… .

Rather than an example of limited bureaucratic literacy, the text, with its ellipses and grammatical blunders, vividly embodied Hernando’s harried retelling of the events. It was a linguistic performance that captured his family’s distress and disorientation, seeking to elicit some measure of sympathy and conjuring affective affinities around the injustice of dispossession. But the oficio was not simply about state abuse and negligence. As its plot unfurled, it culminated with a more insidious form of bureaucratic violence. Two final notes, inserted before the six family members’ signatures, gave the letter a fateful ending, one in which the Manzana Cinco project appeared to be a matter of life and death:

NOTE: one time the architect DIANA MOSQUERA came with the attorney from the office of HABITAT when my father was still alive they made him cry and from there my father’s health deteriorated and my mother’s a couple of elders deserving of respect and that their fundamental rights and human rights were not respected and other mistreatments to them.

NOTE: Until the day 21 of July my father passed away due to all these problems.

Margarita and Humberto had also subtly embedded the language of institutional violence, humanitarian law, and death in their many complaints and testimonies before local, national, and international organizations. In one of their oficios, which Margarita read to me at her home archive, the couple combined their intimate knowledge of the bureaucratic intricacies with an affectively charged portrayal of urban renewal as a crime against humanity. The letter had been addressed to the national government’s director of human rights with the subject line, “Displacement and violation [quebranto] of Fundamental Rights.” Like Hernando’s, it was a narrative replete with expressions of indignation and suffering explicitly framed as state violations of human rights. In one passage, Margarita and Humberto asked the human rights official, “What is happening, where is the compliance with the law, the respect of HUMAN AND FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS?” After narrating dragging negotiations and the final unexpected notification of their expropriation, the oficio arrived at its tragic denouement:

NOTE: Such was the psychological pressure and mortification from the functionaries of the ERU … that some have already literally died from the grief [de pura pena moral], seeing that Renovación Urbana robbed them of all they had financially and had acquired with years of work. These people are: HERNANDO CASAS [Hernando’s father], JAIRO ANIBAL NIÑO, famous children’s book writer, who due to this problem was ill for a long time and was unable to recover. Other inhabitants of the manzana 5 are also in poor health, [with illnesses] such as diabetes, a condition that with these pressures is killing them day by day, because they stole their land, demolished the buildings and businesses that sustained them.

“The displaced of Manzana Cinco,” as residents signed this and many other letters, had effectively subverted local forms of legal and bureaucratic violence and remade them into a medium of opposition and critique. Through their affective performances in court, in front of the camera, and on paper, they had reconstituted themselves into victims of dispossession and transformed their urban block into violently razed land. In doing so, however, they had reinscribed the materiality and aesthetics of state governance and law. This irony was not lost on Margarita. As she pulled back from her computer during one of our conversations and dropped the letters she had been reading to me, she asked, waving toward the burdensome archive behind her, “Whom can we talk to, padrecito, if what they call justice is really injustice?” And yet she and many of her neighbors had continued to evoke an idealized state that would recognize their status as deserving victims. Residents had enacted their claims as a matter of human rights, appealing to the moral and ethical sentiments of humanitarian logics that have shaped political engagement in Colombia since the 1980s.⁸⁵ The rise of liberal conceptions of individual human rights, as Lesley Gill has argued, coincided with the violent repression of social movements and class politics, ultimately forming a “narrower political horizon” unable to account for “the economic marginalization and social fragmentation” at the core of the country’s enduring conflict.⁸⁶ The residents of Manzana Cinco embodied these sensibilities in their materialization of urban victimhood and in their claims for more humane treatment at the hands of the ERU. Far from a critique of the structures of inequality and social hierarchies pervading urban renewal and underpinning Colombia’s history of violent displacement, it was more a pursuit of recognition and redress based on the prerogatives of middle-class, propertied citizenship. Rather than a critique of the violence inherent to state bureaucracies, it was ultimately a call for law and order.

The Counterepistemics of Insecurity and Its Limits as a Political Horizon

The rendering of Manzana Cinco as a settlement under attack, of bureaucratic artifacts as sources of insecurity, and of residents themselves as displaced victims, left intact existing structures of urban governance, inequality, and accumulation. Local critiques of urbanism as a form of warfare brought to the fore the injustices and contradictions of the Manzana Cinco plan, in particular the arbitrary evictions and speculative operations carried out under the masquerade of an intervention for the public good. They also served to directly confront the ERU as a state institution, challenging its legitimacy and even putting into motion the destitution of mid-level officials. But in the end, these were epistemic maneuvers limited by the grammar of insecurity and aligned with hegemonic understandings of state authority, property regimes, and citizenship.⁸⁷ The fight for their recognition as victims of the ERU was aimed at obtaining better compensation or a restitution of their property rights, but it did not question urban renewal as a political project or galvanize collective mobilization around a more just urban order. As Hernando himself admitted, worn down by his indignation, “We were also to blame, each one taking care of their own.” Like him, other residents had lamented the lack of union and solidarity among property owners.

In Manzana Cinco, the performative materialization of victimhood and displacement revealed the contradictions of citizenship and belonging in the midst of war. At stake here were the limits of the epistemics and materiality of insecurity as a horizon of urban politics. Local understandings of warfare and their projections onto urban environs and urban selves had been shaped by class- and race-inflected regimes of progress, property, and propriety. This became apparent to me the first time I spoke with Hernando, when he was still living in his family home, surrounded by the demolition rubble. After detailing his violent displacement at the hands of the city’s bureaucracy, he launched into a racist tirade against the Indigenous street vendors who worked nearby: “They took over this shit. All the investments in this area and now so ugly, invaded. Haven’t you seen the vendors are now all Indians?” His contempt for Indigenous vendors who had made their way to the capital after being violently displaced from their land was a piercing reminder of the paradoxes of race, class, and citizenship in Colombia. Hernando had condemned his bureaucratic expulsion only to rearticulate the deep inequalities and violences of Colombia’s land and property regimes.

This does not mean, however, that residents were victims of a form of ideological mystification or that they merely instrumentalized repertoires of violence and insecurity. Their understandings of urban renewal as bureaucratic violence were grounded in their urban experiences and aspirations and gave form to and were shaped by the material and affective environments they inhabited.⁸⁸ Far from the seamless reproduction of dominant discourses about authority and belonging, local epistemological orientations embodied people’s contradictory experiences of sociomaterial worlds. Such modes of street expertise would be best understood as forms of “practical consciousness,” to use Raymond Williams’s term.⁸⁹ They constitute what William Roseberry calls, in an oft-quoted elaboration of Gramscian thought, “a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination.”⁹⁰

In downtown Bogotá, insecurity emerged in this way as an epistemic and material medium through which residents both challenged and reaffirmed the violence of bureaucratic power and unequal regimes of citizenship. An exchange in 2019 with one of the first property owners to be expropriated from the block became a forceful illustration of the ironies of such processes. Jorge was a tailor who had run a successful business and lived in the neighborhood for more than thirty years. Like Francisco, he had migrated to the city from Colombia’s coffee-growing region, from the department of El Quindío, bringing with him a similar entrepreneurial ethos. Unlike Francisco and others on the block, Jorge had accepted the ERU’s meager offer without putting up a fight. True to his pragmatic outlook and serene temperament, Jorge explained in his soft-spoken voice and with distinct forbearance that the prospect of a legal battle had seemed futile. He had relocated to a building across the street from his old property, so that now, from a sixteenth-floor apartment, his shop floor looked over the recently inaugurated cinematheque and two apartment towers. “Of all those people who lived on the block only three or four are still alive,” he said wistfully. We talked about Francisco’s, Humberto’s, and Miguel’s recent deaths and how he had recently seen Margarita, who lived nearby, in a wheelchair and visibly ill. That same month, October 2019, the Consejo de Estado (Council of State) had dismissed a lawsuit filed jointly by Francisco and Humberto years earlier, the only remaining case under consideration. The posthumous ruling, a material conjunction of death and law, had marked the end of a thirteen-year juridical battle.

“It was very hard [what happened to us], many of us had depression, it was traumatic for many people,” Jorge said with a mix of calm and dejection. After he had so vividly brought together his understanding of the bureaucracy’s “methodic, premeditated deception” and the pain of trauma, victimhood, and death, we looked out the window of his shop and I asked what he thought about the new development. “It’s quite beautiful, I think it came out well,” he replied. “I think transformation is good, it’s part of the cycle of cities.” The seemingly stable, finished architectural forms had congealed the same encompassing visions of urbanity and citizenship that residents had left unchallenged in their struggle.⁹¹ Yet, as we will see, these epistemic and material formations are inherently unstable, their cracks and fissures opening new spaces for the composition of urban knowledges and political critiques.