An Orangutan in a Frock Coat

Los Andes launched the Progresa Fenicia plan in 2010 as a radical shift from previous downtown renewal projects, including Manzana Cinco, whose razing unfolded just steps from campus and became a poignant reminder of the threat of eviction among neighboring residents. “The university wanted to do things differently,” Carolina, a senior university administrator explained to me in her airy office, “starting not with a spatial plan but rather with people.” An architecture professor and longtime campus planner, Carolina was also candid about the university’s own missteps in its earlier expansion plans in Las Aguas. “We had an absolutely physical vision,” she told me, “and that was a mistake.”

Property acquisitions over the years had culminated in an earlier project known as the Triángulo de Fenicia (Fenicia Triangle), launched in 2008 by Los Andes and Ospinas & Co.—one of Colombia’s largest construction firms and an organization with deep ties to the university, its president at the time, and the board of trustees. Soft-spoken and diplomatic, Carolina lamented that she and her colleagues had approached this previous plan simply as “real estate development” mainly for the university’s benefit and not as a “comprehensive program with the community.” Such limitations, she suggested, had ultimately led the university to withdraw the Triángulo de Fenicia plan in 2009 and return to the drawing board to create the community-based Progresa Fenicia.

But Carolina also hinted at how the initial plan was more than mere oversight, and the subsequent decision to cancel arose from more than just a change of heart: Appreciating land values and rising discontent in the area had led to a “deadlock” that spurred the university administration to change gears. As Miguel, an architect and campus planner, put it, university leadership realized that “the way things were unfolding, the [Triángulo de Fenicia] plan was not going to work out.” Participatory development and inclusionary planning became a practical necessity, something that many residents would come to suspect was a ploy to take over the neighborhood by other means: a “Trojan horse of development,” to use Faranak Miraftab’s words.¹ The tensions between ideals of inclusion and collaboration and strategies for land control and accumulation would thus become a central feature of Progresa Fenicia and demarcate lines of contention both within the university and in Las Aguas in the years to come.

Progresa Fenicia became well known within Bogotá’s planning circles as a blueprint for inner-city renewal without displacement. Much like progressive planners who attempted to retool the city’s POT and its modes of territorial governance (see chapter 5), university planners set out to test the possibilities of a new model of inclusionary densification. While the POT had been concerned mainly with top-down technologies to reassemble territories, populations, and land uses, Progresa Fenicia engaged residents directly and sought to transform social and property relations from the ground up. Far from a campus expansion plan based on buying out residents or the state-driven reconstruction projects of previous decades, Progresa Fenicia envisioned the creation of a new dense and mixed neighborhood through “partnerships” and “joint construction” with locals. The languages of territorial insecurity and control, decay and recovery, receded into the background, and urban renewal, now more frequently called “revitalization,” was recast as a means toward social integration and community development. Las Aguas became a laboratory in which campus planners, university professors, urban consultants, and students contributed to the production of new forms of knowledge alongside, but also often at a distance from, residents and property owners. Such progressive epistemologies aimed to turn the page on the city center’s history of destruction and displacement and—in line with nascent postconflict discourses in Colombia—rectify long-standing injustices through the remaking of urban spaces and socialities.

Yet the Progresa Fenicia team’s visions about the university’s role within the city and in relation to Colombia’s tentative postconflict futures were plagued with contradictions. In one sense, Los Andes’s plan resonated with what has become the increasingly central yet often unacknowledged role of higher education institutions within circuits of speculative development linked to the so-called creative and knowledge economies. This is what urban scholar Davarian Baldwin, writing about universities in the United States, describes as the “rise of UniverCities” and their exploitative relationship with the racialized urban poor that often surround urban campuses.² In another sense, Los Andes’s new planning team—which now included legal scholars, social workers, management faculty, anthropologists, development studies professors, financial experts, and planners and designers—reframed the university’s intervention in Las Aguas as a collaborative community-investment program that would secure the permanence of residents and improve their lives and livelihoods.

Despite the radical turn this suggested within Bogotá’s trajectories of downtown renewal and displacement, university experts’ reliance on liberal ideals of progress and technical knowledge reinscribed entrenched modes of territorial control, inequality, and difference. As I elaborate in this chapter, expert epistemologies for the participatory and inclusionary reconfiguration of physical spaces, land values, and social relations inevitably clashed with the materiality and lived experience of deep-seated insecurities and conflicts. Planners failed to engage directly with the social and political-economic fault lines that had shaped the working-class neighborhood. The disavowal of these broader conjunctures—from the entanglements between technocratic knowledge and state violence to the layered histories of forced migration and urban dispossession—undermined collaborative endeavors and risked making them complicit in the long-running banishment of downtown’s urban poor. As one resident aptly put it during a community meeting organized by Los Andes, “This is the same thing as Manzana Cinco; they want to kick us out. The only difference is that they want to do it more elegantly.”

Progresa Fenicia’s social promise was predicated on the alleged benefits of real estate development and individual property, categories charged with class and racial overtones and suffused with the legacies of Colombia’s violent struggles over land. Much like national postconflict reconstruction discourses based on ideals of economic development and entrepreneurialism, this was not a plan to undo structural inequalities and promote forms of collective solidarity, but rather a promise of inclusion into existing arrangements of power.³ As Tania Li notes, liberal reformism too often “counts on growth” to solve historical injustices, when what progressive mobilization requires is “a commitment to distribution fought for on political terrain.”⁴ A similar sentiment had permeated university planners’ own moments of skepticism and disillusionment after working for years on Progresia Fenicia—it was “coming up against the limits of the paradigm of development and profitability,” one expert confided, having questioned at times why he and his colleagues had even embarked on the plan. One professor who had grudgingly agreed to contribute the plan’s qualitative analysis had more serious misgivings. “Participatory frameworks,” he complained to me during a quiet conversation in one of the campus’s courtyards, “are ideological placeholders [comodines].” Increasingly frustrated with the potential implications of the plan, he described the university’s recent expansion into the neighborhood as “imperialism and colonialism” and suggested an outcome resembling “eugenicist terraforming”—a race- and class-inflected reshaping of human and material topographies.

In this chapter, I follow the discussions and encounters brought about by the Progresa Fenicia plan among faculty, administrators, consultants, and residents, as well as the social and material frictions and realignments that accompanied the plan. I explore the commitment to ideals of “progress,” “participation,” and “inclusion” as expressions both of a particular history and politics of knowledge production and of university planners’ situated experiences as middle- and upper-class professionals largely insulated from the violences of property and development. I avoid reducing university planners’ attempts at collaborative planning to hidden agendas or “false consciousness”—that is, to mere conduits for class domination, as the disgruntled professor suggested above. Instead I illuminate the conjunctures that shaped experts’ approaches to knowledge production and that prevented them from recognizing the plan’s larger sociopolitical context and its reverberations across a terrain of violence and insecurity.⁵

I also avoid portraying the inhabitants of Las Aguas as a homogenous mass or as passive victims. As Catalina Muñoz and Friederike Fleischer argue, residents actively gave meaning to the Progresa Fenicia plan and recontextualized it within the neighborhood’s sociopolitical history through their embodied experiences and everyday narratives.⁶ Whether it was middle-class owners protecting their privileges and gaining leverage in future negotiations or impoverished dwellers opposing what they saw as their eventual expulsion, for them much more was at stake than the technical reshuffling of square meters and land uses to benefit a generic individual property owner. In repoliticizing the intervention, residents called attention to how the neighborhood had been intimately tied to the specters of land violence and misappropriation, from the threats of gangs and the uncertainties of illegal tenure to the struggles over local governance and the anxieties of widening inequality. Residents thus produced critical knowledges about local citizen struggles, state authority, and the political significance of the material transformations of their homes and neighborhood.⁷ The idea of Las Aguas as a real estate partnership and vertical condominium thus inevitably seemed out of touch. Progresa Fenicia emerged as a sanitized vision that clashed with the lived reality of downtown as a landscape of legal, property, and bodily violence.

Bringing together the main threads of this book, I examine in this chapter how Progresa Fenicia reenacted urbanism as warfare in the language of equitable progress and inclusionary development. In the context of downtown’s trajectories of renewal and displacement, the university plan shifted away from militaristic spatial control while echoing human security discourses prominent in Colombia’s convulsed postconflict era.⁸ Yet as scholars have pointed out, interventions aimed at protecting and aiding communities have in practice often merged militarization and development, expanding modalities of governance to manage “disorderly” populations.⁹ So although Progresa Fenicia was far from enacting overt modes of militarization and policing, it brought to light the subtle and intractable connections between progress and insecurity, development and violence—something reflected in Los Andes’s own place within Colombia’s history of technocratic governance and warfare.

These contradictions foreground another central theme of this book: the politics of (in)security as a mediating force in the production and materialization of urban knowledge. In previous chapters, I detailed how social actors mobilized epistemologies linked to Colombia’s long-running armed conflict both to legitimate plans of reconstruction and dispossession and to resist such projects as incarnations of state violence and forced displacement. Progresa Fenicia brought into focus the dynamic, dialectical quality of such topographies of urban knowledge. As university planners moved away from visions of renewal centered on security and order, residents responded by calling forth the everyday violences of urbanization. This process exposed the trenchant hierarchies and power differentials that shaped the plan’s allegedly collaborative and inclusionary modes of knowledge production. It revealed the ideals of property and progress that underpinned the vision of a mixed-use, high-rise development and their intimate connection with the sociopolitical and institutional structures behind Colombia’s conflicts over governance, land, and citizenship.

Progresa Fenicia highlights the complex ties between elite liberal knowledge and the country’s foundational violences and colonial legacies. Both an embodiment of enlightenment and propriety and a key node of power within class, racial, and political-economic hierarchies, Los Andes recalls Liberal politician Darío Echandía’s famous description of Colombian democracy as “an orangutan in a frock coat.”¹⁰ From this point of view, I examine how scholars, administrators, and consultants both disavowed and reckoned with the university’s role as a vehicle for projects of nation making, modernization, and capital accumulation. Anxieties about epistemic violence under the veneer of cosmopolitan politesse and detached narratives of neutrality and progress are central to my analysis and not least to my own positionality as an Universidad de los Andes alumnus and US-based scholar.¹¹ They call attention to the ways in which forms of expertise, from progressive planning to anthropological research, reproduce assumptions about racialized and impoverished communities as subjects waiting to be incorporated “into the comforts and privileges of property and citizenship,” as Ryan Cecil Jobson puts it.¹² Looking at the sociomaterial conditions that shaped the composition of progressive urban knowledge in Progresa Fenicia ultimately points to the limits of planning expertise as an epistemology tied with violent histories of state making, development, and citizenship. It also raises crucial questions about the possibility of a mode of planning beyond the security-laden roots of colonial and modernist governance, one that centers the transformation of the epistemic and material structures of urban governance and belonging.

A University with Its Back to the City

The creation of Los Andes brings us back, full circle, to the emblematic event of the destruction of El Bogotazo (see chapter 1). Its foundation can be traced to November 1948, when more than fifty aristocratic men signed the university’s “declaration of principles.” This was only months after the El Bogotazo uprising had left downtown Bogotá in ruins and as political violence swept across the country. The momentous juncture was no coincidence. As Mario Laserna Pinzón, the university’s main founder, explained, “The 9th of April [of 1948] was the best argument for the foundation of the Universidad de los Andes.”¹³ The son of a wealthy Conservative family, Laserna Pinzón had studied in North American and European elite universities such as Columbia, Princeton, and Heidelberg. After graduating in mathematics from Columbia University, Laserna Pinzón returned to Colombia to create a nonpartisan, nonreligious private university modeled after US liberal arts colleges. The idea was to promote a form of “technological humanism,” as one of the university’s founding members put it, to overcome the country’s profound social and political divisions.¹⁴ It was as if the explosive violence of El Bogotazo had finally made the devastation of rural warfare visible to urbane letrados—those nation-building, lettered elites Ángel Rama wrote about¹⁵—who were now, according to one history of the university, “compelled to descend to the harsh terrain of the reality that surrounded them.”¹⁶

But as Los Andes settled at the base of the city’s iconic Cerros Orientales (Eastern Hills), overlooking the expanding historic center from the old working-class industrial periphery of Las Aguas, the “descent to reality” looked far more like an ascent out of the quagmire of Colombia’s history of sociopolitical violence. The university rose as a center of technocratic expertise—the future training ground of policymakers, state planners, and business leaders—with administrators declaring the institution “apolitical” and “neutral.”¹⁷ It aspired to embody a technical ethos through which its técnicos would be able to stay above the fray of political violence and offer an alternative to vitriolic partisanship and social conflict. As cofounder Francisco Pizano de Brigard recalled, “In a certain way, we did not want to build a new university but rather a new nation.”¹⁸

In practice, this vision for a new Colombia was anything but neutral. While Los Andes’s appeal to academic independence seemed like a legitimate response to bipartisan interference in public universities, the discourse of technical transparency enabled specific political orientations and disavowals. The university remained close to the country’s social, political, and religious establishments. It followed elites’ regressive rejection of student organizing—a pillar of university life at Latin American public universities—and it channeled Cold War anti-Communism and fears of leftist activism on campus. More broadly, Los Andes’s technocratic ethos was heavily indebted to the United States, not only in its emulation of the lofty ivory tower but also with its strong ties to US funders and their geopolitical agendas. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, as historian Amy Offner shows, Los Andes became the country’s top center for economic planning and policy starting in the late 1950s.¹⁹ University economists, in the spirit of Lauchlin Currie’s work and the Alliance for Progress, focused on questions of economic growth and rural-to-urban migration, contributing to the era’s paradigmatic merging of urban development and counterinsurgency (see chapter 1). Behind Los Andes’s status as an independent and depoliticized institution ultimately lay concrete political commitments to the “superiority of the private sector” and the technocratic management of reality, all within an elite refusal of meaningful sociopolitical transformation.²⁰

Los Andes’s contradictory politics, as a supposedly progressive and independent force of change bounded by liberal technocracy and class and racial hierarchies, were nowhere more apparent than in the material configuration of the campus over time. The location of the university—perched at the base of the landmark hills of Monserrate and Guadalupe, two of Bogotá’s main tourist and pilgrimage sites, and beside independence leader Simón Bolívar’s country house, the historic Quinta de Bolívar—was charged with unique political and cultural significance. The vertical topography of the forested urban edge became an ideal medium to carve out a space of cultivated knowledge making that was separate from the unruly city below.²¹

The character of the buildings where classes were first held in 1949 was revealing. The university administration initially rented and later purchased several structures that had been property of the Hermanas del Buen Pastor (Sisters of the Good Shepherd), a Catholic religious order founded in France that had expanded across Latin American cities in the nineteenth century with the mission of rehabilitating “delinquent” women. The nuns’ colonial-style convent, asylum, and penitentiary would house some of the university’s early offices and classrooms. Los Andes continued climbing up the hill and stretching sideways through the acquisition of several other properties that had been vital to this working-class, industrial periphery: the Germania Brewery and its warehouses; the Richard hat factory and Richard textile manufacturing plant, later turned into a religious hospital and asylum with an attached chapel; and the Fenicia glass and bottle factory, which would give the renewal plan its name decades later. The conservative and elitist roots of Los Andes’s modernizing agendas were congealed in the campus’s traditional religious and industrial architecture: technocratic enlightenment inhabiting the material shells of institutions of social discipline and reform. The cloister of técnicos letrados would thus sit above a reality it either disavowed or would manage at a distance and on its own terms.²² A piece of graffiti in the 1980s, which became a well-known expression in local circles, put it best: “[The University of los Andes] facing Monserrate and with its back to the country.”

This did not mean that the university envisioned a campus severed from its surroundings. On the contrary, Los Andes would become a critical force in the reshaping of the east side of downtown Bogotá and of planning expertise more broadly. Early on, the university rendered Las Aguas and other surrounding historic and working-class neighborhoods into objects of technical knowledge and intervention. Crucial in this regard was the creation in 1964 of the Centro de Planificación y Urbanismo (Center for Planning and Urbanism), or CPU, within the Faculty of Architecture and Design. The mission of the CPU, according to its first director, was to “promote and carry out studies related to the problems of territorial ordering, and urban and metropolitan development.”²³ Among its many research projects on zoning, housing, and development, the CPU led key urban renewal studies in downtown Bogotá in the 1960s in coordination with the city administration of Virgilio Barco.

One of these studies, a precursor to the Fenicia plan, was completed in 1967. In line with the densification discourse of Lauchlin Currie and Mayor Barco (see chapter 1), CPU researchers presented Las Aguas as “an ideal sector for urban concentration, capable of containing a significant number of inhabitants.” They recommended “its urban remodeling [remodelación urbana] with the aim of improving current land uses.” For university researchers, this meant primarily “land uses for middle-income housing and adequate facilities for cultural and educational institutions.”²⁴ The class and racial overtones of such a proposal were apparent in the photographs appended to the study. A panoramic view of old rooftops and smokestacks included the caption “Confusion of housing and industry.” Close-up views of peasant markets—campesinas with children in arms and foodstuffs arranged on the sidewalk—were described as “improvised” and stood alongside other photos of hillside erosion and improper waste disposal. Overall, CPU architects overlooked the realities of urban labor, housing, and popular economies and portrayed them instead as “problems” that required a technical solution through the consolidation of a middle-class university and residential district. If the university had been born from the ashes of El Bogotazo to “rebuild the nation,” its first steps beyond its walls suggested a rebuilding in its own image and far from the grounded realities of urban life. At stake here were the same politics of detached, gentlemanly civility and institutional entrenchment through which urban elites had long ignored the complexities of Colombia’s sweeping violence and its integral connections to modern citizenship, property, and governance. University planners’ proposals to “improve current land uses” disregarded downtown’s history of working-class struggle over space and belonging. This was a striking disavowal for a university founded in the aftermath of the widespread destruction of El Bogotazo and amid unprecedented rural displacement to the city as war raged in the countryside.

Although the 1967 renewal plan was never implemented, fragments of its vision for a densified, middle-class neighborhood materialized in the following decades. The old Fenicia glass factory was demolished in the late 1960s, and private developers erected two thirty-one-story residential towers, the Torres Fenicia, in its place. Owners increasingly let aging houses collapse, repurposing plots as parking garages to serve the university’s growing population. Flanking modest cafeterias and corner shops, a large car-armoring plant became a blunt reminder of the area’s industrial past and of its variegated land uses and piecemeal transformations. By the 1980s, a few middle-class apartment buildings had been erected on the western edge of the neighborhood, and residents continued to add floors to their self-built homes for additional rental income, while others assembled precarious shacks on the vacant public land on the eastern slope. During this period, Los Andes crept out of its hillside enclave more decidedly. Together with the neighboring Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano and Universidad de América, by the 1980s and 1990s the university had become a central actor in the city’s plans to reverse “urban deterioration,” “recover public space,” and attract new middle-class residents to the city center.²⁵ Los Andes gradually turned toward Las Aguas and into the several blocks known as Germania, which the university eventually renamed Fenicia. These decades were marked by significant construction both within and outside the university campus, the almost doubling in size of its student body, and transformative public works such as the construction of the nearby Eje Ambiental (1996–2001)—the walkway that had partially uncovered and canalized the Río San Francisco—and the renovation of the Parque Espinosa (2005), a small park on the north side of campus.²⁶

Most notably, in 2007 the university inaugurated a main university building on the other side of the Eje Ambiental, moving directly into Las Aguas. Developed in a vacant lot that had long operated as a parking garage next to the 1970s Torres Fenicia, the ten-story glass and metal structure would now house the Facultad de Administración (School of Management) in the very core of the neighborhood. For many, the building epitomized the university’s increasing encroachment in the area. Residents often remarked on its “ugly architecture,” particularly the building’s north and south windowless black facades, evidence of Los Andes’s indifference to the people living under its shadow. Further compounding the sense of elite intrusion, the building was named after one of Colombia’s richest men and the university’s most important benefactor, Julio Mario Santo Domingo. The name was resonant. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, the Santo Domingo family had consolidated its control over the Bavaria brewing company, originally founded by German Jewish immigrant Leo Kopp, and subsidiaries such as the Fenicia bottling factory in Las Aguas. With its armed security guards and watchdogs, the glittering Santo Domingo building, or Bloque SD (SD Block), seemed to point to the return of the capitalist landowner. It was the replay of the history of industrial patronage and authority that had loomed over the working-class area for decades: The ivory tower rose as a “new smokestack” in the changing neighborhood.²⁷

The Bloque SD would operate as the main outpost from which administrators and faculty devised and launched the Progresa Fenicia plan. “The university has always been facing Monserrate with its back turned toward the city,” Carolina, the senior university administrator, said, invoking the well-worn adage, “and we need to reverse that!” Inevitably, however, this alleged reversal under Progresa Fenicia, and its promises of inclusion and collaboration, would be set against the backdrop of decades of technocratic indifference, material encroachments and inequalities, and tacit university control over the fate of the downtown neighborhood and its residents.

“You’re Not Neighbors!”

In late November 2011, a group of residents walked up to the Bloque SD to attend a public meeting organized by the Progresa Fenicia team. For most of them, this was their first time walking past campus guards and watchdogs and into a university building. As one elderly woman entered the tall atrium through the electronic turnstiles, she looked up in awe and whispered, “Qué bonito [how beautiful],” while others behind her noted with contempt how they had never been invited into the massive structure despite living under its towering presence.

The roughly sixty neighbors assembled in a lecture hall on the eighth floor, where a handful of professors and university administrators presented the Progresa Fenicia plan and answered questions. Alejandro, a middle-aged professor of public management and policy, addressed the audience with the calm of an approachable professor and the blasé tone of a seasoned bureaucrat: “Last year we told the city government, ‘We want to change the focus of the Fenicia plan and have a new focus in which we take people into account [que tenga en cuenta a la gente].’” He clicked to the next PowerPoint slide: “What we did was rethink the scheme and create an entire program called Progresa Fenicia that tries to work with residents to improve their economic, social, and urbanistic conditions.”

A mother calmed a crying baby in the back as residents followed the presentation with a mix of concern, confusion, and lack of interest. Collecting “information” about the neighborhood, Alejandro explained, had been vital to confirm the viability of the project. “We need to know who they are,” he said, inadvertently making apparent the distance between university planners and residents. “[We need to know] who we are!” he added, quickly switching to the first person, stepping back into a conversational, more intimate tone. Preliminary “diagnostics” and a “census” had showed that the project was possible, Alejandro continued, and it was now necessary to refine and deepen that information to ensure that “we don’t have to leave [the area], that those of us who want to stay can stay.”

Over the course of the meeting, the rhetoric of collaborative knowledge and associative planning unraveled. The setting itself, with residents sitting behind the classroom’s long white tables and professors and planners lecturing in front, was revealing of the hierarchies that underpinned the exchange. The meeting restaged bureaucratic socialización (socialization), as procedural participation is known in policy circles in Bogotá, through a form of educational authority: the imparting of knowledge on the unlearned. As Progresa Fenicia team members took to the stage to describe the “components” of the plan and the “diagnostic work” they had thus far carried out, the tensions between the coproduction and extraction of knowledge became more apparent.

Miguel, a lead architect from the campus management office, began by recognizing that urban renewal in Bogotá had largely “gotten off on the wrong foot [entradas con el pie izquierdo]”: “[This is when promoters] launch a project with a render [architectural rendering], that’s spectacular and shines—”

“Pardon me, what’s a render?” Alejandro interjected, nudging Miguel to use less technical jargon, as residents snickered in the back.

“Excuse me, good question, it’s an image of a project, a drawing that gives an idea of the future [in a particular place], and it’s typically large towers with a lot of glass that don’t include what used to be there and those who used to be there.” He assured the audience that Progresa Fenicia would reverse this tendency through a form of “collective construction” that recognized “diversity” in the neighborhood: “This place we call the barrio, the community, is not a single thing; diverse communities are located here, and they are not easily aggregated, but they all share the same space.” University experts, Miguel continued, had a “great responsibility” to learn from residents’ “knowledges, experiences, stories” and to use that “great mass of knowledge” in the creation of a vision for a future with a place for everyone.

Two unspoken assumptions were embedded in the presentation. The first was that it would be professors and planners who would assemble this body of knowledge and establish the corresponding epistemic categories. And the second was the idea of urban reconstruction as an a priori, inescapable process. “Transformations will keep on happening [whether we like it or not],” as Miguel put it, compelling residents to participate in downtown renewal rather than question its foundations. University planners’ interactions with residents tacitly centered a particular worldview. With their talk of inclusionary redevelopment, they projected middle-class ideals of citizenship and progress as universal, unquestioned aspirations. At stake here, following feminist theory, was a distinctive “standpoint,” a privileged position that permeated knowledge production, defined the questions that mattered, and simultaneously obscured the situatedness of planning expertise.²⁸ Despite its progressive intentions, Progresa Fenicia enacted a form of knowledge from the center, which ultimately revealed more about university planners’ presuppositions about liberal values of property and governance than about residents’ urban experiences and understandings. This mode of seeing failed to recognize that residents themselves had for decades elaborated forms of knowledge from the margins about state displacement and oppression closely linked to Los Andes as its powerful landowning neighbor and occasional employer.²⁹

It was thus unsurprising that residents had been wary of a “census of living conditions” that the university had piloted months earlier. At some point Silvia, an administration professor specializing in community development, took the microphone and reviewed the several activities—community meetings, workshops, focus groups, and the census—that Progresa Fenicia had organized to understand the “conditions” and “needs” of the population. Significantly, such exercises had portrayed residents’ lived realities as “problems” requiring the “design of adequate proposals” to find “solutions.”³⁰ Silvia pulled up a slide that gave a bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood and its estimated 1,628 residents. She noted, for instance, that 55 percent of workers in the area were independent: “If we are thinking about a model of economic development that allows people who want to stay to actually be able to stay in the zone, we have to understand who those independent workers are.” While Silvia was acutely aware of the difficulties of the redevelopment partnership and was committed to illuminating the many obstacles residents would face, she did not question the assumptions behind the plan or the imperative to participate. Silvia concluded her intervention by admitting that “the census had had significant coverage in some blocks, but very little in others.” She called on the silent crowd to help improve and supplement the information available to the Progresa Fenicia plan. For her and her colleagues, the key was to gather more knowledge about the neighborhood and create mechanisms to include as many people as possible in the project. Obscured were questions about the necessity itself of renewal and the very terms in which residents and their homes would be conceived and incorporated into the plan.

These tensions became apparent with the intervention of Camilo, the team’s legal expert. A savvy and knowledgeable consultant, lecturer, and lawyer, Camilo was one of Progresa Fenicia’s main architects and a passionate critic of the city’s recent history of exclusionary renewal. In our many conversations about the plan over lunch, he would describe himself as the “man without a suitcase.” Far from negotiating sale prices with property owners—a common role for real estate lawyers, not to mention legal swindlers and scammers—Camilo had been developing a methodology to determine the “juridical situation [situación jurídica]” of properties so that residents could become partners in the project. Attempting to be as didactic as possible, Camilo explained to the audience the color-coding system, or “traffic light,” that the team had devised, as he showed a map of the neighborhood’s more than five hundred land parcels: green meant no restrictions to become a partner in the plan; yellow represented a legal condition easy to solve, such as shared tenure; gray was lack of information; and red pointed to a complex situation such as ongoing lawsuits, foreclosures, or possession. Sensing some unrest among attendees, Camilo stressed that it was critical to establish “properties’ legal aptitude to be part of the project.”

An elderly man stood up and waved his arms with exasperation, interrupting the presentation. “This is a violation of confidential information and of our freedom. You never consulted with us.”

Camilo tried to be conciliatory. “Your opinion is very valid. We understand the perception of a transgression of privacy, but to be totally clear, this information is public, and anyone can access it.” In any case, he added, it was still crucial for residents to cooperate and “validate” the information. Alejandro stepped in to appease the audience, explaining that the planning team had gathered data with the sole purpose of “designing a proposal that would allow us to redevelop the area, to secure local residents’ permanence, and to make sure that people would stay and develop [permanecieran desarrollándose].” Shifting the responsibility back to residents, he argued that the success of the plan and its promises of permanence and inclusion depended on them: “If we all contribute, we all win [todos ponemos, todos ganamos].” He called on residents to refrain from selling their properties and consider instead their future gains as owners within a dense, redeveloped neighborhood. “But the project is not viable,” he warned, “if we open spaces for intermediaries who want to speculate.”

More was at stake in these exchanges than a disagreement over the mechanics of the redevelopment partnership. It was the underlying power differentials—the structuring conditions of the meeting and of any potential partnership—that were at the center of residents’ increasing discontent. A visibly upset homeowner, for instance, raised concerns about residents’ “economic capacity” to become partners in the project. He slowly but insistently asked about the steps the university would take to examine the issue. Every time Alejandro attempted to respond, the man interrupted with a reformulation of the question. “You’re not the only ones who can speak here!” the man finally protested. He was voicing a sense of inequality between the university and local dwellers over the control of the terms of the discussion.

In contrast to university planners’ newfound desire to know their neighbors, residents had for years tracked Los Andes’s moves within the area, in particular its property purchases, making it difficult to reconcile everyday material realities with the idea of a redevelopment partnership. The university’s proposal appeared as elite indifference or, at its worst, cynicism—a form of epistemic violence.³¹ One man articulated this fundamental lopsidedness later in the meeting.³² Using paused and formal speech—seemingly gesturing to the genre of the professorial lecture and its politics of decorum and knowledgeability—the man pointed out the contradiction between the “principles” that planners talked about and the “university’s behavior”: “If you walk around the area, you’ll find that the university has acquired several large properties. The university has expanded rapidly: Take this building where we are right now, or the new library, or the communal park, which is practically the university’s property. All of this shows no reciprocity. What trust or assurance can we have?”

An elderly woman, one of the many retirees who lived in the neighborhood, stood up next, visibly agitated. “What does the Universidad de los Andes want?” she asked. “What does it want? You tell me! What does it want? [Does it want] to rebuild all of this? [Does it want] to take our homes away from us?” Alejandro spoke into the microphone again, in his most conciliatory voice, assuring the attendees that the university only wanted people to remain in the neighborhood and become partners in the project. He then added, invoking a sense of commonality, “We [professors and administrators] also want to stay here, as neighbors [como vecinos],” to which a man in the back immediately retorted, “You’re not neighbors; you live in the north!”

Alejandro, with Miguel now backing him, tried to appease the crowd by going over the mechanics of the redevelopment partnership once again. They started by reminding the audience that Los Andes was a “university, not a real estate company” and that Progresa Fenicia was not a “rent-seeking scheme.” Instead, to “escape the commercial logic,” the plan included multiple modes of association so that property owners could obtain new apartments at no additional cost. By tripling the neighborhood’s density, Miguel stressed, “[the real estate profits brought in by] new residents would pay for urban improvements and for local dwellers’ new apartments.” For residents, however, such technical assurances were moot, as their concerns lay with the broader and long-standing power differentials that had structured the relations between the university and the neighborhood.

Pointing to this underlying history of material conflicts, a middle-aged apartment owner commented on what he saw as the contradictions inherent to the promise of inclusionary revitalization, and he invoked the specter of land grabbing and dispossession. “I work in the Indigenous sector,” the man declared, “and this is how Indigenous communities have lost their territory.” He drew out the connection by calling attention to the epistemic and political-economic struggles at the core of the plan: “You talk a lot about how the university has scientists and we’re all aware that this is one of the highest-ranked universities in Latin America. But the community also has its saberes, its knowledges. So, I respectfully would like us to open a space, not for information, but for us to work together.” At stake for him were the material conditions of knowledge production. Not only had the university established the epistemological parameters of urban revitalization, the man concluded, but professors and administrators inevitably remained beholden to the larger economic forces shaping the project. “You are professors, but you are not the owners of the university,” the man concluded, “and when large investors enter the scheme, how can we be sure the terms of the partnership will not change?”

Epistemic Dissonance

The friction between the material politics of expert knowledge production and the neighborhood’s everyday realities and saberes intensified in the following months. As rumors about the plan continued to circulate among residents, university planners held weekly “executive meetings” on a top floor of the Bloque SD and expanded their presence in the neighborhood through surveys, town halls, and social outreach. By this point the Progresa Fenicia team had accepted my presence as a regular “observer” and, eventually, as a collaborator in the organization of academic events related to the plan. This had happened not without ambivalence on their part. Some university experts seemed uncomfortable with the idea of having a tagalong anthropologist with undeclared allegiances, while others, for whom Progresa Fenicia was primarily a research endeavor and a form of epistemic experimentation, were more than welcoming. As Camilo, the team’s legal expert and my closest friend in the group, once told me half-jokingly, “I will always be happy to be your object of anthropological research.”

If my relationship with the planning team was permeated by the tensions between knowledge production and its unspoken politics, so was the preparation and implementation of the plan itself. In experts’ everyday routines, the plan’s broader political contexts and ramifications lurked uncomfortably—repressed and submerged—in the background. They inevitably resurfaced time and again only to be reluctantly acknowledged or willfully ignored. This was apparent, for instance, in the everyday spatiality of the planning process. While experts talked every week about collaborative knowledge and associative development, they did so from the heights of the Bloque SD meeting room. The impulse to plan alongside residents stood at odds with experts’ continued gaze from above. As Miguel, the lead architect, once told me, looking out into the neighborhood from an SD balcony, “Down there it’s very similar to the country’s situation with all its conflicts but at a micro scale; that’s the challenge we’re taking up with the intervention.”

Such dissonances were further materialized with the university’s acquisition of two houses in the area to set up Progresa Fenicia social outreach programs and meeting spaces. The paradox of serving the community while further expanding property control was not lost on all the experts. As the planning process advanced and conflicts deepened, planners occasionally sought to mitigate such jarring contrasts. In one meeting, for example, team members cautioned that university architects affiliated with the project had been taking photographs of the neighborhood as they worked on their initial designs. “This is just going to make people more nervous,” one expert noted, calling for all contact with residents and documentation of the area to be closely monitored. Tracking such contradictory orientations toward the project and following planners’ reckoning with the contentious undersides of the progressive plan became central to my ethnographic work. This reckoning, I should clarify, was theirs as much as it was mine. Being similarly positioned to them in terms of class, race, and sociocultural background, I was equally confronted with the complicities and disavowals of my own epistemic praxis. In this sense, my analysis here emerges as much from following university experts’ practices as from my own process of learning about the plan and recognizing its unsettling implications and underlying paradoxes.

Tensions within the planning team came to a head when Progresa Fenicia recruited a group of university ethnographers to assist in deepening the information previously gathered through a preliminary census. Ideals associated with the “collective construction of space [construcción colectiva espacial]” came up against what experts called a “viable financial model.” For Tomás, a professor in the social sciences, and José, a doctoral student, the plan presented a problematic contradiction between the ethics of collaborative knowledge and the plan’s real estate imperatives. As coordinators of the new qualitative study—which included home visits and interviews—they viewed their role within the plan with discomfort and wariness. During an initial meeting between them and the Progresa Fenicia team, Alejandro suggested that the group imagine the ethnographers as “vendors of options [to enter the project]” and residents as “clients.” Embracing an extractive approach to knowledge production, the team’s financial expert added that the social researchers should not “miss any opportunity to get [sacar] more information out of residents.” I glanced over to Tomás and José and saw them wince, as another professor quipped, “That sounds like an insurance broker.” From Alejandro’s managerial perspective, the study was a key instrument of negotiation. Tomás and José, for their part, were reluctant to frame their participation in such terms. As Tomás later warned in the meeting, “Our role will not be to try to get people to sign on to the project.” After a moment of silence, Alejandro restated his point, seeking to placate the social scientists: The objective of the survey, he said, “is getting information that will assist us in making decisions, period.”

The tensions between extracting information, negotiating development partnerships, and collaboratively composing urban knowledges continued to reappear in the day-to-day ethnographic work. In an early meeting with the four recent anthropology graduates hired to carry out the fieldwork, Tomás urged the young women to remember that they were not “real estate brokers.” The aims of their ethnographic study, however, had already been the result of a compromise. While Tomás and José had originally envisioned open-ended, semistructured interviews as their main methodology, others on the planning team insisted on gathering specific data about ownership, income, and land use. In one sense, the study had thus ended up looking more like a standard socioeconomic census (censo socioeconómico) with actionable questions about property and tenure. At the same time, the new ethnographic survey opened spaces to make visible other social realities within the neighborhood.

Tomás and José advised the fieldworkers to “avoid unitary stories” and “reject the assumption that everyone who lives in the same conditions has the same narrative.” They insisted on the need to reconstruct people’s “temporal orientations” and “senses of place” by attending to their “life plans [planes de vida].” In his work on community- and place-based design, Arturo Escobar follows the idea of planes de vida conceptualized by Colombian Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples as a promising path to envision alternative futures outside the parameters of capitalist modernity.³³ For Tomás and José, something similar was at stake in Las Aguas. “The biggest challenge,” Tomás told the four young researchers, “is to understand how two different life logics [lógicas de vida]”—those of the university and the neighborhood—“coexist in the area.” Ethnographers thus deployed the notion of planes de vida to repoliticize knowledge production within Progresa Fenicia. In doing so, they strategically reified the neighborhood as the embodiment of urban precariousness and informality.³⁴ Contrary to their initial call to attend to the multiple narratives within the neighborhood, Tomás and José demarcated, as sharply as possible, the lines of difference between the plan’s assumptions and the everyday realities of insecure labor, tenuous ownership, and lived uncertainty in Las Aguas. For them, this “quotidian economy [economía de la cotidianidad]” was at odds with the long-term temporal horizon and stability necessitated by the redevelopment partnership.

This epistemic disjuncture became apparent in discussions about tenements (inquilinatos). A common living arrangement in downtown Bogotá for decades, inquilinatos had been traditionally defined as “shared housing,” where, according to a 1970s university study, several households rented and “shared communal spaces such as patios, hallways, yards … kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry.”³⁵ As elites moved out of the city center during the twentieth century, dilapidated estates were subdivided and repurposed as precarious rentals by absentee owners.³⁶ Inquilinos and the increasingly deteriorated structures they inhabited would become integral to class-inflected and racialized representations of downtown decay. Although shared housing continued to be a key modality of residence in central areas in later decades, it was increasingly working-class property owners or poseedores themselves who would rent out rooms within their homes. Shared housing unsettled dominant assumptions about ownership and residence, posing a direct challenge to Progresa Fenicia. Not only did such arrangements house the neighborhood’s most impoverished residents and represent a main source of income for homeowners, but they did not fit neatly with the ideology of individual property so central to the plan.³⁷

During a meeting in early March 2012, Tomás and José gestured to such deep-seated tensions between local forms of housing and the plan’s property partnership scheme. They referred to the case of a two-story house from the early twentieth century in which several families had lived for years without a property title. Each family had its separate living space and shared common areas, and although they were all relatives, they paid rent to the older couple that lived on the upper floor. The social scientists argued that the house was an “inquilinato” and that it exemplified the “subsistence economy” of many neighborhood residents who lived on precarious incomes and lacked basic utilities. To further illustrate such deprivation, José recalled how, during their first visit to the house, the young fieldworkers had been shocked to discover that it was flooded with sewage from a burst pipe.

Miguel, the campus architect, objected to their description. “I’m not sure that we should call this an inquilinato. It isn’t really on the market so it would require a different treatment within the plan.”

“In terms of its internal organization,” Tomás insisted, somewhat irritated, “it does operate as an inquilinato.”

“Sometimes they call this allegamiento,” Miguel noted, referring to a situation where allegados (relatives) share housing.

“But they pay rent and share services and space,” José interjected. The fact that the families shared the house as kin but also paid rent emerged as an anomaly within the plan’s categories. It was neither individual property nor rental space.

The “legal solution,” Camilo suggested, “would be to consider all the tenants as poseedores, but that would make the whole thing a mess.” It would entail a legal procedure through which the residents could obtain shared ownership over the house given the prolonged absence of a property owner. At stake here was not only change in tenure but also the transformation of social relations and kinship dynamics. This ultimately raised questions about what the plan could offer in the renovated neighborhood to extended working-class families such as this one. It was apparent to the experts that new units in an apartment building would not work. As planners considered the problem for a few minutes, José broke the silence by sarcastically pointing to the limits of the plan’s allegedly progressive property scheme: “[Can the plan offer] progressive inquilinatos?”

Tomás and José’s deployment of the notion of inquilinato was deliberately political. It drew attention to those who were “most vulnerable” and who lived in the most precarious conditions. But other Progresa Fenicia team members seemed wary of the category’s implications. If they “discovered” too many inquilinatos, Miguel intimated, they would have to devise impossibly robust policies to relocate all impoverished tenants or create alternatives for them to become homeowners. For many university experts, the focus was therefore on individual property owners and their various forms of tenure and livelihoods. For them it was imperative to recognize the neighborhood’s heterogeneity and the multiplicity of actors that were well positioned to become part of the plan. This afforded a space of negotiation and compromise. More than inquilinatos, they talked, for example, about productive households (viviendas productivas), where tenants were recast as sources of income and owners or possessors came to the fore. Such perspectives ultimately privileged ideals of capitalist productivity and individual ownership in line with the plan.

Throughout the planning process, the construction of epistemic categories produced certain kinds of inhabitants while making others less visible, and it rendered certain forms of ownership and belonging legible while obscuring others. Despite their skepticism of Progresa Fenicia, even the social scientists had reproduced the power dynamics of the university-led plan by imposing the reified category of inquilinatos. As one of the young ethnographers commented after a morning interview with a tenant, “[Our supervisors, Tomás and José,] seem to already know what they’re going to find”—namely, “informality” and “marginality.” Despite political differences within the planning team, the production of knowledge was thus largely a unidirectional process led by experts, one that left little space for local actors’ self-representations. Residents’ grounded knowledges of urban land and ownership, of long-standing histories of conflict and violence, not only remained out of sight but were subsumed under categories mapped onto them from above.

Progressive Fictions

With planning events and social outreach in full swing by late 2012, the Progresa Fenicia team set up a voicemail box to get feedback from residents. Soon afterward, Camilo listened to a disturbing recording. The voice at the other end did not comment on increased costs of living, replacement housing, or the risks of partnering with the university. Instead the anonymous caller made a short and blunt threat: “If you keep on messing with the neighborhood you’re going to get bombed.” More than he was concerned about the threat, Camilo was unsettled by the irruption of the talk of violence.

Over the previous two years, university planners had crafted a narrative about progress, participation, and collective improvement. Far from the destructiveness of previous downtown plans and their security-centric rhetoric, they had recast renewal—what they now called revitalization—as a platform for inclusionary community building and development. Yet such reframings had immediately struck many residents as puro cuento (stories or cheap talk). While Progresa Fenicia team members typically interpreted such reactions as lack of trust or as misrepresentations of the university’s intentions, for locals something more significant was at stake. For them these were not simply lies but rather, following urban geographers D. Asher Ghertner and Robert Lake, dangerous “land fictions”: “social stories” that not only reinvented “land qua commodity but land as a particularly socially indexed commodity, one that promises to transform its uses and hence its users in ways that align with desirable social imaginaries of value.”³⁸ In this regard, a homeowner and longtime street vendor who worked in the neighborhood told me candidly, “This isn’t going to be for the poor… . We have been taught to live differently. [If the project becomes a reality] I will probably say, ‘How nice,’ but I won’t be able to stay.”

Residents interpreted the university’s progressive land fictions through the experience of pervasive and long-standing conflicts over urban property and space. For most people, ownership had been gained through sustained struggles, which often turned violent, with rival land claimants as well as local authorities. From this vantage point, the bombing threat that had shocked Camilo was not so surprising. It was a manifestation of the violent undersides of property regimes and a reminder that the university’s incursion did not happen in a vacuum. Its role as the promoter of the plan—however well-intentioned and conciliatory—emerged as a bid to consolidate authority within the neighborhood’s patchwork trajectories of territorial control. Moreover, the speculative uncertainties created by Progresa Fenicia catalyzed local divisions and hardened power differentials. Behind the veneer of participatory negotiation, and beyond expert representations of a space of properties and land uses, lay a fractious terrain of disputes, misappropriation, destruction, and displacement.

Unbeknownst to most students, faculty, and staff who walked through Las Aguas daily, visited its cafeterias, and used the area’s makeshift parking lots, the neighborhood had long been a destination for people fleeing violence in rural areas. A family of seven, for example, had been displaced from their land in Marinilla in the department of Antioquia in the early 2000s under the pressure of both guerrilla and paramilitary forces. I met the father—his campesino past still visible in his worn work clothes and rugged hands—while following the Progresa Fenicia ethnographers during one of their field visits. The family rented a dilapidated colonial-style house across the street from the Bloque SD. Part of its orange tile roof was collapsing, its courtyard was cluttered, and two of its four rooms had been repurposed as sewing shops where the family worked. The interview proceeded as usual with questions about occupation, tenure status, income, and cost of living. But when one of the anthropologists asked about his arrival to Las Aguas, the man stopped, and his voice quivered. He talked about how “paracos [paramilitaries] were sanguinary to the core” and described the violence he had seen before fleeing: children with signs of torture, a cracked head, a campesino dragged by an SUV. “Every day these images come back,” he told us. After one of the young ethnographers uncomfortably turned back to her script and asked about his family’s opinion about the plan, the man simply stated, “We want [the university] to let us live here, to live in peace.”

The university’s focus on property development and its lack of attention to these grounded histories made it unwittingly complicit in local land conflicts and displacements. Such entanglements never reached the planning table, with experts either treating them as mere anecdotes or remaining oblivious to their occurrence. One revealing story involved a family of six who had been recently displaced from Huila, a department in southwestern Colombia. With the help of Eduardo, a longtime possessor of a small parking lot, the family had settled into a vacant house owned by the city in the main entrance to the neighborhood. Family members could be seen every afternoon selling arepas and chorizos to passersby from a small grill on the sidewalk. Eventually authorities evicted them, and the university acquired the house, demolished it, equipped it with a shipping container turned planning office, and created an urban vegetable garden in the back. Gesturing to the imagery of sustainable urbanism, the cutting-edge Progresa Fenicia office had ironically contributed to the family’s renewed displacement. While I was chatting one afternoon with Eduardo about his own struggle to remain in place, the newly evicted mother and grandmother walked by and asked if we knew of any other vacant houses in the neighborhood. “So many abandoned houses in downtown,” the elderly woman complained. “How about that big gray house on Twenty-First Street; isn’t that one empty?” her daughter asked. Eduardo recalled how a young man who had been a tenant there had taken over the house a few years earlier. He was not sure if the man was still there, but he could assure the women of one thing: “If you are going to take over a house like that, you have to be ready to stand your ground with your life.”

Residents who arrived in the neighborhood escaping rural violence—from the older generations who fled La Violencia in the mid-twentieth century to recent arrivals caught in the crossfire of paramilitary, guerrilla, and state violence—had not merely “resettled” in the city. More than “adaptation, integration, and assimilation,” as Andrés Salcedo Fidalgo importantly argues, at stake here were processes of “reconstruction” linked to the recomposition of social relations and the “production of spaces.”³⁹ At the same time, agonistic practices associated with rural property conflicts were translated and rematerialized in the construction of urban housing—what residents often called their ranchos, a throwback to the rural smallholding. In Las Aguas, the possession of land through gradual improvements (mejoras) and its constant defense from legal and extralegal threats of expulsion echoed through urban dwellers’ everyday experience. But such practices and conflicts did not simply migrate from the countryside into the city with the displaced families who squatted in abandoned houses or built shacks on the hillside. Rather, as I have been arguing in this book, they were integral to the city’s modern regimes of property and development. The logics of land and state violence were at the very core of urban knowledges and their sedimentation in downtown spaces. For residents of Las Aguas, such material histories unsettled the university’s progressive fictions, bringing to light the underlying and contradictory politics of appropriation.

Sara, an elderly single mother of a disabled adult son, elaborated on the intimate connection between the logics of violent (dis)possession and her path toward home ownership.⁴⁰ She had bought her small rancho in the 1980s at a very low price from a taxi driver who had received threats and decided to leave. “But I had it very hard too,” Sara recalled pensively, sitting in the sparsely stocked cafeteria she ran out of her small living room. Since her arrival, her clean and well-organized home and cafeteria had collided with the street’s aesthetics: its “dingy bars, brothels, and clouds of smoke.” Almost immediately after moving into her house and reconditioning it for her modest business, she was pressured by local drug dealers and brothel owners to aid in their illicit operations. Her refusal increased animosity from neighbors, leading up to a critical event in the 1990s: “They put a revolver to my chest. It was a woman who ran a repair shop across the street, one of the toughest families in the area.” This was part of an attempt to get her to leave the neighborhood and give up her house. “But I went back up to them,” she continued, “and I told them they would have to buy my house or kill me.” Tensions had resurfaced more recently when the house next to hers was abandoned by its owners and “people tried to invade it.” Sara decided to “take charge of the property,” carrying out repairs and making sure no one got in. Other residents looking to appropriate the house “declared a war” against her and accused her of “hiding thieves and drugs” behind the restored facade. In the end, the house remained vacant, its entrances sealed, with Sara claiming she had only been trying “to benefit the community.”

Other residents similarly pointed to the dangers associated with home building and ownership. A street vendor explained how the remodeling of the first two floors of her auto-constructed home had antagonized some neighbors, “people who think they own the barrio.” When they saw construction materials and the changing appearance of her home, they sent city officials to inspect the construction—an oblique threat to her tenure. Another property owner had endured more overt attacks from a family who had been after her house: They threw bricks on her roof every week, both to scare her and to deteriorate the well-kept structure. Conversely, a local store owner with no legal title took great pains to build up and improve his house in order to have more legal security and avoid expropriation. And yet another homeowner with a unique penchant for vernacular design had incorporated security features into his house—such as concealed lookout openings—to “keep an eye on the street” and prevent squatting in neighboring structures and the theft of electrical wiring and exposed metal pipes. In all these cases, urban property was imbued with the conflicts and insecurities associated with the threat of dispossession. Sara concluded her story about the trials of home ownership by commenting on the university’s plan and gesturing to the country’s broader currents of land violence: “You know, I really pity those poor peasants who get thrown off their lands.”

For Ramiro, an attorney and newspaper editor who owned a small two-story house, it was difficult to disentangle Progresa Fenicia from the lasting threats of downtown displacement. “I just hope the same thing doesn’t happen [to us] with the university plan,” he told me as he recounted his beleaguered path toward property ownership in the city center. His early life had been marked by state dispossession. He was born to a family of watchmakers, and his parents had bought a small colonial-style house in the historic Santa Bárbara neighborhood near the Plaza de Bolívar after years of living in inquilinatos and rentals. Ramiro and his family lived there “until the Banco Central Hipotecario [state mortgage lender] started to dismember the neighborhood [in the early 1980s]” for a state-led renewal plan (see chapter 1). “[Authorities] started buying houses … just like [the Universidad de] Los Andes is doing now!” Ramiro noted. The family opposed the plan fiercely and was “the last in the block” to accept the forced purchase.

Displaced by renewal, in the late 1980s Ramiro and his family arrived in Las Aguas, where they clung to their precarious middle-class status amid poverty and criminal bands vying for control. “It was a very tough area when we arrived,” he recalled. Given this history, Ramiro found university experts’ detachment from downtown territorial struggles and property violence troubling: “Do they really want us as neighbors [in the future development]? I don’t think so.” For him, the fact that power differentials had been left intact—with the university dictating the terms of the participatory planning process and establishing the parameters of land values—preserved the violence of exclusionary property regimes and tacitly devalued his sense of ownership and belonging. This was the continuation of the “expulsion of raizales [original populations]” he had experienced earlier in his life, what he remembered as a violent urban dismemberment but now under the promise of progressive revitalization and its fictions of inclusionary development.

Between Equals?

Eventually local dissent became impossible to ignore. Apartment owners in Multifamiliares Calle 20 (Multifamily Twentieth Street), a building complex constructed in the 1980s, emerged as the most visible force opposing Progresa Fenicia. In one sense, their mobilization was an expression of middle-class anxieties exacerbated by the plan. The uncertain future of renewal and its lingering threat of displacement deepened existing sociospatial divisions. Apartment buildings such as Multifamiliares had already been visibly separated from Las Aguas’s older houses, tenements, and hillside shacks. They stood at the edges of the neighborhood, near main avenues and close to the campuses of Los Andes and the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano. Surrounded by fencing and facing the renovated promenade of the Eje Ambiental, Multifamiliares had been an island in the working-class neighborhood. Residents of the modest apartment complex had also been deeply unsettled by the razing of Manzana Cinco that had unfolded directly across from the complex’s main gate (see chapter 3). The plan and its calls for progress had thus unsettled what residents viewed as their hard-gained yet fragile social status and security. To reassert such distinctions, some apartment residents occasionally expressed disdain toward the people living past Twenty-Second Street and up the hill. During planning meetings, they often rejected the idea of relocating to shared buildings “with those people from up there.” Some went as far as sending letters to officials at the Secretaría de Planeación, one functionary recalled, complaining about Progresa Fenicia and arguing that “the project should get rid of those people who live in shacks and tenements and leave us alone.”

At the same time, apartment residents and nearby property and business owners created alliances with the broader community—including poorer homeowners, poseedores, and inquilinos. Not only was this a strategic move to catalyze opposition to the plan, but it also reflected a shared history and political consciousness around property struggles and belonging. Aligning with downtown-wide calls against “urban displacement” and “the defense of territory,” the rising movement against Progresa Fenicia deployed repertoires of land violence that rematerialized Las Aguas as a battlefield closely linked to urban and national territorial conflicts. The name adopted by the opposition group, Comité No Se Tomen Las Aguas, was revealing in this regard: Translating both to “Do not drink the waters” and “Do not take over the waters,” it conjured the physical takeover of the neighborhood—an image resonant with the country’s history of armed invasions of towns and villages. It represented Las Aguas as a kind of commons—the Waters—and the university as a sophisticated urban land grabber.

Under the banner of No Se Tomen Las Aguas, property owners and residents organized panels, film screenings, and town halls about the dangers of urban renewal. At the height of its activities in 2013, the group called for a march against the university’s intervention. Residents carried torches and lit a small fire in the open space in front of one of Los Andes’s main entrances. This protest would later be known by participants and Progresa Fenicia staff as the Marcha de las Antorchas (March of the Torches). Redolent of Bogotá’s history of political violence, this had been the name of a massive manifestation against bipartisan violence led by leftist Liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in 1947, one year before his assassination. The emblematic procession is said to have drawn around one hundred thousand people to the city center through highly coordinated grassroots organizing across working-class neighborhoods. This “river of fire,” as Gaitán described the procession at the time, would become a symbol of the contained power of the urban masses as well as a foreshadowing of the undercurrents of urban violence that would surface during the Bogotazo uprising.⁴¹ By deploying these repertoires of contention, No Se Tomen Las Aguas members sought to repoliticize the university plan and draw attention to the material histories of urban power and inequality that had shaped Las Aguas. Yet the mobilization of these histories, particularly in the hands of middle-class property owners, was replete with contradictions. The idea of a commons overrun by the university not only occluded frictions and struggles within the neighborhood but also tacitly reproduced normative ideals of ownership and citizenship. This was brought home to me by Nancy, one of the leaders of No Se Tomen Las Aguas.

Nancy and her partner, a downtown alderman (edil), were property owners in Multifamiliares, and although they no longer lived in the neighborhood, their ties to Las Aguas and the city center ran deep. The couple had built their legal clientele and political base, which were closely entwined, in the neighborhood and surrounding areas. Nancy was the embodiment of a downtown lawyer—for many university experts she represented the proverbial tinterilla (ink spiller). She litigated modest lawsuits, mostly for impoverished residents, and became closely involved with land disputes in the city center. Nancy had also become a regular dissenting voice at university town halls. She was always present in these gatherings and often made her way into smaller tenant and property-owner meetings carrying a folder of poderes—powers of attorney given to her by residents.

As a main organizer of No Se Tomen Las Aguas, Nancy had drawn on her long-running experience as a legal and political broker to widen local participation beyond the parameters established by Progresa Fenicia. For her, one of the group’s main “social conquests” had come after the Marcha de las Antorchas when the city administration agreed to host a series of roundtables with community organizations and university planners. With the mediation of the city’s Veeduría Distrital (Oversight Office), participants discussed guarantees for resettlement on the blocks on which they resided, an allocation of funds to mitigate the economic impacts of renewal, and the temporary suspension of rising utility costs in the renewed neighborhood.⁴² These negotiation points would ultimately make it into the decree that sanctioned the Progresa Fenicia plan in 2014, as well as into subsequent regulations for the “protection of original property owners and dwellers.”⁴³ Nancy was proud not only of the outcome but of the fact that No Se Tomen Las Aguas had been mentioned by name in one of the decrees. For her, this was a form of recognition and respect that had been all but absent in the university’s participatory planning. Apartment residents and homeowners gradually accepted Progresa Fenicia—as the neighborhood’s propertied middle class, Nancy herself admitted, they were well positioned to benefit from redevelopment. At the same time, Nancy continued to represent Las Aguas’s most impoverished neighbors in their negotiations with the university, often acting as a vocal opposer in public settings.

After years of seeing only her public persona as a defender of the poor and witnessing planners’ discomfort with her “double agenda,” I was finally able to meet with Nancy in her downtown office in 2018. Located in a modernist mid-rise on the edges of the historic La Candelaria, her tiny law firm consisted of two cubicles brimming with legal volumes and court cases in leather binders. Nancy started by pointing out the enduring power differentials that surrounded the Progresa Fenicia plan as well as the university’s initial disregard for local organizations. “I’m still very upset with the university,” she told me, “because this is like a mosquito dealing with an elephant.” Yet in describing the redevelopment conflict, Nancy traced her activism and professional beginnings not to property disputes but rather to cocinol: white gasoline used for cooking by the urban poor from the 1960s to the early 1990s. As a young law student, she had lived with her parents and sister in a house in Las Aguas not far from her apartment at Multifamiliares. In her daily walk to the Universidad Libre—a decidedly middle-class and secular university founded by Liberals in the late nineteenth century, where Jorge Eliécer Gaitán would serve as president in the 1930s—Nancy was always shocked by the long lines of women and children waiting to fill large plastic jugs (bidones) with cocinol. “It was almost like a punishment for the community, it seemed terrible to me,” she recalled. Nancy probed further and realized that cocinol was at the center of neighborhood politics. The national Ministerio de Minas y Energía (Ministry of Mines and Energy) distributed the fuel to working-class homes that lacked propane gas or electric stoves. “So people got a carné [official card], and if they didn’t have it,” Nancy said, “well, they couldn’t get the cocinol.” As in other neighborhoods, the Junta de Acción Comunal (Community Action Council), or JAC, of Las Aguas became the key mediator in the distribution of the cards and the fuel. The access to cocinol, Nancy explained, “was part of the political, partisan pressure at the time in Bogotá, through the JACs.”

Cocinol opened a contentious space of political engagement, government corruption, and illegal trade. Dubbed the “blue coca” by the newspaper El Tiempo in 1993 in reference to Colombia’s explosive drug trade, the volatile gasoline not only was a leading cause of burns in the city but also became a sought-after commodity for clandestine networks that siphoned cocinol from delivery trucks and diluted the remaining load with petrodiesel or water.⁴⁴ In their role as local managers of beneficiary lists, members of JACs also allegedly manipulated cocinol distribution for individual gain and, most importantly, as a source of political capital. Cocinol was at the center of emblematic protests during those decades, such as a 1983 “pro-cocinol march” in the city center in which thousands of working-class residents protested cocinol scarcity.⁴⁵ In later years, calls for the transition from cocinol to natural gas in barrios populares also led to social mobilizations, such as the 1993 Paro Cívico de Ciudad Bolívar, a civic strike in Bogotá’s largest working-class district.⁴⁶

According to Nancy, cocinol became “a way to group people in relation to a necessity or, better, to instrumentalize them.” She said these last words with a critical tone. Nonetheless, Nancy’s career had been built precisely by harnessing cocinol mobilizations in Las Aguas. Amid government discussions in the early 1990s to eliminate the distribution of the cooking gasoline and promote the use of propane gas cylinders, she helped organize residents to oppose the initiative and its increased costs for families. “I started to fight and so I organized the community,” Nancy recounted with excitement, “and we would go to the Ministerio de Minas … it was a lot of people, we would go in buses.” This first experience in community activism, however, had ultimately frustrated her. “After all those meetings and so much time dedicated to the community,” she continued, “in the end gas companies started to give away propane stoves and people started to change their stance and stop fighting for cocinol.” While she admitted that it was important to “not fear change”—the shift to propane would eventually pave the way for the provision of affordable natural gas in many low-income neighborhoods—Nancy continued to see the process as an example of strategies to “debilitate social mobilizations.” Most importantly, the episode foreshadowed the contradictions that would define her personal and professional paths as a savvy neighborhood broker in the years to come.

By the end of the 1980s, Nancy became a member of the neighborhood JAC as two local actors vied for its control: on one side, one of the largest landowners in the area, an emerald trader and “far right Conversative,” and, on the other side, a Multifamiliares resident and member of the leftist Union Patriótica party. While she avoided siding with either one of the political groups, she realized “that the local fights around cocinol were [really] about powers, the micropowers [in the neighborhood].” Seeking to stay outside the “struggle of partisan powers” and following the generic goal of “defending my barrio,” she became a visible political actor on the east side of the city center, serving as edil three times. She worked actively for years to legalize informal settlements, prevent state displacements of people occupying public lands, and assist poseedores in titling their homes. Pointing to a shelf behind her that was packed with files, she told me she had helped “legalize at least eleven downtown barrios.” One of her sharpest memories of these struggles was when she helped 153 families resist eviction in the Vereda Monserrate, up the hill from Las Aguas, and negotiate resettlement agreements with state officials. “With other JAC leaders, children and women, we didn’t let them evict them by making a very long cordon,” Nancy said, stressing her activist resolve. “When the bulldozer arrived, I saw a woman with her child in her arms get on and I made her get off so I could get on, as a police officer hit me in the back with his baton.” Here, too, however, she was ultimately disillusioned with the movement when “some social leaders went to the Alcaldía thinking they would get a better settlement and they started to divide the community.”

Nancy brought her narrative back full circle to Progresa Fenicia and suggested that the university had also co-opted and divided the community, just as local political leaders had done in the cocinol years. Instead of cheap fuel, now it was with the promise of property and propriety. Becoming increasingly aware of local political dynamics, she explained, university planners had “joined forces with the president of the JAC … generating discord.” They had co-organized social events and outreach for the poorest inhabitants, tenement dwellers, and squatters on public land. “[This is the] population that is going to end up busted [reventados] and that will end up being displaced,” Nancy told me. For her, the plan’s social programs “did not have much value or impact,” but rather “attracted people by giving them ‘candy,’ just like every private and public agency does to obtain benefits.” The imperative, she insisted, was to negotiate “between equals [entre iguales],” a phrase that would become a new slogan for the latest wave of opposition to the plan. “Sometimes they use people’s vulnerabilities,” Nancy argued, “because people see them [university staff] as gods. They’re unemployed, they haven’t even finished elementary school, they’re not professionals, so they see a god and a savior.”

In 2018, Nancy and her allies held several Entre Iguales meetings so “the most vulnerable” could learn to deal with university functionaries “without fear” and “with knowledge [of the value of their] patrimony and land.” In an important strategic move, No Se Tomen Las Aguas countered the university’s influence on the JAC and got one of their own elected as president. For Nancy, this led to a crucial reorganization of the board following “criteria of defense, not of subjection to the university, so that they don’t see the Junta [the JAC] as henchmen or foot soldiers, but rather with the dignity each one of us deserves.” Her talk of dignity illuminated the deeper politics that underlay her opposition to the university. For Nancy, even with the broadening of participation and inclusion, and despite her own adherence to the plan—“Because to tell you the truth, [Progresa Fenicia] benefits me, as well as people in the building,” she admitted—the university had continued to reproduce insidious forms of social difference and epistemic hierarchies, part of the class warfare so integral to the history of downtown. Beyond the veneer of progressive appropriateness, Nancy suggested, university experts, “who are all very intelligent and educated, sometimes consider that because one is from the barrio one doesn’t have the same preparation, and they’re wrong!” Entre Iguales was thus partly aimed at defying what she saw as everyday forms of condescension and authority. For her, the personal and the political were inseparable, such as when planners did not acknowledge her experience as an attorney and litigant and treated her as a manipulative tinterilla. “If Sánchez [the surname of a university expert] calls me Nancy, well, I call him Sánchez,” she said, indicating her refusal to call him “Doctor”—the form of address typically used for attorneys and professionals in Colombia—as he had not given her the same deference. “Because you see, it’s the struggle between equals.” Such struggles thus descended into everyday practice, into the ordinary “treatment [tratamiento]” of people and its classist undertones.

For Nancy, her activism was thus about cultivating a particular kind of knowledge in opposition to the university’s dominant epistemic assumptions. This is what she called a “clandestine knowledge.” Yet her critiques of Progresa Fenicia and her long-running activities as a neighborhood lawyer and politician implicitly reproduced the hierarchies and normative values integral to the university’s liberal progressivism. In describing her work, she reinscribed ideals of pedagogical authority and social progress not unlike those enacted by the university. “People’s lack of education is so serious,” she asserted, “that they become aggressive, unreceptive, mistrustful—it’s a very complicated conflict of knowledge.” No Se Tomen Las Aguas and Entre Iguales had thus aimed to “educate people, form them politically.” In the face of accusations about her own political and economic interests as a neighborhood broker, Nancy again invoked ideals of educational betterment as her main alibi. Far from chasing after court cases and extracting funds from impoverished families, she argued, she had “educated people about having savings, doing [fundraising] bazaars and parties, so they could start saving and creating funds.” With these funds, families would gradually pay their legal fees in installments, “even with coins!”

Much as experts rationalized financial planning and pathways to ownership, Nancy justified the brokering practices at the heart of her neighborhood activism as a way of helping people “to learn to value their patrimony, have juridical security with their title, and negotiate fairly.” Her critique of Progresa Fenicia ultimately foregrounded ideals of educational integrity and social improvement rather than the political-economic structures she had initially found so perilous for her “vulnerable” clients.⁴⁷ “The university is not playing a leading role in formation and education. What is the education they are leaving behind for such a violent and aggressive society?” she said as she described the planning team’s alleged manipulation of poor residents and influence over the JAC. Mirroring her aspirations to be on the same footing—in terms of status and influence—as elite experts, she also elevated middle-class visions of educational progress as the response to violent conflict. And like the university, Nancy, too, had to deal with the conflict-ridden undersides and repercussions of her incursion into local ecologies of power and poverty. Noting the conflicts that emerged from the recent takeover of the JAC as well as the circulation of rumors about her exploitation of residents’ vulnerability for political and economic gain, she talked about her “deteriorated image” and gestured to the latent dangers she was now facing: “This has been very risky for our security; we still have threats [hanging over us].”

The Paradoxes of Progressive Displacement

“For me only what is real is possible,” Camilo told me, reflecting on his work in Progresa Fenicia and on the plan’s limitations—especially the uncertainties surrounding the fate of inquilinos and squatters. It was 2019, a year after the city administration had approved the plan’s first Unidad de Actuación Urbanística (Unit of Urbanistic Action), a zone of two blocks where the reconstruction process would begin. With negotiations underway, resettlement and expropriation had become more tangible possibilities. Camilo, however, was reassured by the fact that most property owners in this area had agreed to the plan, and when he had any qualms about the process, he reaffirmed his commitment to “incrementalism” and “pragmatism.”

In one sense, notions of the real, and therefore of the possible, had indeed expanded after years of planning and negotiation. Progresa Fenicia had not only incorporated measures aimed at securing the permanence of residents but had also become the blueprint for citywide regulations for the “protection of dwellers [protección de moradores].” Yet university planners’ conceptualizations of the reality of urban transformation and its possible futures had been refracted through their situated experiences and material conditions. Looking through such ideological lenses had largely occluded the neighborhood’s fractious social terrain and its deep running entanglements with histories of violence and displacement. From experts’ vantage point, Las Aguas appeared as a sociomaterial ensemble of agents and spaces that could be reordered into a densified and valorized real estate development.

When university planners did recognize the centrality of conflict within the plan, they couched it in managerial terms and as a matter of coordinating individual “interests and stakeholders.” One of the main architects of Progresa Fenicia, Juan Felipe Pinilla Pineda, argued in a scholarly article that the plan was best viewed as a “consensus-building process.”⁴⁸ For him, the university emerged as a neutral mediator ideally positioned for “conflict management.”⁴⁹ Although self-critically recognizing the limits of Progresa Fenicia’s “land pooling” efforts and its almost exclusive focus on landowners, the university’s managerial vision inscribed a sanitized understanding of conflict that glossed over the existing power differentials integral to Las Aguas and Los Andes’s shared history.⁵⁰ At work in the university’s “consensus building” was what Laura Nader calls “controlling processes”: “the mechanisms by which ideas take hold and become institutional in relation to power.”⁵¹ While Progresa Fenicia stood in stark opposition to downtown’s trajectories of securitized renewal, it nevertheless entrenched established ideological and material arrangements of governance, property, and development—arrangements closely linked to the country’s history of land violence and displacement.

For many residents, such disavowal of conflict, as well as its sanitized rendering as something to be “overcome,” appeared to be a bid for control over knowledge production and the very terms of urban transformation. As I have shown in this chapter, residents had experienced urban reality differently, something that made them wary of the university’s progressive promises. For them, the material and sociopolitical contours of urban life were inseparable from property violence and local contestations over authority. This of course included the university, which, despite claims of neutrality as a nonprofit institution of higher education, was a key node in local and national circuits of governmental power and capital accumulation. In a letter to the Secretaría Distrital de Planeación, Astrid, a resident of Multifamiliares, described the university as an “oligarchic mafia.” She read the letter out loud to me, her elderly mother, and two neighbors as we sat in her narrow living room one afternoon. When Astrid uttered the words “oligarchic mafia,” she snickered, as if she had transgressed an unspoken boundary of decorum. But one of the neighbors, a retiree and apartment owner, went further and compared the plan to “paramilitary displacement” and agroindustrial land grabs in the countryside. He recounted how, in his many trips to the northern regions of Cesar and Magdalena, he had seen African palm oil plantations push out populations and crops. “Land dispossession,” he noted, had resulted from “projects” presented by investors and approved by the Ministry of Agriculture. He emphasized the word “project”—the term used by university planners to refer to Progresa Fenicia—and drew a parallel between the real estate partnership and the use of “investors” and “frontmen [testaferros]” in rural land grabs. “They also offer them [opportunities to participate], but in the end they make them leave,” he continued. “In Cesar, they kill them.”

By pointing to the neighborhood’s deeper undercurrents of sociopolitical conflict, residents contested the university’s dominant epistemic frames and its technocratic brand of progressive urbanism. Such counterhegemonic knowledge, however, was not an alternative, subaltern epistemology—a separate “logic of life,” as Tomás and José, the team’s social scientists, conjectured in their critical contributions to the plan. It did not represent a reality beyond modernity and capitalism that would radically open new urban possibilities.⁵² Nancy’s activism and brokering shows instead how local opposition unfolded within the parameters of capitalist development and through normative views of progress and citizenship. Neighborhood mobilization was contradictory, with activists such as Nancy simultaneously leveraging their own interests and middle-class aspirations while struggling to shift the plan’s lopsided power structures. Other homeowners skillfully assessed their opportunities within the plan, pressing for better conditions to either remain as resettled apartment owners or exit while capturing the highest value for their land. Local opposition and negotiation, in this sense, were irrevocably connected to ideals of propertied citizenship and to the alleged inevitability of urban development. This again resonates with Nader’s calls to examine “how central dogmas are made and how they work in multiple sites” and to follow the “microprocesses” through which “individuals and groups are influenced and persuaded to participate in their own domination or, alternatively, to resist it.”⁵³

The contradictory nature of these epistemic struggles was brought home to me during a conversation with Alex, the street vendor harassed by the police, with whom I opened this chapter. Alex had long lived in a tenement in the neighborhood, and I asked him what chances he saw in avoiding displacement and staying in the area as a tenant. “Tenant?” he immediately fired back, standing in front of his chaza full of candy and snacks. “No, I see myself as a homeowner; if that doesn’t happen then we’re really not accomplishing anything, are we?” At work here was the expert reinvention of Las Aguas as commodified land to be pooled in a fiduciary trust and reassembled as a denser and more valuable urban space. This was a “value project” that would supposedly enable the transition from impoverished tenement dweller to socially ascendant property owner.⁵⁴ For Alex, ideologies of individual ownership and commodification had catalyzed both his opposition to and, eventually, his support for the plan.⁵⁵

Such contradictions were not lost on planners—more so as negotiations dragged on and new oppositions and frictions surfaced. Visibly frustrated, Camilo gave me a pessimistic update on Progresa Fenicia over the phone in 2021. After years of working out agreements and conditions for cooperation, he explained, “a demolishing dose of Colombia reality had arrived.” The plan’s approved Unidades de Actuación Urbanística remained in a stalemate, while the “theory of a university conspiracy” had gained force among a new group of vocal property owners and allied political actors. Some of these were shadowy figures, Camilo suggested, questionable brokers with their own speculative interests and clientelistic strategies in play. For his part, he had become the target of accusations of corruption—a “white-collar thief,” the rumor went—as well as the recipient of numerous requests for official information. This new “merciless legal strategy” had bogged down the plan in red tape.

It was clear that the plan was not going to happen “Los Andes–style [al estilito de los Andes],” Camilo said in a self-deprecating tone, referring to the university’s technocratic politesse. Neighborhood tensions and inequalities had surfaced more visibly with the COVID-19 pandemic and amid the massive social protests that swept through Colombia’s major cities between 2019 and 2021 (see the epilogue). Not only did many small businesses suffer and some disappear with the temporary closure of the university, but also, Camilo noted, “other strange things started to happen.” A resident who had become a vocal ally of the plan and undeclared enemy of No Se Tomen Las Aguas had been murdered in his home in Las Aguas. The suspicion was that family disputes over land were behind the crime. That same year, a well-known business owner who had actively participated in the planning process was detained by the police during a large drug raid in his neighborhood store. For Camilo, this strained atmosphere, along with the renewed attacks on the plan, had made the latest round of negotiations a “small hell [un pequeño infierno].” But his misgivings did not stop there. Sensing a deeper disenchantment, I asked him whether he had doubts about the plan itself.

“Of course I have doubts,” Camilo replied. “Developers are only in this for the financial deal; they don’t care if people are going to live or not [in the new development] or if they used to inhabit [the area]. The [real estate] paradigm is concerned only with itself.”

The conflicts over urban knowledge traced in this chapter ultimately point to the limits and contradictions of planners’ progressive fictions. Not only did narratives of inclusionary property and progress clash with the political-economic realities of Las Aguas, but they also made apparent the trajectories of state and land violence that had been woven into sociomaterial relations. What experts envisioned as an “example of peaceful coexistence and development for the entire country”—an aspiration that mirrored Colombia’s emergent postconflict sensibilities—risked compounding the social and political violences integral to the creation of land markets and its implied transformation of property relations. The plan’s promise of social justice was ultimately dependent on the expansion of real estate dynamics and regimes of individual ownership and entrepreneurial citizenship embodied in the figure of the partner and proprietor. So while Progresa Fenicia undoubtedly represented a move away from the securitized expulsion of previous renewal plans, it nevertheless preserved the conditions of Bogotá’s urbanistic warfare, constituting a form of progressive displacement. The imperatives of development, property, and urban intervention were left intact—their deep-seated violences and conflicts disavowed—such that progressive agendas of urban inclusion emerged as new routes toward dispossession, ones in which urban dwellers themselves actively took part.⁵⁶

Considering these paradoxes, one of the most radical statements I heard during my time with the Progresa Fenicia team did not question the plan’s consensus-making procedures or participatory techniques but rather challenged the assumption that renewal was inevitable or even desirable. During a walk around the neighborhood with the design team, led by a well-known professor and famously grandiloquent creator of several downtown buildings, an architecture student voiced her concerns about the plan. As if knowing she was crossing an unspoken line, she wondered quietly, audible only to me and a couple of students, whether the university should consider simply not intervening in Las Aguas at all.