Excavating Urban Terrain

In talking about the monumental park and the disappearance of El Cartucho, Isidoro and the Engineer had turned their gaze downward. Their fixation on the underground world of tunnels, itself part of local lore, pointed to the enduring traces of what had existed there before. The urban substratum emerged as a testimony to the obduracy of the area’s physical and social topography—the submerged remnants of violence and power that had defined El Cartucho, marked its dissolution, and continued to echo through the empty park and its vicinity. In one sense, then, the plastered tunnels, now turned into an unused underground garage, exemplified the “rubble” of urban development—what Gastón Gordillo suggestively describes as the “void that haunts modernity.”⁴ Above ground, the few residues of the demolition, such as the old Santa Inés school, emerged as ruins from another time, fenced off and left behind by the city’s transformations. Below ground, as Isidoro and the Engineer intimated, the garage/tunnels told a different story, one of still active and unwieldy vectors of violence that had been concealed by the concrete facade of the expansive park. These traces “reveal[ed] the material sedimentation of destruction,” as Gordillo observes in his study of state and capitalist expansion in the Argentine Andes.⁵ They were not “inert remains,” as Ann Stoler argues, but “sites that condense[d] alternative senses of history,” spaces of “vital refiguration.”⁶

Isidoro’s mention of Iraqi battlefields was thus particularly meaningful. It evoked a warscape that extended into the core of downtown and flowed under the monumental park.⁷ By likening the empty garage and its hidden tunnels to a bunker, he recast the landscaped park as a terrain of violence. In his ruminations on postwar Europe, Paul Virilio finds in the bunkers littered across the Atlantic littoral the “landmarks of contemporary military space.”⁸ For him, the architectural monoliths announced the momentous expansion of warfare beyond the battlefield into cities and across the skies. They foreshadowed “total war, risk everywhere, instantaneity of danger, the great mix of the military and the civilian, the homogenization of conflict.”⁹ Similarly, Isidoro’s bunker-park hinted at the violent underside of urban transformation. He imbued the materiality of Tercer Milenio and the fading traces of El Cartucho with an intimate knowledge and experience of insecurity.

Inspired by Virilio’s “bunker archeology” and its phenomenological orientations, in this chapter I excavate the layers of knowledge sedimented in Parque Tercer Milenio. In its reified physicality, the park not only obscured the social and material transformations of El Cartucho but also occluded the knowledges, practices, and affective dispositions that went into the destruction of the old neighborhood and the refashioning of a new sociomaterial environment. Among critics and scholars, Tercer Milenio has epitomized contemporary paradigms of urban security.¹⁰ Its hard surfaces and premature obsolescence, along with the spillover of the unruly populations it was supposed to erase, have emerged as tangible embodiments of the contradictions of securitization. And yet the precise manner in which ideas and experiences of security became entangled with urban epistemologies and materialized in the creation and undoing of urban forms has remained out of sight.

In the following pages I mine the park’s flattened topography to unearth these knowledge practices and to examine how they shaped the making and unmaking of El Cartucho. By interpreting the neighborhood’s material transformations through repertoires of warfare, local residents and former inhabitants pointed to the deep-seated struggles that had come to define the area. Planners, architects, real estate consultants, and social workers, in turn, articulated forms of knowledge aimed at taming El Cartucho’s unwieldy geography by making legible and disentangling its dense sociomaterialities. At its core, Tercer Milenio was a project of planned destruction. Although the expectation of future real estate development was integral to the construction of the park, it was secondary to the objective of total removal. As one critic noted, the uniqueness of the plan resided “not necessarily in the structures created … but in the ‘anarchic’ spaces erased.”¹¹ Rather than pointing to yet another instance of capitalist “creative destruction,”¹² Tercer Milenio made apparent the significance of techniques of spatial obliteration and epistemologies of destruction.¹³

During the planning and demolition process, experts became intensely involved in producing knowledges about the material complexities of the urban environment and how they shaped social practices. Such knowledges were then deployed to unbuild physical and social infrastructures. Ideas about the materiality of urban space and the socialities attached to it were infused with security frameworks. Experts and planners’ experiential registers—from their sense of everyday insecurity to their practical awareness of the country’s broader history of violence—permeated the composition of urban knowledges. The crafting of such knowledges was a material process: ideologies anchored in tangible realities and geared toward the reconstitution of objects, people, and the relations among them. But unlike locals’ attunement to the complex history of territorial struggles in the area—which they viewed as a continuation of the country’s wide-ranging conflicts over land—planners’ situational, pragmatic, and affective knowledges centered on state security and control. Crucially, epistemologies of urban reconstruction were shaped by and gave form to the idea of urban terrain.

Bogotá planners and officials often talked about the city as terrain. Common expressions such as “visiting the terrain” (salida al terreno) and “understanding the conditions on the terrain” (entender las condiciones en el terreno) highlighted their interest in gathering knowledge about local urban circumstances through fieldwork. At the same time, the notion of terrain pointed to the enduring influence of field sciences and the study of physical space—from geology and topography to cadastral surveys and mapping—in the urban planning and design professions. From this perspective, social practices appeared subordinated to the physical attributes of space. At their most extreme, they positioned space as a key site for the strategic reengineering and control of social milieus. Taken a step further, such conceptualizations evoked long-standing connections between terrain and militarism. From Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz to Ernesto Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung, natural topography has been central to ideologies and practices of warfare. As Clausewitz put it, “The relationship between warfare and terrain determines the peculiar character of military action.”¹⁴ Commanding high ground and taking advantage of hostile terrain are the very stuff of military strategy and guerrilla tactics.¹⁵ This is no less true in cities, where theaters of war take the form of urban grids, infrastructure, and buildings. And here is where planning, as a technology aimed at organizing and refashioning urban forms, takes on strategic value.

In his analysis of the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories, Eyal Weizman shows how urban space emerged “not just [as] the site, but as the very medium of warfare.”¹⁶ He traces the ways in which city planning and architectural practices became “tactical tools” within militarized forms of territorial control and dispossession.¹⁷ According to Weizman, the layout of settlements and the design of roads and overpasses “embodied aggressive intent” against Palestinians, supporting the overarching logic of military occupation.¹⁸ In this context, scholars have further argued that the urbanization of warfare so emblematic of the global war on terror has become a dominant paradigm under widely varying sociopolitical and economic agendas.¹⁹ From postdisaster New Orleans and Olympic Rio de Janeiro to Gaza and the occupied West Bank, cities are now increasingly the target of security strategies and military intervention.²⁰ They appear as battle spaces in which the lines between urban environments and tactical terrains, civilians and enemies, are blurred—places in which, as Stephen Graham puts it, “life itself is war.”²¹

My analysis of Tercer Milenio extends these debates by looking more closely at the knowledge practices through which the city is reconstituted as urban terrain. I am interested in the expert labor that rendered El Cartucho and the park—epistemically, affectively, and materially—battlegrounds to be conquered and secured. Terrain, in this sense, is far from a preexisting backdrop on which political actions, such as the militarized spatial interventions described by Weizman, take place. Instead, projects of state sovereignty and social control are brought to life through the intimate knowledge and active shaping of terrain—whether it be rivers and mountain passes or the circuitous streets and layered infrastructures of downtown districts. “Terrain,” as Stuart Elden argues, “makes possible, or constrains, political, military, and strategic projects, even as it is shaped by them.”²² In Tercer Milenio, city officials sought to materialize ideas of spatial order and state sovereignty by clearing, leveling, and smoothing urban ground.²³ The process, however, was incomplete and contradictory. The new park was anything but a disciplined environment, and surrounding neighborhoods remained impervious to the intervention. The terrain partly recrafted by planners proved to be more obdurate than anticipated—a fact astutely noted by Isidoro and the Engineer in their own portrayals of an enduring landscape of war and its underground world of tunnels. The sociomateriality of urban space was never fully domesticated by planners and architects—only partially reassembled through their expert engagements.

From this perspective, urban terrain emerges neither as the exclusive outcome of human action nor as a fully autonomous material substrate, but rather as a dynamic ideological and material process. It encompasses people’s experiences and practices as well as the tangible qualities of urban things. This is what Yael Navaro-Yashin, in her ethnography of postwar Northern Cyprus, aptly calls “make-believe space”: a process that “refers not singularly to the work of the imagination or simply to the materiality of crafting but to both at the same time.”²⁴ I follow a similar direction below, focusing on both the knowledge of urban materiality and the materiality of urban knowledge. Exploring the epistemic crafting of urban terrain illuminates planning expertise not simply as a form of mystification or technocratic “camouflage” for securitized control and violent dispossession.²⁵ Instead it calls attention to the material and experiential conditions under which urban space itself becomes knowable as a terrain of warfare.

From Santa Inés to El Cartucho

El Cartucho was a long time in the making. Originally known as Santa Inés, it had been a stately residential district at the beginning of the twentieth century and a strategic node of commerce and transportation since colonial times. The site of the city’s peasant market and train station, Santa Inés and neighboring San Victorino formed a crossroads for the movement of all variety of people and things during most of the city’s history. By the mid-twentieth century it housed the city’s intercity bus terminal and numerous hostels and was still largely considered Bogotá’s gateway and dry port. Topographic features proved central to the area’s development as a liminal space at odds with the aspired order of the urban grid. The course of two rivers, the San Francisco and the San Agustín, had shaped the organization of Bogotá in profound ways since the colonial era.²⁶ These unwieldy geophysical elements both mediated and stubbornly obstructed colonial and republican planning and its idealized visions of the urban fabric as regular geometrical latticework. For decades, officials engaged in attempts to manage and mold this fractured topography through the construction of bridges, the canalization of streams, and the construction of roads.

Flowing from the eastern mountains to the west, the streams defined the limits of the city’s four foundational parishes. The first to be established, between the two rivers, was the main parish of La Catedral, home to the cathedral and the Plaza Mayor (renamed the Plaza de Bolívar in the nineteenth century). Later on, and expanding to the north and south, were the less eminent Las Nieves and Santa Bárbara. And the last to be founded, in 1598, was San Victorino, a more peripheral location where Santa Inés would eventually be located and where the strictures of urban order and social status were more tenuous. Critically, as the San Francisco River reached San Victorino its course turned sharply to the south, where it met the San Agustín River. In contrast to the symmetric quadrangular plazas of the other parishes, the San Victorino Plaza had a curved triangular shape, and the urban gridiron gave way to sinuous streets. “The ideal of the renaissance city,” as historian Carlos Carbonell Higuera puts it, “succumbed to the imminence of geography.”²⁷

For many years, the irregular topography of San Victorino and El Cartucho became inextricably bound to ideas and practices of encounter, transgression, and difference. Subaltern lifeworlds appeared closely juxtaposed to the urbane aspirations of the rapidly growing metropolis: first as the meeting ground for Spanish and Indigenous inhabitants and, later on, as a zone of exchange between urbanites and peasants, elites and popular classes. With migration from the countryside exploding at the end of the nineteenth century and continuing to run apace during most the twentieth century, thousands of rural migrants and violently displaced peasants found a place to live and work in the precarious tenements and busy streets of San Victorino and Santa Inés. In the process, the area became more firmly tied to imaginaries of rurality, of the largely unknown and purportedly unruly world beyond the capital. In the mid-twentieth century, such urban epistemologies—now articulated in the language of illicitness and informality—further solidified after the Bogotazo uprising and construction of the Carrera Décima. These momentous events deepened the material and symbolic fissure between the city center’s western districts and the east side.

Since at least the 1940s, city officials and elites had become intent on reshaping the area’s physical contours, starting with the San Victorino Plaza and what Carbonell Higuera calls “its irregular, rhomboid form.”²⁸ While many commentators framed their calls to regulate and expand the plaza as a matter of improving the city center’s worsening traffic, the class politics of such demands were not difficult to see. A downtown lawyer, for instance, argued in a newspaper article in 1948, not long after El Bogotazo, that such reforms would “also be useful for large popular assemblies [grandes reuniones del pueblo], so that protests and political meetings, which are common in Bogotá, do not obstruct transit in main avenues and roads so frequently.”²⁹ The new material environment was thus imagined as a space to which contentious politics and popular movements could be evacuated. The Bogotazo’s ruins appeared as the perfect starting point for such reconstruction plans and their visions of sociospatial control and segregation. In conjunction with interventions across downtown, the city carried out public works in 1949 “to level several areas [in San Victorino] for the planning of a large parking garage,” according to Carbonell Higuera.³⁰ The plaza-garage was intended as a kind of outlet for excessive traffic, disorderly vending, and working-class culture.

But officials’ ambitions to reorganize the urban environment—which included paving over the San Francisco River upstream to the east—soon proved profoundly contradictory as San Victorino, Carbonell Higuera notes, became prone to constant and “violent flooding.”³¹ Additionally, the newly opened Carrera Décima had expanded the Bogotazo’s trail of destruction and virtually severed the area from downtown’s institutional and business core. With land values plummeting and middle and upper classes fleeing to new upscale neighborhoods in north Bogotá, San Victorino and Santa Inés took on a more overtly marginal character. Further cementing west downtown’s reputation as an enclave of poverty, abandonment, and insecurity, in the 1960s the city government relocated street vendors to the plaza-garage and installed hundreds of stalls in what became a makeshift commercial arcade, the Galerías Antonio Nariño, for three decades. By this point, the division between a historic center and a popular one had been more firmly established: a “high downtown” of middle classes and elites in the east, and a “low downtown” associated with Indigenous and peasant populations, informal commerce, and clandestine operations to the west of the Carrera Décima.³² What was once a liminal space of social friction was materially and symbolically reconstituted as a terrain to be tamed and contained. Tellingly, a news headline in 1963 described the area as a “red zone”³³—a term not only linked to danger and immorality but also charged with ideas of insecurity and militarism central to Colombia’s geography of political violence.

El Cartucho’s name itself indexed such militaristic sensibilities. Records suggest that in the nineteenth century, a street in Santa Inés was unofficially known as El Cartucho due to the existence of a clandestine gunpowder factory and the paper packages (cartuchos) it used. According to historical accounts, the factory provided ammunition to early revolutionary fighters, and its owners were eventually executed along with other republican insurgents in the years preceding Colombia’s independence from Spain in 1819.³⁴ The name El Cartucho would continue to circulate informally for decades, ultimately becoming the de facto label of the entire neighborhood by the twentieth century. By this point the term had a more direct connection to violence: Cartucho, in its contemporary usage, means “bullet” or “firearm cartridge.”³⁵

The entanglements between this epistemic and affective terrain and the country’s history of warfare crystallized during the late twentieth century.³⁶ The transformation of Santa Inés into El Cartucho, of urban space into urban terrain, became increasingly linked to the intensification of armed territorial struggles and criminal violence in Colombia from the 1980s to the 2000s. Not only did such conflicts continue to forcefully displace people from the countryside to Santa Inés’s crowded residences, but also, crucially, they provided the repertoires through which the area was further resignified and rematerialized as a battleground. In neighboring San Victorino, for instance, a business owner who arrived in the 1980s talked about El Cartucho as a “small Caguán, a zone of distension in Bogotá.”³⁷ He was referring to a demilitarized zone that the government of President Andrés Pastrana Arango had created in southern Colombia between 1999 and 2000 for peace negotiations with the FARC guerillas. The zone had epitomized the idea of a parallel sovereign, “a state within the state.” After alleged human rights violations and accusations that the FARC continued to launch military operations from the area, El Caguán was largely portrayed as a space of lawlessness and violence. In 2015, one of San Victorino’s oldest and wealthiest business owners also hinted at these militaristic undercurrents when he spoke to me about the district’s history as a “dangerous, hot” spot. He recounted how he and other local leaders had created an organization known as the Corporación de Comerciantes Mayoristas Asociados (Corporation of Associated Wholesalers), or COMAS, for security and self-defense. “It’s basically a CONVIVIR,” his son, next to him, whispered to me as we sat in a modest office hidden in the back of one of their warehouses. The CONVIVIR, or Cooperativas de Vigilancia y Seguridad Privada (Cooperatives for Surveillance and Private Security), were created in 1994 by the national government to promote rural self-defense organizations across Colombia. In the following years the cooperatives would become a key legal vehicle for the expansion of paramilitary control in the countryside. In San Victorino, these veteran comerciantes suggested, paramilitary logics had been reenacted in the form of unofficial underground detention rooms, private security patrols, and guarded borders.

While many of El Cartucho’s residents experienced the neighborhood’s downfall as a contested and contradictory affair—calling attention, for example, to the many legitimate businesses and livelihoods that subsisted in the area until its demise—they also evoked the distinctly material process through which Santa Inés–El Cartucho slowly turned into a battlefield. Former residents’ memories of life in the neighborhood were often permeated with the imagery and sensorial experience of violence. In 2013, Sandy, a longtime resident now living on the city’s outskirts, told me about her life in the area since she was a child. Talking over coffee and almojábanas in a small downtown cafeteria, Sandy constantly came back to the physical and affective signs through which she became increasingly aware that the “normal neighborhood” she had once known was no longer there. She began her account with a poignant remembrance of the M-19 guerrilla siege and military takeover of the Palacio de Justicia, a few blocks east of her home, in 1985—one of modern Colombia’s most emblematic events of urban warfare: “When the tanks came in it sounded really loud; it shook the ground. I was only six or seven years old and imagined we were at war. You could hear the shots, the bombs, the ambulances, everything under siege. And because we were only a few blocks away they could have launched a bomb at us at any time.”

Sandy went on to narrate how Santa Inés had “degenerated” and El Cartucho had formed from a rapidly growing drug economy closely tied to the area’s informal waste recycling business. Paralleling this account was a story about family decline. Both her stepbrother and father had been murdered, another brother had been running from the police after a bar brawl turned deadly, and her mother’s cafeteria had closed when the landlord rented the space to a waste-picking business with possible ties to the bazuco trade under the control of a local leader known as Ernesto “El Loco” Calderón. Closely woven into her recollections was the intimate knowledge of a changing material landscape. Far from the “clean streets” of her childhood, she now found “trash everywhere, street dwellers burning trash in front of [her] house every day to get copper from cable wiring.” She saw “houses crumbling down” as drug gangs, known as ganchos (hooks), drew lines across the neighborhood in their bid for power.³⁸ At some point, her mother’s modest restaurant became “a strategic point to stash weapons” and “for undercover police to gather intelligence.” In the end, Sandy explained, with unmistakable military overtones, “we were mined with drugs, homelessness, even paramilitaries and guerrillas.”

Before she and her family were finally displaced, Sandy was brought more directly into the fractious terrain created by the demolition of El Cartucho. By the 1990s, she was living between a small shack in one of the city’s poorest peripheries and a dingy mezzanine above a restaurant her mother now ran in El Cartucho. She also sold lottery tickets on the street and frequently managed recycling warehouses, coming into closer contact with local strongmen and their street enforcers. In this precarious situation, and already pregnant with her first child, Sandy heard that the city government was looking for people from the area to conduct a socioeconomic census for the Tercer Milenio plan. She applied and was immediately hired for the job. As a broker between city officials and residents, in particular gancho leaders, she was now thrown directly onto the front lines of the struggle to unbuild El Cartucho. “There were places where [functionaries] couldn’t go and I would talk so they would let them enter,” Sandy recalled. “One day they went in without letting locals know, and they were chased off with bullets [a plomo].” But the job also extended to persuading residents about the inevitability of the demolitions and reconstruction. In response to the often-threatening questions about how she, a local, could work for the city enabling her own displacement, Sandy would tell people that the plan would happen “even if [they] opposed it.” Or, as she quipped, “A donkey going downhill had more chances of going in reverse.”

By the early 2000s, Sandy had been twice displaced from El Cartucho: first by the bazuco and recycling business and, finally, by a renewal plan in which she herself had participated. In the process she had become a census taker for government programs, the job that would keep her afloat for the next few years. But the ironies of her story were not lost on her. “It was kind of unfair, don’t you think?” Sandy asked me pensively the last time we met. Reflecting on the disintegration of the neighborhood, the expulsion of residents, the spillover of violence, and the mostly empty park, she stressed how all along she had “always felt the abandonment of the state.” Ideologies and affects linked to Colombia’s embattled sovereignty had permeated her intimate and now professional knowledge of the place where she had grown up, so that it appeared as an unruly terrain abandoned and only partially reconquered by the state. Mirroring her contradictory position as both longtime resident and official contractor, her security-infused vision of urban terrain became the grounds for a critique of state intervention and urban reconstruction.

The complex entanglements between the destruction of El Cartucho and struggles over sovereignty were made tangible in a spectacular way in 2002. The expansion of military operations and the escalation of guerrilla and paramilitary violence throughout Colombia that year culminated with the election of security hard-liner Álvaro Uribe Vélez to the presidency. Authorities in Bogotá were on high alert as insurgent attacks rattled the country, and police raided houses in central neighborhoods in search of weapons caches. In July, the country’s leading newspaper, El Tiempo, featured a special report that presented the partially demolished El Cartucho as a key link in the country’s illegal arms trade: “Among the houses in ruins that still remain in El Cartucho, after two years of demolitions to build the park Tercer Milenio, there are still enough weapons and ammunition to create a FARC front.”³⁹ And on August 7, 2002, Sandy’s childhood fears that Santa Inés would be bombed were realized. That day mortar shells aimed at Uribe Vélez’s swearing-in ceremony at the presidential palace missed their target, landing instead a few blocks to the west on a partially demolished El Cartucho. The bombing, presumably launched by the FARC, resulted in the death of several people who were clinging to the ruins left by the city’s bulldozers. Significantly, the rockets hit a house whose demolition had been ordered in the very first stages of the renewal plan. Gancho Amarillo (Yellow Hook), as the building was known, was one of the area’s largest tenements and bazuco houses.⁴⁰ Along with several cambuches (shacks) made of plastic tarp and sticks, it was among El Cartucho’s last holdouts in a sea of rubble. The accidental bombing was the coup de grâce in the long process that had naturalized El Cartucho as a terrain of warfare.

Crisis Planning: Expertise as Strategy

Nonetheless, the epistemological and material destruction of Santa Inés–El Cartucho had largely unfolded at the drafting tables and in the offices and boardrooms of planning professionals whose urban sensibilities had been shaped by the country’s explosive armed conflict and cartel violence. During the 1980s and 1990s, a sense of being under siege permeated the residents of major Colombian cities. Kidnapping had peaked as armed groups’ weapon of choice, and representations of Colombia as “a country held hostage” circulated widely.⁴¹ Middle- and upper-class urban residents feared the world beyond the city limits—those “mountains of Colombia” from where guerrilla and paramilitary groups typically signed off their official communications. In Bogotá, it was not only that well-off residents lived enclaved lives, a common trend in Latin American cities,⁴² but rather that they conceived of the city itself as an enclave within a dangerous and unruly territory. If displaced peasants and rural migrants had for years arrived in the capital carrying their visceral histories of violence,⁴³ more affluent residents perceived only the impending threats of a war raging outside. Urban bombings, kidnappings, and rising crime appeared as signs of external forces making inroads into the urban world.⁴⁴

At stake here was the deep divide between the city and the country that has marked Colombian history and shaped its geography of warfare: the imagery of a fractured territory and of state sovereignty radiating from the center to fill the alleged void of the hinterland.⁴⁵ Such ideas shaped urban intellectuals’ views of rural peripheries as “no man’s land,” “red zones,” and “internal frontiers.”⁴⁶ This is what anthropologist Margarita Serje aptly terms “the reverse of the nation.”⁴⁷ But as much as this geographic ideology became the backbone of nation-state projects across remote peripheries and its enclaves of extraction and exploitation, it was also directed inward and mapped onto the metropolis. By the late twentieth century, El Cartucho epitomized such an internal frontier, the urban counterpart to rural Colombia’s zones of conflict and emergency. Much as simplistic accounts portrayed the war-torn countryside as the reflection of an absent state, experts materialized El Cartucho as a radically ungoverned and insecure urban terrain.

The transformation of downtown Bogotá was thus fundamentally guided by what we might call a metonymic epistemology: the idea, as one city planner told me, that the city center was a “microcosm” of national and global territorial conflicts. The particular ways in which people braided their experiences and knowledges of the city with geographic ideologies of insecurity varied considerably, as did the political ramifications of such epistemic practices. For locals like Sandy, viewing downtown transformation through the lens of armed conflict and land violence shed light on intractable struggles over sociopolitical and economic power. It brought into focus the injustices of state intervention, ultimately shaping a politics of dissent. For the officials and experts behind Tercer Milenio, whose lives mostly unfolded in the wealthy districts of north Bogotá and who had typically experienced the war from afar, El Cartucho embodied anxieties about the nation’s unruly topographies. Echoing long-standing views about how dense jungles and steep mountains constituted an “intrinsically opaque” and ungovernable geography,⁴⁸ planners portrayed the people, things, and spaces of El Cartucho as constituting an inherently perilous terrain that could be secured only through total destruction. As the project manager of Tercer Milenio told me years later in her upscale development firm, “It was a black hole, a cancer, right next to the city’s main institutional buildings; it was the most dangerous place in the city, a place in front of which people walked every day and no one dared look inside.”

In this way, Tercer Milenio became central to planners’ fantasies of territorial order and security. It was the target of a form of crisis planning that precluded alternative urban imaginaries and compelled a particular course of action: demolition and radical reconstruction. Crisis, as Janet Roitman argues, is an epistemological a priori starting point, an unquestioned “transcendental placeholder … for the production of knowledge.”⁴⁹ In El Cartucho, planners’ claim to an urban crisis led to militarized and strategic conceptions of urban renewal. It reaffirmed ideas about the city as terrain and conjured a future of order and security. Most importantly, crisis planning became linked to technocratic efficacy and managerialism, ideals that would come to define the administration of Mayor Enrique Peñalosa (1998–2000) and its implementation of the Tecer Milenio plan. In an op-ed in El Tiempo in December 2000, diplomat and policy scholar Fernando Cepeda Ulloa celebrated the Peñalosa administration’s “recovery of downtown,” particularly of El Cartucho and San Victorino, stressing the “overwhelming power” of the administration’s “leadership-planning-execution formula.”⁵⁰ For him, Mayor Peñalosa and his Empresa de Renovación Urbana (Company of Urban Renewal) exemplified a distinctive style of planning and governance that was strategic, was geared toward execution, and decisively targeted the spatial manifestations of Colombia’s crisis of governance (crisis de gobernabilidad).

Among city officials and colleagues, Peñalosa was known for his resolve and managerialism. Stories circulated about how, in his daily commute to the Alcaldía, he would take note of potholes in the streets and place calls to city agencies to demand that they be immediately repaired. He would leave voicemails for functionaries of all ranks congratulating or reprimanding them on their regular duties. And, as several planners and architects who worked with him in the late 1990s recalled, Peñalosa, who was not a designer, had single-handedly drawn the plan for Parque Tercer Milenio on a paper napkin. His disposition for action and leadership—what some would describe as his authoritarian inclinations—were on display when I met him in 2012, by which time he was a globe-trotting urban expert. In contrast to the many demure bureaucrats or rehearsed politicians I had encountered in government agencies, Peñalosa moved energetically around his consulting office as if it were the stage of a TED Talk auditorium.⁵¹ With a picture of Tercer Milenio hanging behind his desk, the former mayor drew schemes and jotted notes on a large paper board as he avidly recalled the key stages of the plan. Significantly, Peñalosa described the crisis of El Cartucho not as a moment of rupture in the turbulent years of the late twentieth century but rather as part of a longer history of disorder and modernization—a history that for him was personal and went back to the work of his father, Enrique Peñalosa Camargo.

“It was my father who came up with the idea of [demolishing] El Cartucho,” Peñalosa explained in his distinctively categorical tone. “He would always tell me, ‘Look, there is a unique opportunity here to tear down that dump [porquería], which is in the center of the city, and develop a project there,” he recalled, standing in front of a window overlooking the tree-lined streets of the upscale district of La Cabrera in north Bogotá. He traced the idea back to his father’s work as a city councilor in the 1950s as well as Peñalosa Camargo’s close friendships and professional collaborations with Jorge Gaitán Cortés, a respected city councilor (1958–61) and one of the most “technical” mayors in the city’s contemporary history (1961–66),⁵² and with Virgilio Barco Vargas, also a former Bogotá mayor (1966–69) and later president (1986–90), widely recognized for his technocratic approach to government. As a public functionary in the National Ministry of Public Works in the late 1940s, Gaitán Cortés had proposed an unrealized plan known as the Ciudad del Empleado (City of the Employee), which would have razed the Santa Inés district for the construction of “hygienic and comfortable” housing.⁵³ For Peñalosa, his father, like Gaitán Cortés and Barco Vargas, epitomized an elite generation of mid-century urban technocrats. “[He and his colleagues] worked without pay in the city council … and they worked every day until two in the morning and wrote books and studies, and carried out projects,” Peñalosa stressed. This was “the group of people I grew up with, people captivated by Bogotá and by urban issues.”

Such forms of expertise became intimately tied to an emergent international technocratic apparatus directed at global urban problems—domains of policy and expertise that would be increasingly identified with the terms “habitat” and “human settlements.” And here again, Peñalosa traced his own lineage and connection to this history through the figure of his father, who played a key role in global circuits of expertise in the 1970s. Peñalosa Camargo had been secretary general of the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (also known as Habitat), held in Vancouver in 1976. Habitat was a watershed moment for the consolidation of a transnational framework of urban governance, and it ultimately led to the creation of UN Habitat (the United Nations Human Settlements Program), which Eugene McCann describes as a “key global informational infrastructure” for the circulation and legitimation of expert urban knowledge.⁵⁴ Drawn by a sense of urgency, hundreds of official delegates, NGOs, and journalists convened to confront “the extremely serious condition of human settlements” across the globe and especially in “developing countries.”⁵⁵ As Felicity Scott argues in her history of modern architecture and global environmental governance, the Vancouver conference ultimately “sought to garner support, particularly among industrialized countries, for new policies and forms of governance by mobilizing fear of population growth in the Third World and with it the specters of scarcity, insecurity, and war.”⁵⁶

Urban habitat emerged as a distinctly technical and strategic issue, one whose adequate redesign would serve as a critical source for nation building, social pacification, and the expansion of global capitalism. The appointment of Peñalosa Camargo as secretary general of the conference was thus appropriate. His trajectory as an expert in Colombia was closely aligned with Habitat’s reframing of urban development as a critical component of strategies of governance and security. Furthermore, he embodied the action-oriented, technocratic ethos showcased at the conference. This, according to Scott, was the idea that “human settlement problems … were technical, not political in nature, and the conference was an occasion for the exchange of information.”⁵⁷ As Peñalosa Camargo remarked during the Vancouver conference, “We will be coming together for a global exchange of ideas, techniques and systems for solving specific problems.”⁵⁸ Questions about whom development and security agendas served were obscured. Instead, planning appeared primarily as a logistical question dependent on technical resources, strategies, and execution.

Peñalosa Camargo’s role within this emergent milieu of expertise had a lasting impact on his son’s own trajectory as an urban expert. It partly explained the contradictions that would come to characterize Peñalosa’s vision as mayor in the late twentieth century: on the one hand, his alleged emphasis on progressive values of equality and inclusion through a new breed of technocratic knowledge directed at public spaces (of which Tercer Milenio was a culminating project), and on the other, his strategic views of urban space as an ideal medium to cement security, governance, and development. But most of all, his father’s legacy lived on in Peñalosa’s aspiration to a form of urban expertise that was radically action oriented and based on principles of efficacy and transformative outcomes. In describing to me previous “socioeconomic studies” of El Cartucho and San Victorino and failed interventions in the area, Peñalosa called attention to the fundamental gap between rhetoric and action: “This world is divided into two kinds of people: those who talk and those who do [hacen].” The suggestion was that he, like the technocrats he admired before him, were doers. For Peñalosa, the imperative of “doing” was the only real response to Colombia’s lasting crisis of sovereignty and order.

Critical scholarship on technocracy has typically called attention to how expert knowledge is mobilized to create a simplified and depoliticized social reality subject to intervention and management.⁵⁹ In Peñalosa’s account, the drive to intervene, to do, emerged as both the ruling ideology and the central aim of urban technocracy. Strategic and logistical thinking mediated the production of urban knowledge and its corresponding forms of intervention. This outlook, as Peñalosa made clear in his personal recollections, was not simply the function of a particular body of knowledge or institutional matrix but had been anchored in his experience and location in a particular social milieu. As an elite urban professional who, like his father, saw the country’s alleged crisis of sovereignty manifested in the material and social forms of the city, he assumed that urban expertise had to be strategic. Appeals to scientific expertise—to the calculations and designs integral to modernist urban planning—were subordinated to wide-ranging visions of sovereignty and governance. The invocation of strategic action and logistics, furthermore, pointed to what theorists from Carl von Clausewitz to Michel Foucault and Paul Virilio have argued is the mutually informing connection between war and politics, militarism and everyday life.⁶⁰ Strategy, in this context, is primarily concerned not with tactical maneuvers on the battlefield or the political stage but with the terms themselves in which theaters of engagement are organized. It is in this sense—as a structuring logic—that military-strategic thinking has been viewed as a blueprint for the operations of power across myriad fields of knowledge and political practice, in times of both war and peace.⁶¹

Significantly, Peñalosa’s technocratic sensibility pointed to the performative and material dimensions of expert strategy and its securitized overtones. At stake here was not only the emergence of an epistemological space known as urban habitat but also a practical and phenomenological approach that envisioned the urban realm as a field of military-strategic intervention. In On War, Clausewitz himself had already noted that strategizing is aimed at “persuading others” with “clear ideas.”⁶² It is a framing device that “provides the script and the props for a convincing performance of the future in the here-and-now,” as Martin Kornberger puts it.⁶³ Strategy, Kornberger adds, is “an aesthetic phenomenon… . [It] favors images over plans, evangelism over analysis, and the poetry of the possible over the prose of the present. The pathos of the strategist replaces the bureaucratic ethos of the planner.”⁶⁴

Far from suggesting a strategy without a strategist,⁶⁵ Tercer Milenio called attention to the ways in which ideas of crisis and strategy became incorporated into expert knowledge and ingrained in a terrain of intervention. This not only made apparent the lines of continuity between urban warfare and planning, military logistics and development, but also posed critical questions about what form of war was meant by strategists, who their imagined enemies were, and what kind of battlefield was materialized in the process. In Bogotá, such questions were directly shaped by geographic ideologies of insecurity linked to Colombia’s armed conflict and informed by global paradigms of securitization ranging from Cold War geopolitics to counterterrorist discourses to risk management and humanitarian frameworks. Planners drew on these repertoires, which were in turn mediated by their experiences as middle-class urban professionals, to render urban space into a tangible object of expertise and intervention: a terrain of knowledge.

In his recollections of the early stages of the plan, Peñalosa rehearsed the main coordinates through which El Cartucho and San Victorino emerged as battlefields and in which nothing less than national sovereignty was at stake. As he explained it to me, “The struggle to remove San Victorino was monumental. [Clearing] San Victorino was something that no one would have dared, it was almost like the FARC, no one dared touch it… . It’s unimaginable what it was, it was the symbol of the impotence of the state: the center of Bogotá totally occupied, it was complete chaos.” Peñalosa portrayed the public plaza and its street vendors as comparable to Colombia’s insurgent enclaves. The image of the “absent state” was transposed to the core of the country’s capital, and the operation became a matter of state sovereignty. The politics of informality and poverty were assimilated to the politics of warfare, making impoverished vendors “legitimate” targets of governmental force. Back in his office, channeling the “pathos of the strategist,” Peñalosa elaborated on the logistics of this military takeover as he got up from his desk and drew my attention to a map hanging on the wall:

[San Victorino] was taken over by thousands of mafia organizations with political and military power… . So how was I able to get them out? Basically, because I had a police chief, a tough guy, who was later killed, and we carried out a military operation. When we launched the final operation, we brought in everything: fifteen hundred police officers, helicopters, armored vehicles, everything! Why? Because when you’re going to carry out one of these operations you always have to have overwhelming force, so the guys can clearly see they have no chance. [Back then] no one dared even to say that San Victorino was going to be cleared, everyone panicked! Much less that El Cartucho was going to be torn down!

Military thinking and strategic force were woven into urban knowledge, producing a mode of crisis planning that recrafted San Victorino and El Cartucho into a terrain of warfare. As chief strategist, Peñalosa had enacted the urban theater of operations in which planners and experts would perform.⁶⁶ They were the ones, however, who would be confronted with the task of making the complex realities of El Cartucho—its people and things—knowable as a terrain of danger awaiting radical transformation.

A Materialist Phenomenology of Insecurity

Ideas about the materiality of urban space were central to the plan to demolish El Cartucho and build a metropolitan park. Planners and experts shared an orientation toward the urban environment that linked its sensorial and affective qualities to understandings of violence and insecurity. The materiality of insecurity was integral to planning and design knowledges, so that securing the neighborhood appeared as a matter of disassembling its forms and erasing its physical attributes. The expert attention to urban materiality reflected political imaginaries that juxtaposed the allegedly orderly spaces of the city with the rugged, unruly topographies of the countryside. Such aesthetic criteria were mapped onto the city’s geography, making visible the rifts between affluent, modern districts and impoverished, disinvested neighborhoods such as El Cartucho. Professionals’ urban lifeworlds, their daily experience at home and in their offices, embodied this aesthetic order, which was reproduced in their expert engagements and embedded in their understandings of territorial (in)security.⁶⁷

Take for example a senior official by the name of Lucía who oversaw the implementation of Tercer Milenio from 1998 to 2003. I met her at her architecture design firm in April 2012. A business administrator by training, Lucía had spent most of her career managing and promoting high-end real estate developments. Her firm was located in the upscale El Nogal neighborhood, not far from Peñalosa’s consulting office, in one of the countless orange brick buildings that roll down the green eastern hills into the sprawling Sabana de Bogotá. Her office’s surroundings embodied local ideals of cleanliness, safety, and beauty: wide concrete and brick sidewalks (one of the legacies of the Peñalosa administration), tree-lined parks, and a handful of Victorian-style houses that were once the defining characteristic of the area when it was an affluent suburb in the 1940s.

Sitting at her desk next to the frosted glass partition of the sleek office space, Lucía was the personification of an elite Bogotana. She wore a tailored cream suit that matched her light complexion and talked with the casual politeness, slightly pursed lips, and elongated s common among the upper class. Addressing me with the informal tú—sensing our overlapping social backgrounds—Lucía candidly shared some of her most memorable experiences working in the Tercer Milenio project. “I had never been to El Cartucho and I was left with my mouth open for three days because it was such a horrible thing,” she said with a mix of disdain and fascination. The sensorial and aesthetic qualities of that first visit left a strong impression on her, one that she was at a loss to describe: “If I could paint or write, I’d try to write about that first impression when I entered [the place].” The “images” that came back to Lucía were revealing of the social and cultural sensibilities that had shaped her perception of El Cartucho. One that stuck with her was an apparently banal observation about the doorways used by jíbaros (drug dealers): “Their houses’ doors were … how are those things called? Those things that they use in hot lowlands [tierra caliente] that you can move to the side, like rattan blinds [bambulitas]. They would peer outside [through them].” Implicit in her recollection was the long-standing imaginary of Indigenous and Black lowlands and coastal regions as uncivilized and disorderly,⁶⁸ which carried echoes of the same apprehension toward rural migrants that had infused representations of downtown Bogotá since the late nineteenth century.

Further compounding these geographic assumptions and their manifestation in El Cartucho’s decaying materiality was Lucía’s depiction of an idealized urban past that had been all but completely lost: “First I saw houses and the prettiest things in the world; they still remained even though they had smoked up [almost] all of them, because they smoked up [even] the houses. I saw a family, a lady that had never gone out of there, who said she had afternoon refreshments [onces] in the home of Indalecio Liévano and that she raised her family in that place. We took her out of there and put her in a refuge when we started the renewal process.” In sharp contrast to her misgivings about the material aesthetics of costeños and calentanos—people from warm tropical climates—she waxed nostalgic about a traditional Bogotá culture epitomized in the city’s republican architecture and in eminent gentlemen (cachacos) like Indalecio Liévano—a respected twentieth-century historian, politician, and diplomat. For her, such historical relics had been besieged by the materiality of violence and disorder, eventually disappearing or becoming “refugees” in an allegedly inevitable process of destruction. Although initially troubled by the “horrible poverty” she had seen, Lucía was soon persuaded in her conversations with Peñalosa that, at its core, the problem of El Cartucho was one of “degeneration” and “illegality” crucially mediated by the materiality of things and people. “Because what one found in El Cartucho,” Lucía explained, “was a very strong form of illegality that defended itself with disorder, filth, and chaos. [Illegality] attracted vulnerable populations, made them drug addicts … and human shields.”

The idea that urban insecurity and disorder were aesthetically and materially ingrained in El Cartucho became central to the reenvisioning of the area as a terrain of warfare, one in which urban planning and military-strategic intervention merged into each other. This was something already apparent in officials’ seemingly innocuous and common description of Tercer Milenio as a “detonating project” that would ripple through downtown and remake its urban fabric. Such militarized framings pervaded planners’ everyday work so that conflicts with local actors were scaled up and recast as signs of a looming battle. As Lucía put it, “At some point we were worried, concerned about the process, so I went to speak to the army, because there were tensions [in the area], and they told me, ‘Look, we’re not going in, because if we do, there’ll be a civil war and they will probably win because they’re too strong. We, as soldiers, can only fire bullets [echar bala].” The implication was that overt military action had to take new forms, transmute into other techniques and modes of political action, that would more effectively reconquer the physical and social terrain of El Cartucho. For Lucía, the conjunction of militarism and politics was most apparent in the work of the police: “The police helped us a lot; there was a commander who was very political. In reality, the police are more political than anything else.” During the project, policing was underpinned by other, more covert forms of intervention—from negotiation to co-optation—aimed at diffusing local leaders’ control over the area. But as other experts made clear, the logics of warfare had also extended and merged into the politics of demolition, land acquisition, and urban design.

Cristina, one of the lead designers on the project, talked with me about these entanglements as she clicked through one of her old PowerPoint presentations on Tercer Milenio. We discussed the plan in her home office in late 2011 in Santa Bárbara, one of north Bogotá’s most exclusive neighborhoods. The elite enclave is known for its ample houses, lush greenery, and twenty-four-hour private security force. It has also been characterized by its homeowners’ opposition to high-rise construction and mixed-use development. Cristina lived in one of two three-story townhouses that formed a boxy brick-and-stone structure enclosed by a heavy steel gate. It faced a hilly park shaded by eucalyptus, pine, and cypress trees—three common species imported by the Spanish and a living remnant of the time when the area was a large hacienda. Although the building bore little resemblance to the Spanish-inspired architecture of white stucco walls, wood window frames, and red tile roofs visible around the neighborhood, it was still closely aligned with ideals of residential living that harked back to the Spanish country home and its bucolic relationship to a domesticated landscape—something akin to what Raymond Williams famously described as a pastoral “structure of feeling.”⁶⁹

Cristina’s views on the military-strategic nature of the intervention and the material decadence of El Cartucho illuminated the ways in which geographic ideologies “are actively lived and felt,” as Williams puts it.⁷⁰ Sitting in her dimly lit and soberly decorated studio, soft jazz music playing in the background, she articulated a vision of the city through the familiar spaces of her home and office. “If you have [a place] in a house, like the space I have there under the stairs,” Cristina said, pointing outside her office door, “and there is the possibility of leaving a piece of cardboard or something else, then you start to put more little cardboards and other things in there.” Evoking El Cartucho, she called this “the human tendency to clutter [encartuchar],” something she had experienced not only in the intimacy of her home but also, ironically, when she directed a city office in charge of overseeing the construction and maintenance of public space: “People started leaving files [carpetas] somewhere in the office and then everyone thought that was the spot where files had to go before they would be taken down to the archive. After three months there was a Cartucho there, full of files!”

From this perspective, El Cartucho emerged as the ultimate manifestation of threats haunting the very core of urbane life—the alleged tranquility of the bourgeois home and orderly routines of state bureaucracy. For Cristina, the neighborhood’s decay posed a fundamentally logistical issue not unlike the one entailed by home organizing and state restructuring. And in the absence of the knowledge and mechanisms to relocate, compensate, and expropriate residents, Cristina noted, the military-strategic nature of the logistical challenge was laid bare. The “logic of the private sector,” the real estate world from which most experts came, fused into the logic of warfare. “The strategy to purchase land was almost a military strategy,” Cristina explained bluntly. “[The strategy] was to buy entire blocks” instead of individual properties, in order to gain territory and create a secure perimeter. That is why land acquisition was carried out “along the edge [of the neighborhood],” she continued, “because we knew that the most complex issues of drugs and weapons were in the core. That’s why we had to acquire land in the periphery.”

Turning to her computer screen and pointing to an aerial photograph of El Cartucho, Cristina remarked on the importance of “working from above” during the process. What Eyal Weizman calls a “politics of verticality” proved central to the city’s bid for territorial control.⁷¹ Such planning optics not only contributed to representations of El Cartucho as a theater of operations but also made visible its contours as a terrain of insecurity. Planners often called attention to the irregular and rough spatiality of the neighborhood, to its “zigzagging” and “crooked” streets. As one expert put it to me, “Morphologically El Cartucho was like a triangle with a very particular urban form, so people se encartuchaban, they got into a space into which authorities could not easily penetrate.” She had indexed key meanings of cartucho—which in addition to gun cartridges also refers to paper packages, cones, and rolls—and mapped them onto the neighborhood, suggesting a “morphological” homology between words and material forms. El Cartucho thus emerged as an opaque and striated terrain impervious to the gaze of the state. But more than pointing to the city’s immanent material qualities and how they admittedly overwhelmed human action, these expert discourses called attention to the ways in which enactments of materiality themselves became a critical medium of politics. Planners’ obsession with the rugged physicality of El Cartucho, and their tacit references to the country’s terrains of warfare, proved integral to militarized strategies of demolition and reconstruction. As one architect told me, the plan ultimately aimed to “desencartuchar El Cartucho”: to unroll the unroll, as it were, and smooth out the area’s convoluted material geography.

At work here was an understanding of the materiality of insecurity shaped by experts’ everyday knowledge and experience of the city. Many planners and designers held the conviction that urban space did indeed have immanent material features and that it had the power to dictate social and political realities: from the civilizing environments of middle- and upper-class living to the inherently dangerous and unruly spatialities of the urban and rural margins.⁷² As Lucía noted with almost absolute certainty, “Physical space defines the behavior of people, of humans, even animals.” In El Cartucho this meant that the disposition and qualities of things and people inevitably led to violence, insecurity, and disorder. By materializing the neighborhood as a tangibly unwieldy and dangerous terrain, experts reasserted the need to fully disassemble it. This was perhaps most apparent in officials’ reluctance to preserve any trace of the neighborhood’s architecture or topography. Leaving any structures standing was seen as inherently risky, one functionary explained to me. Unbuilding had to be complete, and transformation had to reach, as another senior planner put it, “a point of no return.”

Mapping Human Terrain, Unbuilding Social Infrastructures

The strategic acquisition and demolition of physical structures was the most visible dimension of the rematerialization of El Cartucho as a terrain of warfare. According to Cristina, however, Tercer Milenio had been a complex process of knowledge building (construcción de conocimiento) in which softer techniques targeting social relations underpinned the plan’s harder military-strategic logics. Behind the physical dismantling of the neighborhood, experts had deployed modalities of intervention aimed at disassembling “social infrastructures”: local forms of sociality, ownership, and organization.⁷³ Significantly, such modes of governmental knowledge were framed in the language of humanitarianism and development. Property relations and everyday livelihoods emerged as key battlefronts, illuminating the multiple security logics that converged in Tercer Milenio. Echoing Colombia’s long history of armed conflict and the state’s embattled sovereignty over an unruly social and physical topography, the downtown neighborhood was recrafted into something akin to a zone of disaster and vulnerability, with thousands of alleged victims waiting for humanitarian assistance and the promise of development. Ironically, experts’ enactments of a social emergency became an increasingly tangible reality amid an enveloping atmosphere of destruction and ruination put into motion by the same state actors in charge of rescuing its supposed casualties.

These other facets of the militarized intervention surfaced most clearly in the accounts of officials and experts working closer to the ground. These were the functionaries directly charged with carrying out the plan, or what is known in Colombia as the gestión of a project. While the term is close to the English “management” or “governance” (e.g., gestión pública), gestión refers more directly to the practical demands of bearing out a project—that is, of dealing with real-world contingencies and working through the mechanics of implementation. Néstor, for example, was an architect who had worked in the city’s Instituto de Desarrollo Urbano (Institute of Urban Development), or IDU, the city agency responsible for executing the Tercer Milenio project, and who described his work as being neither strictly planning nor policymaking but rather gestión urbana. I met Néstor in 2012 in his consulting office near the city center. In contrast to Lucía and Cristina, he had spent most of his career in the public sector. Far from the glossy real estate companies and design studios of north Bogotá, his firm looked more like a modest bureaucratic office: a shared space of four desks in an older building in the traditional La Soledad neighborhood. As a result of his proximity to the city government’s day-to-day official business in Tercer Milenio, Néstor’s experience revealed the continuities between the strategic-securitized dimensions of the intervention and the prosaic, seemingly technical aspects of providing social assistance.

Unlike other officials involved in the operation, Néstor was wary of describing Tercer Milenio as a security intervention. As he explained hesitantly, “I think our objective was not to end the illegal drug trade of the city; that was not the objective of the plan … although that’s still debatable.” As an IDU functionary with experience in public works, Néstor saw the park primarily as public infrastructure that, like roads or dams, had inevitably displaced residents. “So our main problem wasn’t getting rid of crime,” he stressed, “like in that favela in the movie Elite Squad. No, our objective was to do urban renewal, and a key component was to carry out a plan of gestión social.” Instead of characterizing the plan as a form of urban warfare, epitomized in the popular 2007 Brazilian film about a violent special operations police unit in Rio de Janeiro, Néstor called attention to its resettlement schemes.⁷⁴ The planning team searched for existing models and finally adopted “the World Bank’s methodology to deal with resettlement, to deal with displacement,” he told me. The main challenge in El Cartucho was the widespread absence of property owners, making it impossible for the state to follow eminent domain protocols. So “experts turned to other experiences,” Néstor explained, “and the closest one was resettlement in vulnerable areas, where people did not hold property titles.” Drawing on the World Bank’s framework to “reestablish initial conditions” and the city’s own experience in “zones of risk and vulnerability,” Néstor continued, experts created a “baseline” and a system of compensation.⁷⁵ Crucially, technologies aimed at governing insecure peripheries had been transposed to the city core. “Parque Tercer Milenio was really interesting,” Néstor said, “because it was the first lesson in how to manage vulnerability in nonmarginal zones. We have an urban pattern where we typically think that poverty is located in the periphery and the city knows how to handle those situations well, zones of risk, zones of informal urbanization. So that was the referent but transferred to a central area.”⁷⁶

In talking about “vulnerable” populations that had to be “rescued and resettled,” Néstor conjured the imagery of humanitarianism and its complex ties to military and police intervention—a familiar script in Colombia’s theater of warfare. As a central periphery defined by vulnerability, El Cartucho was made to resemble a zone of emergency, one in which the causes of urban crisis were obscured and the moral imperative to intervene took precedence. As Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi argue regarding contemporary military-humanitarianism, the intervention brought together “a logic of security and a logic of protection.”⁷⁷ Such affective and epistemological sensibilities rendered visible the “social” dimension of the battlefield. If planners’ vertical optics made tangible the material contours of terrain, social and real estate gestores (individuals who perform gestión) recrafted El Cartucho into something akin to the “human terrain” of contemporary counterinsurgency.⁷⁸ Aimed at making the intervention more humane, to “socialize” (socializar) the plan, as the expression goes in Bogotá’s policy circles, officials produced knowledge about local communities in an attempt to distinguish law-abiding residents from alleged criminals and to better direct social assistance and relocation programs. The process, however, was riddled with contradictions, not only exacerbating conflicts and criminalizing entire swaths of the population but also serving as a strategic technique of persuasion and intelligence gathering that prepared the ground for territorial control and displacement.

Consuelo, a senior sociologist with a long career as a consultant in the public sector and one of the experts in the Tercer Milenio operation with the most field experience, elaborated on the stakes of the plan’s “social component.” Soberly dressed and restrained in her manner, Consuelo met me for coffee at a busy street café in a boutique hotel next to the ritzy Parque del Virrey, a park she described as “an oasis in the chaos of Bogotá.” During our conversation it became apparent that her long-running engagement with downtown conflicts and exclusions had reached a breaking point. She confessed feeling “moral fatigue” and being often “fearful and tired of Bogotá.” Her already strained relationship with the city had been exacerbated by a recent break-in at her north Bogotá apartment, and she now spent most of her time in a small house she rented in the countryside. Consuelo’s urban disenchantment also pointed to the conservative social reformism that shaped the professional practices of many gestores sociales. She seemed genuinely concerned for her “street friends [ñeros]”—something resembling motherly care—and intimately attuned to their lifeworlds. “I spend all day doing this, I can’t stop doing activism,” Consuelo said as she gave some change to an old woman who had been weaving around the espresso- and pastry-filled tables asking for money. And yet her approach to urban poverty had a moralizing undercurrent, favoring ideas of social betterment over an acknowledgment of the contentious politics of urban renewal.

Consuelo’s moral conviction about the necessity of implementing a “strategy of social intervention” gave the city’s social schemes an aura of technicality, one that, as Fassin and Pandolfi put it, “neutraliz[ed] political choices by reducing them to simple operational measures.”⁷⁹ In a distinctly procedural tone, she listed some of the initial actions carried out in the neighborhood: “Psychosocial attention for families, comprehensive support in their condition of unemployment, their health condition, their educational condition, et cetera.” As she elaborated further, Consuelo offered a more unvarnished account that made apparent the political underside of gestión social. She presented socio-humanitarian intervention as a tactical resource that had been deployed to support the larger strategy of territorial control. Not unlike the counterinsurgent war for “hearts and minds,” social assistance programs emerged as a means of persuasion—what Consuelo called “a strategy of seduction”—and as a source of information, which she in turn described as a matter of “identifying and recognizing” the social reality of the area. On the one hand, officials set out to create a sense of “proximity” and “build trust” among local residents. On the other hand, they gathered data that would be indispensable in later stages of the plan. The central tool in this regard was a socioeconomic census that was carried out “behind closed doors,” Consuelo admitted. “We closed El Cartucho so no one could enter or exit,” she explained, “and then there was a zero hour [hora cero] for the census.” Cordoned off and surveyed, people were counted, classified, and mapped. “We had so many maps; the cartography was so impressive,” Néstor recalled, talking about the same process.

Ultimately, Consuelo said, the operation had aimed to “support families so they could start preparing to exit the zone [la salida de la zona].” Her phrasing was reminiscent of the language used in Colombia to describe militarized enclaves and zones of conflict, amplifying the sense that the plan was an emergency evacuation to rescue vulnerable subjects from a zone of danger. Further uncovering the politics of Tercer Milenio’s urban humanitarianism, she more openly stressed its strategic value as a technique of both legitimation and logistical expediency: “First came in the strategy of social and humanitarian intervention, and then behind it the real estate intervention of urban renewal for the purchase of the properties. So that was what was smart about Peñalosa’s idea. He said, ‘Let the humanitarian issue pass first, let it take care of whatever it needs to take care of, and when it’s guaranteed that even the very last of all the human beings there is sheltered or protected or at least intervened or accompanied, then we come in with the purchases and the bulldozer.’” By intervening in the very bodies and livelihoods of people, gestión social was supposed to accomplish what militarized planning alone could not. Although government assistance allowed some families to eventually access permanent housing, an indeterminate number were relocated transitorily and then left to their own devices. Far from a long-term resettlement policy, the scheme was more directly aimed at allowing officials to “peacefully” unbuild El Cartucho’s social infrastructures and launch demolition and reconstruction plans. Temporary resettlement, initially for one year and later on only for three months, was a “truce [tregua],” as Consuelo put it, “a truce while all real estate matters were taken care of.”

In one sense, gestores sociales had recast “people as a geographic space to be conquered—human beings as territory to be captured,” as Roberto González argues in his critique of counterinsurgent “human terrain.”⁸⁰ Mapping and managing this terrain, however, proved to be a much more contradictory and conflict-ridden affair than Consuelo’s techno-humanitarianism implied. The census, for instance, was actively opposed from the start of the operation. “You want to get us out and on top of that you want us to open our doors so you can see what you are getting rid of?” Néstor recalled residents telling him. Inevitably, he admitted, the census became a source of intense negotiations and, more problematically, of tensions and eventually outright violence: “The census implied a negotiation, reaching agreements with local actors; otherwise, it would have been impossible to do it.” City officials identified specific “groups” ranging from tenement dwellers and street vendors to owners of typography stores and recycling businesses. In the process, Néstor pointed out, “forms of leadership emerged, some of which were terrible, some among them even died, there were several threats and deaths.” Here he was confronted with the realities of the intervention. As a gestor social, he had done work that had overlapped with matters of security and policing. “It’s a complicated issue,” he said about meeting with local jíbaros, “because as a functionary you can’t meet with criminals.” With some hesitation, he hinted at the threats he had received from rivaling local factions and how he had finally decided to resign.

If Consuelo had presented the official version of gestión social as a technical-strategic operation, experts like Néstor were more forthcoming about the complex terrain of conflicts and insecurities that gestores sociales had had to navigate. What emerged here was something akin to a “public secret”: the partially disclosed truth that social programs relied on stealthy maneuvers and tactical compromises.⁸¹ “There was a tacit agreement,” Néstor explained cautiously, “and one has to be careful about saying this. What one presumed was that while the project’s chronogram was established, during the months of the census, the other stages of the plan, et cetera, some of the groups that had illegal economic interests would have time to leave. The groups that had some fear, and again you have to say this carefully because it wasn’t an official agreement, those groups would start withdrawing.” In different ways, officials involved in the process admitted knowing that some of the main jíbaros in the area and their ganchos promptly relocated their business to nearby areas. As Néstor put it guardedly, “It seems some of the criminal groups moved immediately to neighboring San Bernardo, and we didn’t prepare some form of resistance, we didn’t carry out any police or social action.”

Relocation of “vulnerable families and individuals” was also plagued with conflicts and uncertainties. The city had scarce institutional resources to permanently resettle local inhabitants, especially the hundreds living in the streets, and residents in other city districts, including very impoverished and marginalized neighborhoods, were actively opposed to receiving El Cartucho’s stigmatized inhabitants. “So very painful things occurred; some were frustrating, some had to be hidden,” Néstor continued. “We had to do things secretly. For example, in Antonio Nariño, people organized a protest because we were bringing children from El Cartucho, and in another neighborhood in Usme, too, they even built barricades because we were taking some people from El Cartucho. So we had to do things individually, we had to take families out and accompany them covertly.”

These tensions intensified during the property acquisition and demolition process, the so-called gestión inmobiliaria. The real estate operation had been led by Felipe, a successful real estate agent, who met me in his expanding firm, not far from where I had talked with Consuelo in the upscale El Virrey neighborhood. Tercer Milenio had been his first job after graduating from an elite university in downtown Bogotá. At the time, he had never set foot anywhere near El Cartucho, and other officials joked about the unlikely scene of a “rich kid” negotiating with homeless addicts and hoodlums. At the end of the demolition, he was known by locals as “El Gucci del Cartucho.” Like Consuelo and Néstor, Felipe stressed the “social” dimension of his work. Looking back on his experience with some nostalgia, he explained that his role in the project had been “more as a social worker than a real estate agent.” Felipe had become passionate about relocating commercial clusters without dispersing them, while lamenting the fact that the city had not compensated businesses more fairly. He had found the work most rewarding when he felt he had “improved” people’s lives: “More than a real estate satisfaction it was a social satisfaction, helping those people to move on to something better, helping an elderly woman find the apartment she wanted.” In Felipe’s account, humanitarian sensibilities emerged under the guise of a caring form of socioeconomic development. And yet, as with other experts, his ethical and moral convictions aligned closely with the practical and operational demands of the project. “You have to understand the social situation of each one of those persons to be able to give them a solution,” he clarified, “[rather than] simply tell[ing] them, ‘I’m going to give you money so you can leave,’ because [in that case] you will probably lose the money, the house, and end up worse off.”

Felipe recounted a flamboyant scene that captured the tensions between his personal-affective investment in the project and his commitment to strategic pragmatism. During one of the early field visits, some of his team’s topographers had been met with threats while attempting to take measurements on an inner block. Ernesto “El Loco” Calderón, a local leader and recycling business owner—the same man who had outbid Sandy’s family and taken over their restaurant—had confronted the city functionaries, allegedly threatening them with a gun and a grenade. Under intense pressure from his superiors and with a trip to Miami with his girlfriend coming up, Felipe went into the very core of El Cartucho, donning his suit and tie, to resolve the issue. He retraced his steps with me, almost in disbelief of what he had been capable of at the time: “I started walking, I passed in front of the city morgue, things were a bit strange, strong, ugly, but I kept going and then reached Ninth Street and I asked, ‘Hey, where’s the man they call El Loco Calderón, I’m looking for him.’” Amid perplexed looks, someone told him to go to a nearby bakery. He went in and asked again if anyone had seen El Loco. “The only crazy person here is you!” a tall, corpulent man with curly hair, dress shirt, and graying stubble beard shouted, standing up from the crowd of scraggly men. “What do you think you’re doing here?” El Loco himself had asked, genuinely surprised.

Felipe explained that he came on behalf of the office of urban renewal to get El Loco’s permission to measure the block. “This guy is crazy,” Felipe recalled him saying. “I don’t even know how you managed to get to Tenth Street alive dressed like that.” But El Loco laughed it off, appreciating Felipe’s boldness, or perhaps his utter obliviousness. He told him to come back the following week, but Felipe explained that he had to do it that same day or the next at the latest. El Loco asked him why, and the exchange that followed, Felipe recalled, “marked the beginning of their relationship”: “I just told him, ‘Look, the truth is I’m going to Miami with my girlfriend and I don’t want to cancel the trip.’ The guy burst into laughter, saying, ‘OK, I’ll let you take your measurements if you bring me a leather jacket from Miami.’ And that’s how I ended up buying a leather jacket for El Loco Calderón in Miami!” In one sense, the gift—a leather jacket—was emblematic of the moral-humanitarian impulse that shaped experts’ understanding of urban intervention: it was a gesture of goodwill and empathy, much like Consuelo’s tacit equation of alms giving to activism when we spoke at the outdoor café.⁸² As an exchange, however, Felipe’s gift was the opposite of what scholars have described as the unreciprocated gift of development aid—it was a hollow token, a coat for a neighborhood.⁸³ It enacted a social bond between the men, one of respect and reciprocity, that would ultimately prove a thin veneer for the plan’s underlying territorial violence.

The tensions between social assistance and militarized displacement, cooperation and co-optation, played out more prominently in later stages of the plan. Confrontations with jíbaros and their ganchos became more frequent, and police increasingly escorted demolition crews into the neighborhood. City workers were often attacked and machinery sabotaged. “Someone even threw a grenade at us in a camp where we had trucks and machinery,” Felipe recalled. And here again, military logics melded with ideals of socioeconomic development. Local leaders, including some of the very same jíbaros who were orchestrating the attacks, were offered job opportunities and contracts with the city. Ironically, many of them were hired to protect the city’s machinery and to accompany real estate appraisers in their daily work. Crucially, experts saw these initiatives both as an extension of frameworks for social assistance and economic compensations and as a strategy to co-opt and defuse criminal networks. As Felipe put it, “It was an interesting move in the sense that you generated jobs, you paid them salaries for their assistance, and you divided them. It was an interesting strategy that worked well; it was recruiting people from the zone. [This strategy] also created many problems, because it generated complex internal wars among them.”

The remaking of El Cartucho into a human terrain—a double-sided ground of morality and strategy—ultimately proved much more volatile and unwieldy than experts had expected. In March 2000, around four hundred people organized a protest in El Cartucho; according to local press reports, that protest soon became a full-blown “rebellion.” Police intervened and violence escalated, leaving two dead and many more injured. Protesters blocked major streets, burned cars, and threatened to set a gas station on fire. According to journalistic coverage, the area had transformed into “a combat zone into which not even ambulances could enter.”⁸⁴ During the event, El Loco Calderón gained visibility as the leader of the uprising. For several officials who were involved in the project, this was typical of Calderón’s ambivalent shifts between incendiary opposition and pragmatic agreements. Almost exactly a year after these events, Calderón was shot dead by a rival gancho gunman. For Felipe, the assassination had been directly related to Calderón’s many contracts with the administration: “They said he had contracts with the city’s welfare department, with demolition companies, with everyone, so they started accusing him of being a sellout and he started having serious rivalries.”

In 2005, demolitions had reached an end, and Parque Tercer Milenio would soon be inaugurated. In April the city administration carried out the last incursion to remove the people who had stayed behind and were still living in the neighborhood’s ruins. Initial reports spoke of hundreds of former inhabitants wandering through downtown neighborhoods as residents in their path took to the streets to oppose their presence.⁸⁵ These last inhabitants epitomized the recalcitrance of the human terrain that planners had charted and sought to manage. While a combination of assistance and negotiation had enabled officials to identify, sort out, and move a considerable part of the population, these remaining ruin dwellers—the “floating population,” in technical jargon—revealed the extent to which the plan had made people into tactical objects to be either removed or strategically exploited. Literally stripping them down to bodies in circulation, and in a cynical enactment of their disposability,⁸⁶ city officials decided to shelter almost two thousand people in the city’s former Matadero Distrital (slaughterhouse).⁸⁷ But in yet another demonstration of the obduracy of the terrain conjured and allegedly conquered by experts, during the following months, and as the park opened, drug dealers, street vendors, waste pickers, and bazuco smokers slowly trickled back and resettled along the margins of the now paved-over, landscaped terrain from which they had been displaced.

An Urban Prototype in Ruins

In December 2003, several years before I began the research for this book and while I was working as an assistant in the mayor’s office in Bogotá, I was invited to an unlikely event: a city-funded art performance created by the art collective Mapa Teatro and former inhabitants of El Cartucho on the rubble of the partially demolished neighborhood. A motley audience of city functionaries, local intelligentsia, and former residents, we watched the ruined neighborhood come back to life in the cold downtown night. An assortment of longtime residents emerged from a field of debris in which grass and plants had started to grow. Like the weeds sprouting in an abandoned demolition site, these individuals would enact something that exceeded ruination, showing the “heterogenous and unexpected life amid rubble,” to borrow Bettina Stoetzer’s phrase.⁸⁸ The “stage” was loosely configured by lines of candles marking former walls and streets, two large screens at the back, and recovered furniture: an antique wardrobe, a radio cabinet, old wooden chairs, and bed frames. The “actors” included street dwellers, street vendors, impoverished migrants, circus performers, and tenement dwellers, all of whom had made a life for themselves in El Cartucho. As they recounted their experiences and memories of the place that was no longer there—some of them guiding the public through imaginary structures and roads—a video of the demolition process was projected in the background. The uncanny installation-performance dissolved the lines between performers and audience, ruined landscape and new infrastructure, memory and reality. At some point a disheveled man still living on the site came from behind, launching into an unintelligible tirade, only to be removed by the police. At the end, in an improbable scene of rebirth and regeneration, the residents-performers came together and danced slowly to a melancholic bolero as Christmas fireworks lit up the wasteland around them.⁸⁹

In sharp contrast to the strategic terrain crafted throughout the planning process, the theatrical installation rendered visible the people, knowledges, and things that urban renewal had set out to erase. In a conversation years later with Rolf Abderhalden Cortés, one of the cofounders of Mapa Teatro, he described the performance to me as a “counterdiscourse,” one that questioned the “official narratives” and “mythologies” that had been inscribed on El Cartucho. The project had interrogated preconceived notions of urban decay and “problematized the figure of the victim by situating [residents] in a new terrain in which their agency was acknowledged.” It shook the foundations of the modes of crisis planning that had recrafted the neighborhood into a battleground. To illuminate such narratives and stories, it put materiality at the center of performance: the texture and sensorial qualities of the world that had been inhabited by displaced residents. The ruin emerged as a site of possibility and critique. “The community’s stories,” Abderhalden Cortés states elsewhere, “were a substantive part of the architecture of the neighborhood’s memory. A form of resistance in the face of oblivion, a potential footprint among the ruins.”⁹⁰ At its core, the performance illuminated a particular configuration of knowledge and materiality that unsettled the epistemologies of destruction that had been mobilized for the creation of Tercer Milenio.

Mapa Teatro’s artistic intervention in El Cartucho had various iterations. In addition to the two performances in the semidemolished neighborhood, the collective staged installations and video performances in its own exhibition space—a downtown republican house very much like the ones that had been razed in Santa Inés—and in galleries across the globe. Their final act, Witness to the Ruins, which was inaugurated in 2005 (the same year the park opened), brought one of the last residents of El Cartucho and a close collaborator of Mapa Teatro to the stage. Juana Ramírez stood in front of screens that showed images of the demolition and testimonies of former inhabitants, as she performed what had been her daily activity in El Cartucho: working at her small stand making hot chocolate and arepas (corn cakes) on a wood charcoal grill. It was a “live archive,” Abderhalden Cortés explained to me, one that “reintroduced vital elements of her practice.” The installation homed in on the materiality of local knowledge and the local knowledge of materiality—“the smell, materials, and bodies,” he stressed.

Mapa Teatro’s documentary, ethnographic, and artistic installations constituted an urban prototype, not only in its status as a provisional model of urban engagement reassembled over time, but more centrally as what Alberto Corsín Jiménez describes as “an emerging sociomaterial design … whose social and material components retrofit each other as being in mutual suspension.”⁹¹ Operating as what Abderhalden Cortés called a “laboratory of social imagination,” Mapa Teatro’s recrafting of material and social relations not only called attention to the “lost material and immaterial patrimony of El Cartucho” but also crucially destabilized planning epistemologies and pointed to alternative urban futures.

Conversely, Tercer Milenio itself appeared not as monumentalized space but rather as an unfinished and fraught prototype of urban renewal. Despite all the efforts to leave no trace of what had been there before, the park was haunted by the sociomaterial worlds it obliterated, its surroundings falling into disrepair and suffused with the memories of El Cartucho and its destruction. “For old residents,” as Abderhalden Cortés put it bluntly, “the park you see today is a cemetery.” Soon after its inauguration, the park emerged as an obsolescent infrastructure. Three blocks on the north side were left undeveloped. Originally slated for commercial developments, the barren plots became a de facto garage for police cars, including armored riot-control vehicles like the ones used to “clear” the area not long before. Between 2015 and 2017, the development of a shipping container mall for popular commerce and an affordable housing complex on the remaining plots added new layers of meaning to the urban terrain. And yet the park continued to be a solitary space burdened by its history. By the end of 2018, Peñalosa returned to his theater of operations after being reelected as mayor and almost two decades after his first term. In an eerie scene, excavators and bulldozers rolled onto the grassy esplanade of Tercer Milenio to “renew and completely transform” the fourteen-year-old urban renewal project. Alongside intensifying police operations in the area, the administration now aimed to revitalize the park through new sports-and-recreation amenities.⁹² This was the reworking of a prototype, but one troublingly familiar and closely entangled with the vestiges of militarized displacement and territorial control. It was a prototype in ruins, one that foreclosed rather than enabled new paths. It signaled the shifting yet enduring violence of epistemic terrains in the remaking of downtown Bogotá.