The Archaeology of Decay

Not long after the Estación Central meeting, I met with Efraín at a small café in front of the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Theater. Originally trained as a sociologist, he had become a hardened activist involved in neighborhood politics, NGO work on waste management, and, more recently, antieviction campaigns in downtown Bogotá. He had lived for decades in one of the city center’s most “deteriorated” neighborhoods, San Bernardo, near El Cartucho (see chapter 2). Over the previous decade, Efraín had witnessed the destruction of El Cartucho, the construction of the monumental Tercer Milenio Park, and the shock waves of crime, poverty, and abandonment that had followed the urban project.

As we spoke about long-running government plans for downtown renewal, Efraín said that officials had for years “hidden information” about the fate of his neighborhood so that it would “continue to rot away” and people would sell their properties at lower prices. The imagery of “putrefaction [pudrimiento],” which he had also used at the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Theater, was closely linked to his work as a grassroots organizer and environmentalist. Since the 1990s, Efraín had been dedicated to local participation movements around neighborhood waste recycling in central districts. This was a main economic activity in his own neighborhood as well as in other downtown districts, including the now defunct El Cartucho. Such waste work had been typically associated with urban decline and marginality, primarily through the figure of the desechable (disposable), as waste pickers are often degradingly called in Bogotá. Efraín, however, called attention to the critical knowledges that emerged from inhabiting amid deterioro in a degraded, decomposing environment.

For him, it was necessary to understand “urban rot” as a process and make visible “how the material conditions of decay expand.”¹ This was not unlike the process of sorting waste, he noted, because “garbage forms only when debris [residuos] is mixed; without mixing there is no garbage.”² According to Efraín, something like an “archaeology of decay” was critical to sort things and people and unearth the “nucleus of decomposition” that was at the heart of deteriorating neighborhoods such as his own. It would make apparent the human and material layers of rotting terrains, from illicit activities and street commerce to the circulation of weapons and the exacerbation of urban poverty. Further excavation, he noted, would also show how “decay … also starts to diminish” along certain routes and at different times of the day, as types of people and activities gradually shift: “Streets for the commerce of trinkets [baratijas] emerge, zones of poverty, but not of indigence, where people arrive to sell all kinds of things.”

The archaeology of decay, Efraín said, was ultimately about examining “different degrees of decay [grados de deterioro].” Efraín’s attention to gradations was a way not only of producing more nuanced descriptions of processes of deterioration but also of grounding the technical concept of decay in inhabitants’ intimate knowledge and sensorial experience of their changing environs. Implicit in Efraín’s talk of degrees was the unsettling of the norms, or what Paul Kockelman calls “comparative grounds,” in relation to which urban places appeared to be declining.³ Grading, gradations, and gradients, Kockelman argues, are central to how people inhabit, make sense of, and act in the world.⁴ They are semiotic, phenomenological, and material processes that do not simply reflect shared experiential and epistemic backgrounds but rather “performatively constitute” them, “changing [people’s] assumptions about the world.”⁵ Such systems of valuation and their underlying grounds are inscribed in things, embodied by actors, and encoded in laws and regulations.⁶ Furthermore, built environments are pervaded by signs that index practical understandings of gradations and values.⁷ At stake here are the affordances of urban worlds, the relational and emergent properties that both open and close possible uses and modes of dwelling.⁸

When Efraín pointed to the graduated intensities of urban decay, to shifting grounds of practice and perception, he was making apparent the power-laden, transformative effects of official norms. He had been suspicious, for instance, of a raucous business that had recently appeared on his block. Like other illicit activities in the area, it had been ignored by the nearby police station while residents’ trivial misdemeanors and code violations were swiftly sanctioned. Efraín hinted at how governmental technologies to interpret and regulate urban decay—what planners also offhandedly called an entire neighborhood’s “level of decay”—were themselves driving deterioration and pushing people to abandon the area. Such epistemologies impinged on people’s understanding of the city, their modes of dwelling, and the very materiality of urban space. Efraín had been vocal about such dynamics in his activist and political networks. On one occasion, he had brought up the issue with a city councilor. The politician had tried to dissuade him from conspiratorial thinking. “He told me that there wasn’t really a perverse plan of rotting,” Efraín recalled. He responded with a more subtle critique: “So I told the politician, ‘Well, that’s even worse, because it still occurs, so what we have here is a structural logic that creates decay. And people who want to leave, sell for any price to get out, and that only benefits the real estate business, people who don’t mind that the place is rotting beyond measure.’”

Efraín’s call for an archaeology of decay was representative of local critical knowledges of renewal and deterioration and their inextricable connections to the violence of legal and property regimes. In one sense, and as the city councilor suggested, Efraín’s mention of hidden agendas and wide-ranging collusions—common tropes among downtown residents facing eviction—resonated with conspiratorial understandings of urban development. In this regard, anthropological literature shows how conspiracy theorizing has become a central mode of knowledge and critique through which people make sense of the opaque and mediated workings of global power.⁹ But while many downtown residents conjured shadowy agents and wondered about how they pulled the strings of urban development, theirs was not primarily an attempt to “assert epistemic certainty” over an unknown and estranged reality, to borrow from Dominic Boyer.¹⁰ Downtown dwellers’ theories of urban power were instead anchored to their intimate experience and even excessive knowledge of urban ruination. When they veered into conspiratorial thinking, it was more “to disrupt knowledge”: to unsettle planners’ certainties about urban decay and assumptions about order, security, and value.¹¹

In this chapter, I explore Efraín’s archaeological sensibilities as a phenomenological regrounding of urban knowledge in the material and temporal experience of decay. At stake here is what I call a ruinous knowledge: an experiential epistemology borne out by the textures and rhythms of crumbling cityscapes and rotting neighborhoods. Anthropologists have increasingly turned their attention to ruins as critical sites for the study of the enduring violence and material traces of regimes of power, from the debris of colonialism and the rubble of capitalism to degraded landscapes and the wreckage of war.¹² This scholarship has illuminated the destructive undersides of notions of progress and their latent, layered, and differential material effects. Far from static remnants, such residues constitute what Ann Stoler calls “ruination”: “an ongoing corrosive process that weighs on the future.”¹³ Building on this work, and on studies that probe into the possibilities and limits of life amid urban ruins, I examine the composition of knowledge amid decay.¹⁴

There are few concepts so integral to contemporary urbanism, yet so taken for granted, as decay, disrepair, and decline. Obsolescence and deterioration appear to be the very stuff of capitalist urbanization and its endless cycles of destructive accumulation.¹⁵ In this regard, deterioro seems indistinguishable from similar notions such as “blight” in the United States. Yet critiques of blight in North American cities, as Andrew Herscher argues, have focused primarily on spatial and economic restructuring, failing to account for blight’s central “relation to racial capitalism.”¹⁶ Similarly, the archaeology of decay and the ruinous knowledges on which it is grounded call for more capacious critiques of the sociocultural and political conjunctures that mediate deterioration. In Bogotá, this means situating decay not only in the city’s trajectories of capitalist development but also, crucially, within violent regimes of law and citizenship and the social differences they engender.

In what follows I focus on ongoing plans to transform the neighborhoods of La Alameda and Santa Fe in the northwest edge of the city center. I show how urban dwellers’ ruinous knowledges made visible the slow and sustained decomposition of the social and material infrastructures of everyday urban life. By attending to the protracted temporalities and banal materialities of urban renewal, residents illuminated the gradual, gradated, and inconspicuous enactment of unjust and violent legal orders. The ruinous qualities of this epistemic ground lent critical force to local understandings of planning strategies and denunciations of the city’s politics of urban value. Much like the “displaced of Manzana Cinco” (see chapter 3), residents in these west-side neighborhoods called attention to the insecurities of city planning and the continuities between urban renewal and warfare. In one sense, the ruinous knowledges I follow below remained entwined with the normative orders of propertied citizenship as residents turned their attention to decay itself as the problem to be remedied. In their calls for “recovery,” they thus reproduced the inequalities driving the slow violence of state-induced decay. At the same time, steeped as they were in the ruination of their immediate worlds, urban dwellers articulated incisive critiques in which the state and the law appeared inextricably linked to what Keisha-Khan Perry, in her work on Salvador da Bahia, calls the “violence of unequal urban development.”¹⁷ When they invoked the country’s long-running armed conflict as a reference point for their dispossession, they did not employ the language of victimhood, of absent or illegitimate state actors, or of the violation of rights. Instead they articulated a more incisive critique in which state, law, and property appeared themselves as the origins of, not the solutions to, entrenched histories of violence and insecurity. Ruinous knowledges did not draw their force from liberal, middle-class regimes of citizenship but rather from the exact opposite: from rotting urban worlds and the ruination that lies at the core of planning and property regimes.

And this is the promise of such ambiguous subaltern epistemologies. By following the material traces of decay, residents called attention to how governmental logics are erected on and bring about destruction. Mediated by the imaginaries of Colombia’s war, ruinous knowledges were keyed to the continuities between the devastation wrought by city planning and the country’s long history of state violence and forced displacement in the countryside. They ultimately laid bare the “ruination [that] lies at the heart of modern regimes of knowledge,” in the words of Yael Navaro-Yashin.¹⁸ It is to these official epistemologies and their tacit systems of destructive interpretation and valuation that I turn next.

Chains of Decay

As in much of Latin America, the “discourse of downtown decay” attributed the decline of Bogotá’s historic center to the overcrowding of impoverished rural migrants, the expansion of popular economies, and the departure of the middle and upper classes to new residential districts.¹⁹ Urban renewal emerged as the main path for “recovery,” further reproducing exclusionary ideals of governance, citizenship, and public space.²⁰ Similar to what Alejandra Leal Martínez shows in her work on Mexico City, downtown renewal became integrally connected to the “criminalization of the urban poor.”²¹

In Bogotá, downtown deterioration became ensnared in the country’s history of violence. Expert talk about “urban disorder” and “urban decay” can be traced back to the early twentieth century, when Bogotá became the main destination for rural migrants fleeing violence in the countryside. In the 1940s, modernist architects decried the “abandonment” and “filth” that these new inhabitants—Indigenous peasants, impoverished tenement dwellers, and informal market vendors—had brought to the city center.²² Tellingly, they also noted how these “sordid” neighborhoods, located primarily on the west side of the city center, offered unparalleled opportunities for development and accumulation: “Their existence is a great fortune, a stupendous mine that the collective can and must take advantage of: it is called VALORIZATION.”²³

The relationship between social hierarchies, violent conflict, and urban (de)valuation was further cemented following El Bogotazo, the historic uprising of 1948 that partially destroyed the city center after the assassination of leftist presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (see chapter 1). In the aftermath, planners and architects celebrated the destructive power of the insurrection, arguing that it had finally opened the path to reverse the “horrendous disorder” of downtown and materialize existing plans for “expansion and beautification.”²⁴ Urban disintegration appeared here again as a critical condition for progress and valorization. Proponents of a post-Bogotazo reconstruction plan wrote about valorizing the “unhygienic plots occupied by fruit trees” of the older blocks of downtown, many of them now burnt to rubble.²⁵ While the most ambitious reconstruction plans never materialized, ruination continued apace in the city center, constituting the urban equivalent of a scorched-earth tactic to prevent future urban revolts and make downtown less of a subaltern space.

The class and racial underpinnings of decay and its ties to security agendas became less overt in the following decades as planners and real estate developers rendered the concept into a technical artifact. Urban decay would be normalized as an objective condition amenable to expert diagnoses and intervention. A policy document from 1964, for instance, portrayed decay as a natural, self-driven process inherent to the city’s rapid growth: “In cities of accelerated development, and such is the case of Bogotá, the transformation of its constructions is continuous, leaving some in disuse and others exposed to the action of decay [la acción del deterioro].”²⁶ In a late 1980s plan, officials wrote about “the systematic deterioration of [downtown’s] environment” and identified three “main problems”: the “expulsion of residents,” the “excessive concentration of the tertiary sector,” and the “generation of large urban voids.”²⁷ Significantly, “residents” here referred to middle-class inhabitants, “tertiary activities” signaled the rise of informal and popular commerce, and “urban voids” appeared as natural occurrences and not as the outcome of previous rounds of demolition and displacement. Following Tania Li’s work on development expertise, decay was “rendered nonpolitical,” occluding relations of force, the role of specific agents, and political-economic structures.²⁸ As an official epistemology, according to Li, it had “far-reaching effects” not only in terms of expert conceptualizations and public discourse but also in the shaping of material environments and residents’ everyday experience.²⁹ At the same time, the depoliticized materialization of decay was never complete, with both experts and residents recognizing and critically examining its contradictions and political openings.

The neighborhoods of La Alameda and Santa Fe epitomized the effects of such expert knowledges and their normalization of decay. Like most of downtown’s west side, development in the area had been closely linked to wide-ranging processes of destruction. Most recently, the ambitious Estación Central plan, launched in 2007 and still underway in 2020, had led to the demolition of three city blocks for the construction of an underground bus station and future node of the city’s rapid-transit bus system, Transmilenio. Planners envisioned a public-private partnership for the construction of a mixed-use, high-density complex above the station. After more than a decade, however, the city administration had built only bus roads and an underground walkway, leaving behind fields of rubble and abandoned buildings in expectation of the highly profitable real estate operation.

While infrastructural development proved effective in leveraging the first round of evictions and demolitions, as the plan became more real estate oriented and speculative, urban decay emerged as the main rationale. The scope and alleged urgency of the plan became directly tied to the expert diagnosis of decay as a naturalized, self-propelling phenomenon. One of the main findings of a 2012 technical supporting document (documento técnico de soporte, or DTS) was that the zone was undergoing a marked “process of deterioration.”³⁰ The progressive nature of decay and its distinctive momentum required technical interventions that would both allow the area’s supposedly natural obsolescence to run its course and remove the debris of the past through destruction and reconstruction. Planners described how land uses had shifted from residential to commercial, including repair shops and prostitution, and houses had been modified, stripped down, subdivided, and repurposed with “elements that are aggressive to architectural conventions and the environs.”³¹ The DTS also stated that the population had changed, “families had moved to modern or safer neighborhoods,” and the “aesthetic features” and “identity” of a bygone era had been modified. “The development and better use [aprovechamiento] of this area,” the document concluded, “requires allowing urban evolution to follow its course and eliminating obsolete systems to bring about new urban configurations.”³²

Cristina, one of the senior planners who coauthored the Estación Central DTS, described these processes as a “chain of decay [cadena de deterioro].” Some months after talking with her about her earlier experience as a planner on the Parque Tercer Milenio project (see chapter 2), I met her once again in her home office in north Bogotá to discuss her more recent work on Estación Central. As she sketched on a pad in her sparsely decorated studio—wooden shelves and dim lights, jazz playing in the background—she explained, “I have a diagram I put together [about urban decay].” She drew a standard x-y axis. “In a built-up urban sector that has existed for many years there are three moments, so to speak, three attributes: sense of belonging, investment, and economic activity.” Cristina then traced a descending curve with the now nonexistent neighborhood of El Cartucho at the end. Drawing on her experience as one of the lead planners in the large-scale demolition of the central neighborhood in the 1990s and the subsequent construction of the monumental Parque Tercer Milenio, she continued: “[At the bottom is] El Cartucho; there was no sense of belonging, or if there was a sense of belonging it was of illegal people [gente ilegal], there was no licit economic activity, and public space was beyond repair.” The result, Cristina explained, was that the stakes of intervention were much higher, and the state had to invest too many resources to “reverse” these processes and “detain the decay [frenar el deterioro].” Gesturing to a common narrative about governmental voids as a main cause of Colombia’s history of armed conflict, she added, “The chain of decay in all these processes is a function of the absence of the state.”³³ It was not surprising, then, that she and other functionaries described the demolition of El Cartucho as a “military operation” essentially aimed at regaining “territorial control.”

At least three core assumptions were implicit in the notion of “chains of decay.” First was the idea that decay was the result of a form of temporal causality: a linear chain of causes modulated by varying degrees of state presence, licit economic activities, and a legitimate sense of belonging. Second was the presupposition of an inherent contiguity—or “contagion effect,” as some experts described it—so that chains of deterioration appeared not as discrete phenomena but as processes spread out in space and time. And third was the implication of a homology between the material and social attributes of urban space, such that deteriorating built forms necessarily entailed decaying human worlds (see chapter 2). Such assumptions proved to be widely shared among planners across the political spectrum. Cristina, for instance, had worked with Mayor Enrique Peñalosa (1998–2000), who became widely known for his aggressive security and public-space policies, epitomized in the erasure of El Cartucho. She had taken up the Estación Central plan during the administration of Samuel Moreno (2008–11), nominally a leftist mayor, whose term was mired in corruption scandals and largely aligned with the interests of the construction sector. She continued to work on the plan under the administration of Gustavo Petro (2012–15) and within its new policy frameworks against inner-city displacement and speculation. But even here, while progressive officials set out to create affordable, subsidized housing in the city center—ultimately with little success—they also vigorously pushed for what they called “urban revitalization,” reproducing assumptions about the need to reconstruct and repopulate a deteriorated city center.³⁴ In describing to me their reinterpretation of the Estación Central plan, one of Petro’s lead planners dismissed the existing houses and buildings as “not worth saving” and, with visible distaste, noted that these were mostly “cheap residences and tenements [inquilinatos].” While the future of downtown renewal may have been disputed, the past and present of decay were left intact.

These modes of expertise actively shaped sociomaterial worlds through what Michael Herzfeld calls the “management of time.”³⁵ They enacted an urban temporality in which devaluation emerged as a natural historical process and state action and private investment as imperative solutions. Official epistemologies of decay can thus be viewed, following Laura Bear, as “forms of skillful making enacted within timescapes, which bring social worlds into being and link them to nonhuman processes.”³⁶ Such institutional and expert mediation of downtown’s rhythms of decay was further displayed in a PowerPoint slide created by the city government in 2010. Under the title “Curve of Decay,” the diagram made apparent the sociopolitical and material implications of expert timescapes of decay. Depicting a curvilinear process similar to the one sketched by Cristina, the plotted trajectory showed once again El Cartucho at the bottom, while placing the renewed Eje Ambiental promenade at the top. The chart’s directional arrows and overall organization presented a cyclical movement along axes of “deterioration” and “investment.” The implication was clear: Decay inevitably transpires when the city is left to its own devices, and when that occurs, state action becomes increasingly costly and urgent. At work here was a praxis of intervention that was linked to the undoing of chains of decay and that legitimated widespread destruction, as in El Cartucho and Estación Central. As Cristina put it, commenting on the degree of deterioration in the area and the difficulty of containing or reversing it: “If you carry out an operation in a deteriorated zone and that operation is not large enough, then the surroundings will eat it up [se la come el entorno].”

Despite official portrayals of decay as a natural process devoid of politics, in moments of “professional intimacy” planners reluctantly recognized the entanglements between their work and urban deterioration.³⁷ At some point during her much-rehearsed and polished exposition of chains of decay, Cristina admitted, somewhat mortified, that older regulations had “unintentionally [sin querer] led to the deterioration of the city center” by promoting large-scale renovation and making it impossible for owners to develop their properties individually. Other planners often told me with frustration that they had made the same mistake again in the city’s 2000 Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial, with zoning schemes that “froze up land.” The fault, according to Cristina, lay in planners relying too much on norms and simply “waiting for things to happen”—namely, for investors and developers to arrive. Beyond a source of disappointment, however, such failures became a justification for planning expertise itself and for new rounds of state intervention aimed at fixing these allegedly technical errors. And while most plans never came to fruition, things certainly did happen, as actors mobilized around the effects of urban zoning and regulations, compounding the destructive force of official epistemologies of urban decay.

Functionaries working on the ground became painfully aware of these contradictions and of how the Estación Central plan had mediated and catalyzed the dissolution of the neighborhood and the expulsion of its inhabitants. Marcela, a young social worker at the ERU who had been assigned to the Estación Central project, elaborated on the ways in which planning and bureaucratic action had created the conditions for social and material practices that intensified the area’s decay. Marcela was openly critical of the ERU’s work, and when we met at the company’s offices, she avoided talking in her cubicle in front of her coworkers. She asked me to step into an empty office so we could talk “more calmly.” With the office chatter still audible behind the room’s panels, she explained how “the zone had started to deteriorate” after the city launched the plan: “We started to acquire properties and they start to empty out and get walled in, and then a process of decay begins in that area. And people’s complaints are now [about] the zone’s deterioration, the insecurity, and the absence of the state regarding social and security issues.” According to Marcela, the intervention had exacerbated the area’s existing conflicts around the drug trade, sex work, crime, and property to the point that she now feared for her life when she visited. The plan, she continued, had accelerated the “deterioration [of La Alameda] at a social level.” It had caused property values to depreciate, worsened the prospects of fair compensation, and deepened the disputes between owners and tenants. Although Marcela blamed bureaucratic divisions, rigid regulations, and lack of political will for the rapid degradation of the neighborhood, she also recognized her unwitting complicity. Recalling her previous experience as a functionary at the national child protection and adoption agency, the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar (Colombian Institute of Family Welfare), or ICBF, she offered a damning self-critique of how her bureaucratic work had contributed to ruining homes and lives: “[When I worked at the ICBF] they used to accuse me of stealing children to sell them… . Before I stole children and now I steal homes; what’s the difference?”³⁸

The extent to which planning routines had mediated urban decay was further illustrated by Rosa, a social worker specialized in planning, who had worked as an ERU contractor in the early stages of the land acquisition process. We met in the mezzanine of an office tower, just a few blocks from La Alameda and Santa Fe, where she was now a consultant on resettlement schemes for the national oil company Ecopetrol. Along with engineers, appraisers, and topographers, Rosa had carried out a local census and a land market study and had mapped the Estación Central zone. These knowledge-making practices, she explained, had prompted a host of strategies that had further eroded local socialities. Soon after her team started surveying properties, rumors of the intervention spread rapidly in the area, “generating expectations” about resettlement compensations and property sales.

One house, she recalled, had been owned by an elderly woman who passed away when expropriations started. Apparently she had been “made to sign [over the property]” before dying, and when Rosa’s team arrived, more than ten people were living in the house: “No electricity, a broken entrance, full of excrement, full of trash.” Eventually a person with a property deed surfaced, and city officials mediated between the owner and possessors (poseedores) and “facilitated the vacating of the house.”³⁹ At another point in the process, Rosa and her team visited a cheap motel (residencia or paga diario) used frequently by sex workers. Initially they found sixteen residents, but the next time they came by, there were more than fifty people living in the crowded rooms and seeking resettlement assistance. The manager of the residencia, it turned out, had not paid rent in months to the landlord, Doña Eugenia, one of the oldest and most powerful landowners in the area—a terrateniente, as Marcela put it, who ran several bars and brothels. Ultimately, Rosa and her coworkers negotiated with the manager and helped Doña Eugenia regain control of the property. “The social work of resettlement,” she noted, had in practice become a form of real estate brokerage.

Rosa left her job at the ERU “overwhelmed” and conflicted about the extent to which she had become embroiled in the “tangles [enredos]” and “mysteries” that shrouded land use and ownership in the area. In contrast to official normalizations of deterioration and the alleged imperative of intervention, she saw planning itself as an unmistakable link in local chains of decay. “What kind of planning are we generating?” she asked. The renewal plan, Rosa concluded, proved to be nothing more than property acquisition and negotiation mechanisms that had pushed deterioration to its culmination, “rashly expulsing people, for no reason.”

Stratifying and Devaluing

Expert epistemologies of decay did not go unchallenged in La Alameda and Santa Fe. Drawing on their intimate knowledge and experiences of urban degradation, residents questioned official standards of value, theories of temporal causality, and ideologies of order and security. In doing so they revealed the workings of a different set of forces, causes, and rhythms. They did not simply critique the rationales for destructive urban intervention or the ways in which planning had accelerated the final stages of decay and destruction, as Marcela and Rosa suggested. Instead they went further and showed how deterioration itself had been associated with planning and legal regimes years before expropriations and demolitions were launched in the area. Urban dwellers illuminated the opaque and long-standing state practices that had slowly decomposed urban worlds.

The destructive effects of official valuations and regulations became most apparent from the vantage point of the people and places that had been most palpably at odds with expert characterizations. This was the case with Plaza 25, a six-story apartment building that planners described as “exceptional,” an anomaly within the neighborhood’s alleged cycle of decay. According to a functionary in charge of property acquisitions, Plaza 25 “was the only nice, well-maintained, and organized” building in the three blocks that the city had slated for demolition. Its 1980s smooth gray facade, red garage doors, and angular windows stood out among aging brick low-rises and the peeling stucco walls and broken roof tiles of older houses. While two government buildings and a taller residential tower on the same block were spared demolition, the city administration moved swiftly with the expropriation of Plaza 25, making low offers to owners for the obligatory sale of their apartments starting in 2009. It was as if the city had suppressed a categorical anomaly to further consolidate what Vyjayanthi Rao describes as “the murky, intermediate terrain of potential” of speculative urbanism.⁴⁰ Degrading the building was integral to leveling the terrain—symbolically and literally—and a condition of possibility for renewal: for “that which upgrades itself by downgrading others,” to use Paul Kockelman’s phrasing.⁴¹

For residents, their expulsion had been the culmination of a drawn-out process in which the state had devalued their properties through selective abandonment and oblique action, effectively “damaging the neighborhood [dañando el barrio],” as Cecilia, a former apartment owner, put it. Evoking imaginaries of war, she explained how authorities had previously “displaced” unsavory businesses to the “red zone” to the west, leaving streets “empty and ruined [en la ruina].” She mused, “It looks like, when the state is going to carry out urban renewal, they make sure it gets more and more ruined and decayed [dañe y deteriore] so they can kick people out.” Eventually city officials in charge of the plan’s so-called gestión social (social management) started visiting residents to inform them they would be expropriated, Cecilia continued, “despite not having the slightest idea of what the area was going to be used for.” Remembering how, one by one, her mostly elderly neighbors came to terms with the “immense psychological and economic damage” of their expulsion, she noted that they had had no recourse: “People had simply been pushed out by the state, as if they had invaded [their own homes].”

Liliana, another former resident of Plaza 25, also elaborated on the destructive nature of official epistemologies by drawing on the ruinous knowledge gained from living in the decaying neighborhood. With the meager funds from her expropriation, she and her elderly father had moved into a low-income residential complex in Mosquera, a growing industrial and working-class suburb of Bogotá. In a few years she had gone from property owner in the city center to renter in an impoverished urban fringe. The spatial and phenomenological distance between her previous residence and her new environs reminded her every day of how much her “life of quality [vida de calidad],” as she put it, had been upended. In her old studio apartment in La Alameda, “everything was within reach”: a density of amenities and opportunities, including her short walk to work as a secretary at a downtown bank. After her eviction, she had found work as a property manager at a subsidized housing project at the very edge of Mosquera. That is where we first met, at the end of an unpaved road that stopped at a barbwire fence, beyond which there were only empty pastures and downtown Bogotá’s miniature skyline in the horizon. “I used to live there,” she said, pointing to the distant mountains and tiny buildings.

Liliana shared an agonizing narrative about how the administration had devalued her property over the years, ending with her eviction and the demolition of her home. At the center of her account was a bureaucratic classification system known as estratificación socioeconómica (socioeconomic stratification) and its creation of differential geographies of urban value. The national government established the estratificación system in 1994 as a cross-subsidy mechanism (subsidio cruzado) for public utility charges. The aim was that affluent residents would offset the utility costs of lower-income populations. The classification, however, was not based on income level but on the “physical characteristics of housing and its surroundings.”⁴² For almost three decades, local estratificación committees have classified urban and rural areas across Colombia by estratos (the process is called estratificar) on a scale from 1 to 6, where estrato 1 is the poorest (or “low-low,” according to the typology) and estrato 6 is the wealthiest (“high”).⁴³

As established by national law, field teams of reconocedores (surveyors) follow a standard methodology designed to grade the four main factors that determine the physical state of housing: structure, finishes, bathroom, and kitchen. This involves identifying and scoring multiple variables listed on a form, from the size of the construction and the quality of materials to the type of facade, furniture, and overall condition. Implicit in such valuations of material forms and their affordances are local and contextual knowledges about socioeconomic standing, class, neighborhood reputation, illicit activities, and insecurity.⁴⁴ Such assumptions are most apparent in evaluation categories such as “poor,” “simple,” “regular,” “luxurious,” “bad,” “good,” and “excellent,” which the estratificación manual argues “may seem subjective” but are “precise descriptions, clearly distinguishable, that should not create any kind of confusion.”⁴⁵

Despite its technical aura and layering with statistics, the estratificación system is far from a neutral descriptor of given realities. Instead, and as anthropological work on the politics of measurement and commensuration has shown, estratos are generative of social worlds and relations of power.⁴⁶ They not only presuppose tacit norms and knowledges—what Kockelman calls “comparative grounds”—but are constitutive of semiotic, material, and experiential realities.⁴⁷ This has been evident in the social life of estratos beyond their original, allegedly progressive design. In addition to their adoption by a range of institutions for taxation, university tuition scales, and real estate transactions, estratos have been extensively appropriated and redeployed as markers of status and belonging—people talk of imagined estratos 0 and 10 to index sociospatial identities—ultimately reinforcing the inequalities and exclusions of Colombia’s stratified society.⁴⁸

Not surprisingly, Liliana had been very troubled when she discovered that the government had lowered the estrato of the Plaza 25 building from 4 (medium) to 3 (medium-low): “When I arrived in 1998, we were estrato four. And then one day the utility bill said, ‘Restructured from four to three.’” Through a routine update, the city had reclassified the building and effectively declassed its residents. Although the recategorization lowered utility costs and property taxes, it also negatively affected property values, as estratos typically influence experts’ property appraisals. “In 2004,” Liliana recalled, “they decreased [my apartment’s] cadastral appraisal [avalúo catastral] down to a third of the previous amount. My apartment was valued at eighteen million pesos [US$10,016] and they lowered it to six million [US$3,338].” According to her own calculations, her investment over the years had been close to US$47,000, and she had hoped to receive at least US$33,000 from the government. In the end, the city had only paid her US$18,000, an amount that made it impossible for her to relocate anywhere near downtown.⁴⁹

For Liliana, the restratification of her building had been a clear indication that authorities “had already been paving the way” for expropriation, demolition, and reconstruction. She and her neighbors took issue not only with how the government had classified their properties but also with how official grading practices had themselves driven deterioration: “abandon to decay,” in Liliana’s words. In sharp contrast to narrow notions of economic value, residents centered a nuanced and expansive conceptualization of urban value. Following a rich body of anthropological scholarship, value here would be best viewed as emerging (and dissolving) through social, material, and semiotic action.⁵⁰ Elaborating on the creative and transformative potentials of value, residents described how they had cultivated, maintained, and projected their homes’ worth over the years. This led them to denounce state modalities of commensuration as tools to undo processes of value creation and enable forced and unequal exchanges. Authorities had converted them into “trash,” Liliana noted indignantly. They had treated them worse than “criminals,” she said, evincing once again how entrenched repertoires of insecurity mediated the composition of ruinous knowledges. For her, the piecemeal violence of estratificación had fully surfaced when city officials finally carried out the eviction—what she described as a land grab, or despojo—“under threat and pressure” and with the police.

The dissolution of the meanings, socialities, and practices attached to the residents’ homes was further brought into focus by Gerardo, another former resident of Plaza 25. Previously a taxi driver, he now helped his daughter run a small pizza shop in a garage in the middle-class Normandía neighborhood, in west Bogotá. Due to an outstanding mortgage loan at the time of his eviction, he had been left in an exceptionally precarious position and had to relocate to a room in a shared house. In addition to living in Plaza 25, Gerardo had acted as its longtime manager, making sure it complied with condominium regulations (propiedad horizontal) and was well maintained. Along with other neighbors, he had also collaborated with local authorities to improve policing and close two neighboring “drug houses [casas de vicio].” Preserving the property and building community, he explained, were critical to reaping the value of his apartment. This is what he described as the “future of the family patrimony [patrimonio familiar],” a term he and others used frequently and pointedly when describing their expropriation. The term patrimonio is used in Colombia and Latin America to refer to individual and collective property, typically generational and inherited. To call something patrimonio, as Elizabeth Ferry argues, “places limits on its exchange by classifying it as ideally inalienable.”⁵¹ In talking about the loss of his “essential, primary patrimony,” Gerardo gestured in this direction. For him, dispossession had signified the destruction of an ensemble of things and experiences, the disintegration of social relations and a sense of self:

[In that apartment] I projected my life… . I had to remove my paintings and put them in this business. [I had to throw away] my living room, dispose of my trinkets [chucherías] of many years, my memories… . Now I’m reduced to a room of four by three [meters] with a closet and bathroom, where I can barely fit a TV. I had a washing machine, I had a kitchen, I had my pots and pans, I had my living room, I had my paintings, I had my rugs, I had my memories, I had everything that is part of the life of a fifty-nine-year-old man, because I’m fifty-nine, I’m not a child. And these people come in and they destroy the life of a person.

This was not simply a romantic rendering of noneconomic value. On the contrary, Gerardo and his neighbors were acutely aware of the market implications of their valuation and critiqued the state’s unjust offer accordingly. “We are not asking for millions of pesos, but only to be relocated in the area and in a home with similar characteristics,” Gerardo explained. More than exchange, they sought a “replacement,” or vivienda de reemplazo (replacement housing), an objective that would become fairly standard, yet rarely implemented, in later renewal plans.⁵² The fact that this had not been possible confirmed for residents the politics of destruction and appropriation at the core of planning practices and their assessment techniques and reifications. As Liliana recalled, when functionaries told her she would not be able to stay in the neighborhood because it would become estrato 6, she replied, “Who told you that I am not able to live in estrato five or six? How is it that you define me in that way?” Besides perniciously undermining their sense of personhood, Gerardo noted, the gradual degradation of the building had ultimately “dismembered the community”—an expression redolent of Colombia’s history of violence.

By drawing on their intimate knowledge of the slow decomposition of their homes, of the lived traces of decline, evictees had made apparent the material politics of expert systems of (de)valuation. Through an archaeology of the corrosive epistemologies of urban value, they had elucidated how planning knowledges and regulations had progressively ruined their building: how it had been devalued, emptied out, made to fall into disrepair, and dissolved into the landscape of rubble around it. In articulating their grievances, however, Plaza 25 residents also lamented the loss of propertied citizenship and its middle-class prerogatives. When Gerardo described the upkeep of the building and residents’ earlier collaborations with authorities to confront the “insecure and depressed” surroundings, he reproduced the same ideals of security and order later called on by planners to evict them. Liliana, in turn, was especially indignant at the state’s treatment of Plaza 25 owners because of their status as “upstanding citizens.” Cecilia drove home these contradictions when she looked out the window of the downtown office where she worked as a secretary. Turning to the glitzy high-rises—the kind of building that would supposedly replace Plaza 25—she mourned, “For me this is the real city,” not the decayed neighborhood she had last called her home.⁵³

Forced Decline

In charting the rubble left by the neighborhood’s alleged cycles of decay, the residents of Plaza 25 had nonetheless enacted an alternative timescape. For them, deterioration had been the result not of natural urban evolution, but rather of the work of specific actors, institutions, and regulations over an extended period. The archaeology of decay did not unearth an underlying logic, but rather brought to light a sociomaterial world grounded in forms of causality and accountability, knowledge and power, intimately tied to the destructive violence of city planning.⁵⁴

Drawing on such archaeological sensibilities, Paulina, the social organizer who had warned residents about signing meeting attendance sheets at the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Theater, offered one of the most compelling critiques of the politics of decay and the destructive violence of planning. As longtime property owners in the city center, she and her family had attained some semblance of middle-class security in previous decades. In recent years, however, the city had expropriated a commercial space owned by Paulina’s mother near the San Victorino district for the construction of transit infrastructure. This loss, along with land use restrictions imposed on their other property and their main business, had translated into a drawn-out process of forced decline. She and her extended family now lived on the upper floor of what was once their successful billiard hall as they struggled to make ends meet on a dwindling income. The property was in La Alameda, only a few blocks from the Estación Central demolition site and just outside the boundary of the zone of intervention. In the early 2000s, however, planners had zoned the entire neighborhood for urban renewal due to its “deterioration” and “strategic potential.”

The looming threat of eviction and the family’s earlier expropriation, which Paulina was still contesting in court, had made her a self-taught expert in planning law. Originally trained as a veterinarian, she was now devoted to community organizing against urban renewal and downtown evictions. Every time I visited Paulina in the increasingly decrepit and lonely billiard hall, she was studying a new decree concerning property law, eminent domain, and the rights of dwellers in zones of urban renewal. She gathered all the official materials related to redevelopment plans for the area: pamphlets, leaflets, invitations to town hall meetings, official letters. She pored over these documents, bringing the papers close up to her eyes and looking through an exceptionally thick pair of glasses, her advanced myopia seemingly making her an incomparably sharp observer of the quotidian effects of legal minutiae. Her cultivation of legal and planning counterexpertise was firmly rooted in her inhabitation of and habituation to the decaying environment of her home, business, and neighborhood.

With salsa music in the background and a faint smell of cat urine in the room, Paulina talked passionately to me one day about the city’s interventions in the neighborhood. “The problem of urban renewal for me is that urban renewal is a Machiavellian concept.” She explained in detail how zoning regulations and urban laws had for years hampered property owners’ use of their properties and their plans to renovate and transform them. At one point, she pulled out one of the many letters she had sent to the city government and read it out loud: “We are not against development, but in our areas we have had to suffer a great deal of deterioration caused by city administrations, with the implementation of limitations and restrictions on land uses, making us go from legality into illegality, [and all this] has only generated the closing of commercial establishments, the rise of empty properties, an increase of informality, and decay and more decay.” Paulina talked about restrictions on alcohol sales, limitations on land use, and regulations on construction and remodeling. A late 1970s law, for instance, had established that only lots with an area of five thousand square meters or more could be subject to construction or expansion. “So what happened?” Paulina asked. “Who had five thousand square meters [of land]?” Only the several universities located in the area and large commercial owners, she explained. “And what did this generate?” she asked again. “Decay. And what did it force people to do? To sell.” Small- and medium-size owners who did not sell sometimes allowed their properties to crumble so they could use them as parking lots. Since the 2000s, urban renewal zoning had further frozen development to create incentives for large-scale and comprehensive redevelopment—or, as Paulina put it, “so they could depreciate my property and give it to a constructor for greater profit.”

Enrique, a good friend of Paulina’s, lived closer to the zone’s core of decay, as he himself put it, in the adjacent Santa Fe neighborhood. He had owned one of the many small printing and publishing shops that had lined a central street for decades but that had gradually disappeared as the area became a so-called red zone (zona roja). He had managed to keep his small press afloat by publishing miniature Bibles that sold well on the streets. Since the 1980s, the Victorian-style houses—originally built by European Jewish immigrants in the 1930s—had given way to a number of booming prostitution businesses and strip clubs. In 2001, a city decree officialized a so-called tolerance zone (zona de tolerancia) that allowed these businesses to expand and operate legally.⁵⁵ While the new zoning was intended to increase regulation and security, it hardened the area’s “imaginary boundaries” as a place of marginality, paradoxically making it a “violent ‘safe zone,’” to use Amy Ritterbusch’s term, and rendering sex workers immobile and more vulnerable to violence.⁵⁶ According to Enrique, that was when the “kings of the business” arrived: former police and military, and people with links to drug cartels and paramilitary groups. This put into motion violent disputes over property and several modalities of land theft.

Early one morning, I joined Paulina and Enrique as they took photos of historic houses around the neighborhood, many of them recently back on the market. Paulina was going to attach the photos to a letter she had written, questioning officials’ decision to remove the properties from the city’s historic preservation list. She wanted to contest the portrayal of the area as irrevocably deteriorated, and to argue that it was technical actions such as the selective removal of historical preservation protections that had entrenched decay and enabled misappropriation and displacement.

Although Paulina picked up her son from school every day in the Santa Fe neighborhood, just a few blocks to the west from her billiard hall, she still seemed wary as we crossed the Avenida Caracas and things started to get “heavy [pesadas].” Enrique was more at ease navigating the rougher sides of La Alameda and Santa Fe. Not only did he live closer to the area, but with his blue-and-white Dallas Cowboys jersey and oversized baseball cap, the corpulent middle-aged man had an undeniable street presence.⁵⁷ Nonetheless he, too, was cautious not to cross Twenty-Fourth Street, another invisible border beyond which the zona roja or zona de tolerancia was in full ebullience: sex workers leaning next to motel doors, men walking hurriedly on the sidewalk, street vendors sailing through unconcerned, a scraggly street dweller crouching on an empty strip of pavement, and sharp-eyed squeegee kids waiting for cars at the intersection.

Pointing to a large house on a corner with reflective windows and a curved brick facade reminiscent of the neighborhood’s older architecture, Enrique shouted over the street noise, “That one was just remodeled, more than forty rooms!” A brothel owner turned local politician, whose mother now owned several properties, had purchased this and other buildings a few years back, before he was shot down by his enemies. Property acquisitions, Enrique explained, followed a typical “paramilitary strategy”: There would be an initial negotiation on the price, no documents or signatures, and often the use of intimidation; then a partial payment and transfer of the property; and, finally, a refusal to pay the rest of the sum.

At every corner we turned, Paulina and Enrique had a new story about property theft. A drug dealer and a group of bazuco addicts had forced an aging widow out of her house. A swindler had cheated a landlady into a series of loans that would eventually make her lose her low-rise apartment building. A well-known street criminal had taken over a crumbling residencia by killing its owner. These were some openly violent, scandalous cases of what Paulina attributed to an established “cartel or mafia of appropriations,” which included lawyers, city functionaries, and armed enforcers. “People have formed cartels and they have friends in the office of the registry of properties, they have an entire team,” she explained. “They know the floor area of this or that property, if it has any [legal] issues, and with all this information they start making their way in [se van metiendo].” Her billiard hall had also been in the sights of one such cartel. A local lawyer ran the scheme and had been harassing her through both legal and informal conduits for years. Long-running disinvestment and crippling regulations had made her property a “savory dish,” one that land swindlers were “really hungry for [le tienen un hambre].”

Liquidating Space

The creation of the tolerance zone and the enactment of land use regulations had resulted in deterioration and displacement for some and in new opportunities for accumulation and appropriation for others—land cartels, prostitution business owners, and, ultimately, the city administration and developers. Critically reworking the expert notion of the cycle of decay, Enrique elucidated a politics of destruction and misappropriation: “It seems that everything is cyclical. [The place] starts all right, it has its highest point of beauty, and then they abandon it so they can liquidate the space. [This happens] so it can be appropriated either by the state [or by others] by simply leaving it there, totally abandoned.” Abandonment here did not mean state absence but selective depreciation and revalorization enabled by planning institutions and instruments.

Enrique and Paulina’s phenomenological elaboration of the materiality and temporality of urban deterioration was thus closely attuned not only to economic agendas but also to the continuities with broader patterns of violence and insecurity. In one sense, “liquidating space [liquidar el espacio],” as Enrique put it, pointed to the multiple techniques and drawn-out procedures through which properties had been both previously made illiquid and then liquidated and forced into exchange value under the predatory terms of land mafias and urban renewal. In a broader sense, it called attention to the destructive violence of planning and real estate regulations. Given the country’s long history of land grabbing and armed territorial control, “liquidation” had unmistakable connotations linked to forceful eradication—a bureaucratic and financial attack on the neighborhood, a form of “urbicide.”⁵⁸

Back at Paulina’s billiard hall, Enrique elaborated on the connection between armed violence and urban development. As we sipped reheated coffee from tiny plastic cups, Paulina’s sister casually commented on the latest news about the government’s peace negotiations with the FARC. Enrique interjected, “That has a lot to do with what we’re talking about. I haven’t found anyone who can tell me the difference [between what has happened here] and peasant displacement by paramilitaries.” As I showed in the previous chapter, downtown residents often conceptualized urban eviction and renewal as forms of violence comparable to the actions of nonstate armed groups and guerrilla forces—such was the case with Margarita and her neighbors in Manzana Cinco who called the ERU “worse than the guerrillas.” By focusing on paramilitarism, however, Enrique had located violence directly within the state—not as a result of state failures but rather as its continuation.

To illustrate his point, Enrique recounted a story that involved a narcotraficante (drug trafficker) who had been extradited to the United States and was serving a thirty-year prison sentence in New York. The tale ran as follows. A few years back, Enrique had worked as a contractor at a shopping mall construction project on the south side of downtown Bogotá, not far from the San Victorino and old El Cartucho neighborhoods. He became intrigued by the constant circulation of recycling pushcarts with oversized bundles and large plastic bags. The loads were unlike the junk and materials that waste pickers typically hauled around downtown. Although the construction foreman had warned him about speaking with the men moving the carts, one day Enrique recognized a young man from his neighborhood pulling one of the carts and asked him about the circulation of the furtive cargo. This is how he discovered that the drug boss was behind the development of the mall and had brought “three gangs from [the city of] Cali to depress the area [deprimir el sector] and buy on the cheap.” The pushcarts were allegedly part of a scheme to dump the bodies of the people killed by the hired gunmen every week: owners, tenants, and anyone else who refused to vacate or sell or who tried to resist the takeover of the area.

Although the account was most likely embellished—Enrique was loquacious and had a story for every occasion—–the narrative alone was revealing. This particular drug boss had become widely known in Colombia for his close relations with the political establishment and Bogotá’s elite. He was a gentleman criminal, both ruthless in wielding violence and well connected and savvy in his business enterprises. His real estate investments included a luxury resort near Bogotá that was visited by the city’s aristocracy and was a frequent venue for political events. The story thus dramatized and amplified residents’ critiques of decay as not natural or accidental but rather a political project in which urban plans blurred into forced displacement and violent destruction. “Like all that terrorism that [the drug dealer–developer] brought to that area,” Enrique concluded, “people have been misappropriating places here, although in a subtler manner.”

Residents often veered into conspiratorial thinking along these lines. “You would have to be a fool not to recognize that [the neighborhood’s deterioration] was planned,” Enrique told me. And yet he and others had done more than denounce a seemingly long-running, covert, and coherent strategy of urban displacement. Their ruinous knowledges centered on the convergence of sociomaterial effects and on strategizing actors that mobilized and exploited such effects. Far from opaque and distant powers, they tracked the proximate and tangible practices and techniques that had mediated and materialized decay—that “had rotted” the neighborhood, as Efraín once put it.⁵⁹

Such attunement to the neighborhood’s sociomaterial atmosphere—to the politics inherent to official valuations and incremental interventions—was further evinced in a brief exchange during one of our meetings at the billiard hall. “In order to buy our properties, they generate decay with regulations, they restrict building heights, they restrict land uses, they tie us down, so we can’t grow vertically, so we can’t develop our land, so we can’t work in our properties,” Paulina started indignantly. Enrique rejoined with a sarcastic grin, “But supposedly that isn’t planned, no, those things are just random, it’s just life, right?” It was “government, power, whatever you want to call it,” he continued, “those with sufficient power,” who used laws “as instruments of pressure” to simultaneously deteriorate and misappropriate. This was not the hand of a conspiratorial mastermind or a tentacular apparatus of governance, but rather the piecemeal work of multiple agents over prolonged periods of time and through the very materiality of the neighborhood and its temporal rhythms—chipping away at previous modes of sociality and livelihoods.

Ruinous Politics

I met Paulina again in 2016 to talk about neighborhood news over our usual cup of lukewarm coffee. This time the billiard hall seemed much darker and more cluttered. The tables were gone, as was a small commercial space for extra rental income that Paulina had built overnight and without a permit. The ceiling was falling apart, beams of light filtering through missing panels and illuminating piled-up furniture, tools, and materials. In a constant struggle to respond to zoning regulations and their constraining effects on the uses of her property, Paulina and her husband had set up an informal workshop in the back. Their shrinking income now came from the fabrication of billiard tables in what had been a de facto change of land use from commerce to manufacturing.

With her usual stoicism, Paulina picked up the conversation where we had left off a couple of years earlier. She told me about the most recent property swindles as well as the uncertainties that continued to surround the city’s official renewal plan: the decay, depreciation, and insecurity—and not least the enduring threat of eviction—that emanated from the nearby demolition rubble. Toward the end of our conversation, she pulled out a marketing leaflet from two decades earlier, advertising the billiard hall in its glory days. It showed a polished facade, brand-new signage, two small storefronts in addition to the main entrance of the “billiard club, grill-bar,” and pictures of several billiard tables in a well-maintained interior. The juxtaposition of the idealized portrayal on the brochure and Paulina’s now-crumbling space, of “wish image and ruin,” to use Susan Buck-Morss’s phrase, condensed the piecemeal, almost imperceptible processes of decline and decomposition that Paulina and other residents had been unraveling for years.⁶⁰

The trajectories of urban destruction I have followed in this book are emblematic of rubble-strewn landscapes across the globe. These are the ruins of modernist planning, capitalism, environmental degradation, and violence—ruins whose material and affective afterlives and lingering sociopolitical effects scholars have increasingly shed light on.⁶¹ As the contemporary global condition becomes defined in part by what Danny Hoffman describes as the ability to “learn to inhabit ruins,” Paulina and her neighbors call attention to the forms of knowledge that are composed by dwelling on and in deteriorating urban worlds.⁶² They help us understand the kinds of epistemic spaces and political critiques that emerge from the wreckage of urban transformations.

Through their ruinous knowledge, the inhabitants of La Alameda and Santa Fe revealed the everyday “rhythms, temporalities, and intensities” of urban destruction, to use Gastón Gordillo’s terms.⁶³ They made apparent the ways in which planning epistemologies and their normalized techniques had driven the ruination of downtown homes and neighborhoods. Urban dwellers thus elucidated official assumptions about time, materiality, and value and how the “timescapes” of city planning had created the conditions for the gradual coalescing of strategies of dispossession, accumulation, and speculation.⁶⁴

Like other downtown residents, those who lived in La Alameda and Santa Fe found traces of Colombia’s long history of warfare in the decline of their neighborhood. As I showed in previous chapters, the materiality of downtown transformations has been closely bound to the shifting registers and experiences of violent conflict, from experts recrafting urban space into a terrain of military eradication (chapter 2) to property owners confronting bureaucratized eviction and demolition as forced displacement (chapter 3). In these instances, violence emerged as an external and exceptional force that had finally reached the city and unsettled its social, political, and legal order. The ruinous knowledge of the residents of La Alameda and Santa Fe, in contrast, located the logics of warfare in the very fabric of urban governance and development—a constitutive attribute of urban life, value, and forms. For them, the material remains of downtown planning and renewal indexed the interconnected spatiality and temporality of violence. Like postwar ruins, the decaying city was a product of what Hiba Bou Akar calls the “overlapping geography of past and present conflict.”⁶⁵

To further clarify the political significance of such ruinous knowledges, it is useful to return to Efraín’s notions of urban rot and the archaeology of decay. The critical excavations that Efraín called for and that the residents of La Alameda and Santa Fe put into practice were aimed at uncovering the city’s rotten undersides. At stake here was the foundational destructiveness of legal and political orders—that underlying violence that Walter Benjamin famously identified as “something rotten in the law.”⁶⁶ Yet far from a metaphysical principle, this rotting force was instantiated in the “shards, debris, or rubble,” as Yael Navaro-Yashin puts it, that was left behind by planning regulations and interventions.⁶⁷ This is what made Efraín’s archaeological analytic particularly appropriate. It evoked what Shannon Dawdy calls “social stratigraphy”—that is, the layered palimpsest of “past events and structures that produced the shared conditions under which residents live.”⁶⁸ Drawing on their sustained and intimate awareness of urban decay, the residents of La Alameda and Santa Fe charted the material accretion and corrosive effects of a set of practices, structures, and experiences over time. Their talk of planned annihilation and hidden agendas was thus not primarily about making visible distant and opaque networks of power. Rather, it was about illuminating a proximate yet muted constellation of epistemic practices and material processes that had enabled the gradual enclosure, devaluation, and ruination of the neighborhood.⁶⁹

The archaeology of decay resonates with modes of opposition employed by urban dwellers caught amid global displacements, from the “politics of staying put” (to use Liza Weinstein’s phrase) and everyday tactics of negotiation to practices of accommodation and legal maneuvering.⁷⁰ Yet as urban scholars have noted, such contestations have often paradoxically reinscribed exclusionary discourses of progress and civility. The practices of dissent I explored in the previous chapter are a case in point. Like the residents of La Alameda and Santa Fe, the “displaced of Manzana Cinco” gestured to the destructive violence of urban bureaucracy. In their legal battle and appeals for redress and reparation, they upheld idealized versions of state legitimacy and individual property rights. For them, the violence they had suffered was the result of a misuse and deformation of the law and a failure to protect their entitlements.

The grounded knowledges I have tracked in this chapter also partially reproduced the oppressive orders they had opposed. Residents often reified their experiential knowledge of ruination and portrayed decay as the cause of urban ills, assimilating it to criminal disorder and reinforcing existing social hierarchies. At the same time, for these residents on the west side of downtown Bogotá, navigating decay and assigning accountability entailed what Michael Herzfeld calls a “ceaseless reckoning with materiality.”⁷¹ This is a reckoning I have disentangled here, following locals’ archaeological attunements and their sorting through “differential modes of decay,” as Ghassan Hage puts it in a call for ethnographies of the “tempo” and “spatiality” of decay.⁷² Such sifting through the epistemic and material contours of decay brought to light the politics of violent destruction written into city plans and laws and into ideals of property and citizenship.

But what urban imaginaries do such ruinous politics afford? Can other futures besides the desolate spaces and exclusionary dreamscapes of urban renewal emerge from the debris of dispossession and demolition?⁷³ These issues became central to planners, developers, and downtown residents in the aftermath of the Manzana Cinco and Estación Central projects and as the national government and the FARC embarked on a peace process in 2012. In what seemed like the beginning of an elusive transition to a postwar era in Colombia, the question of how and what to rebuild out of the residues of violent destruction permeated the country’s public consciousness and shaped urban sensibilities.

Tellingly, in his inauguration address at the Plaza de Bolívar in January 2012, Mayor Gustavo Petro talked of a new paradigm of territorial planning (ordenamiento territorial) as the pillar of a more humane and progressive city. “We do not want to see more processes of urban renewal like the one that exists two blocks from here or the one that took place one block down the street,” Petro told the crowd, pointing to surrounding neighborhoods.⁷⁴ “[These were plans] where the poor were expelled from the city center by the state with fraudulent prices [precios de estafa] to carry out large real estate projects, excluding traditional inhabitants [población tradicional],” the newly elected mayor continued as the crowd cheered. “Jairo Aníbal Niño [a local writer and former resident of Manzana Cinco] died as a result of one of those processes,” Petro concluded in a more somber tone. “That is not the urban renewal we want.”

A few months later, back at the Estación Central meeting at the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Theater where I started this chapter, María Mercedes Maldonado Copello, Petro’s secretary of planning (secretaria de planeación), elaborated on the administration’s new vision for “urban revitalization [revitalización urbana].” Maldonado Copello cited Manzana Cinco as an example of how the administration had expropriated land and “projected more profitable land uses and higher building allowances [edificabilidades],” essentially acting as an intermediary for real estate developers. “In the administration,” she asserted, “we now question today that the role of the public sector is to simply valorize land in this way.”⁷⁵ The city government would now move “toward projects that are truly associational [asociativos], initiated by property owners themselves, and committed to overcoming the distrust and forms of resistance that the previous model created.”

But as much as rubble and ruins can become the grounds for the composition of critical knowledges and insurgent practices, they also “form boundaries and limits to what can be imagined and what can be done,” as Danny Hoffman argues.⁷⁶ In the following chapters I examine such contradictions and their materialization in new modes of expertise and urban transformation, and I track the ways in which the residues of violent regimes of governance, citizenship, and property live on in progressive epistemologies and plans to remake downtown Bogotá.