Acknowledgments

If writing is shaped by experiences that reach far back before typing is even on the horizon, it is hard to say when this book began. One beginning is when I started visiting downtown Bogotá regularly while in high school and later as a college student at the Universidad de los Andes in the late 1990s. As it was for many residents of north Bogotá, El Centro was both a fabled and a feared space. It crystallized Colombia’s histories of violence and oppression but also epitomized urban inventiveness and endurance. Far from Bogotá’s privileged spaces and their long-standing aspirations of order and distinction, the city center embodied a motley juxtaposition of people, stories, and things. From revered colonial and republican buildings, busy elite officials, and wandering tourists to the improvised spaces of precarious workers and street dwellers, hustlers and dealers, bohemians and artists, this was a place of overlapping difference and friction. I would like to think there are traces of these years of (self-)discovery in the preceding pages. At the very least, my ethnographic sensibility in this book is indebted to my formative downtown itineraries and to the time spent with fellow travelers at the now-closed cafeteria La Puerta de La Calendaria, a literal and metaphorical doorway into the historic center.

Another origin story, closer to when this project began: Between 2001 and 2004 I worked as an assistant to the mayor’s office and was charged with recording, transcribing, and editing mayoral interventions to create short booklets, Apuntes de la alcaldía (Notes from the administration), for the general public. Taking the role of an uninitiated ethnographer of urban policy, I navigated the city through the eyes of experts and administrators—a prefiguring of my research for this book. I remain grateful to Alicia Eugenia Silva Nigrinis, then chief of staff, and urbanist Rafael Obregón Herrera, for their always reliable and savvy guidance. Thanks also to Francisco Ruiz Peronard and Tomás Martín Jiménez, with whom I shared many good times in government offices and as we zipped across the city in Francisco’s purple Renault Twingo. This period sparked my interest in the critical study of governmental knowledge and introduced me to the planning and policy networks that are at the core of this ethnography.

At Harvard University, I benefited from the invaluable support of several mentors in social anthropology. Kimberly Theidon gave me the necessary ánimos and academic grounding to undertake my research project. She helped me understand the stakes of my questions in relation to Colombia’s history of armed conflict and humanitarian intervention. I was fortunate to learn about the anthropology of development, citizenship, and the state with Ajantha Subramanian. Her always critical and sharp analyses were indispensable to my thinking around expertise, space, and power. Ever since welcoming me to Harvard, Michael Herzfeld became an essential guide to anthropological thought and ethnographic writing. Our conversations about the anthropology of knowledge and urbanism have been critical to my arguments in these pages. Finally, as someone who is interested in urban planning as a site of critique and praxis, I am very grateful to have been a student of Susan Fainstein. She reminded me to always keep in focus the material outcomes of urban interventions and their implications in the making of a just city.

At Harvard, I learned from and enjoyed the company of many people: Muhammad Arafat, Alejandra Azuero Quijano, Sai Balakrishnan, Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Kerry Chance, Aryo Danusiri, Juana Dávila Sáenz, Namita Vijay Dharia, Alex Fattal, Nancy Khalil, Julie Kleinman, Ekin Kurtiç, Jennifer Mack, Andy McDowell, Jared McCormick, Lisanne Norman, Sanjay Pinto, Vipas Prachyaporn, Esra-Gökçe Şahin, Benjamin Siegel, J. P. Sniadecki, Claudio Sopranzetti, Stephanie Spray, Nicolás Sternsdorff-Cisterna, Julia Yezbick, Dilan Yildirim, and Emrah Yildiz, among others. Marianne Fritz, Susan Farley, and Cristina Paul provided continuous logistical assistance and morale during my doctoral studies. I’ve been lucky to share a friendship with Jyothi Natarajan and Anand Vaidya over our journey from the East Coast to the West Coast. Anand was always willing to comment on long chapter drafts and help me find the thread, and my first attempt at putting some of my research into writing was under Jyothi’s exceptional editorial guidance. Thanks also to María Ospina Pizano, Simón Parra, Seth Pipkin, Chikako Francis, Andy Francis, and other friends around Boston.

Many people in Bogotá, many more than I can name here, made this book possible. María Camila Uribe Sánchez and Alejandro Rodríguez Caicedo kindly plugged me into the city’s planning networks at the start of my study. Cristina Arango Olaya welcomed me unconditionally to the city’s Secretaría Distrital de Planeación, where I carried out months of ethnographic research. City planners, policymakers, and officials not only tolerated the ethnographer among them but became close collaborators and friends who taught me enthusiastically about planning and design practice. Thank you especially to Hernando Arenas Castro, León Espinosa Restrepo, Armando Lozano Reyes, Carmenza Orjuela, Geovanni Patiño Torres, Alfy Tovar Sepúlveda, Eduardo Restrepo González, Rafael Sáenz Pérez, Sandra Samaca Rojas, Julio César Vega Angarita, and Antonio Velandia Clavijo. Outside the planning department, I was lucky to learn from seasoned urbanists who shared their time and helped me navigate the past and present of planning in Bogotá. Thanks to Patricia Acosta Restrepo, Mario Avellaneda González, Claudia Carrizosa, Yency Contreras Ortiz, Clemencia Ibañez, María Mercedes Maldonado Copello, Leonel Miranda Ruiz, Mario Noriega, Dorys Patricia Noy Palacios, Liliana Ospina Arias, María Cristina Rojas Eberhard, Carmenza Saldías Barreneche, José Salazar Ferro, Claudia Silva Yepes, Otto Quintero Arias, Diana Wiesner, and many others who shared their knowledge and insights.

I carried out a significant part of my research at the Universidad de los Andes, where I had been an undergraduate more than a decade earlier. This was a peculiar homecoming: Here I was at a radically expanded campus doing ethnography both within and about an institution that was increasingly embracing its role as a downtown redeveloper. Many thanks to the faculty, staff, consultants, and students who supported my work and accepted my shifting positionality as an alumnus, outside critic, and invited researcher. Julieta Lemaitre Ripoll and Isabel Cristina Jaramillo Sierra kindly endorsed a key institutional affiliation through the Centro de Investigaciones Sociojurídicas (CIJUS). Claudia Velandia Gómez and Oscar Pardo Aragón opened the doors for my participation in the urban and campus revitalization project Progresa Fenicia. I am very grateful to university experts and staff for their continued support throughout my research: Victoria Caicedo Medina, Franklin Combariza Luna, Luis Díaz Matajira, David Díaz Rivera, Clemencia Escallón Gartner, Natalia Franco Borrero, Tatiana García, María Angélica López Torrado, Manuela Mattos, Giovanni Perdomo Sanabria, Yezid Rodríguez Martínez, Maurix Suárez Rodríguez, Roberto Suárez Montañez, Astrid Reyes, Silvia Tibaduiza Sierra, and others in the university community. I am especially grateful to Juan Felipe Pinilla Pineda for his always critical insights about urban law and his keenness to become an autoethnographer of planning.

My deepest gratitude to all the people from Las Aguas, Santa Inés, La Alameda, and Santa Fe who shared with me their experiences and included me in their projects of knowledge making and dissent. It was in conversations with them that I articulated some of the central analyses of this book. Thank you to Camilo Arango Trujillo, Ricardo Ávila, José Vicente Cantor, Germán Madrid, Edgar Montenegro, Julián Neira, Doris Patricia Niño Pérez, Gloria Pinzón, Adriana Rodríguez Restrepo, Amelia Sanabria de Suárez, Saúl Suárez Niño, José Torres Torres, and many others. I am indebted to Helena Gallo Bernal, who taught me like no one else about counterexpertise and local politics in downtown Bogotá.

I also want to thank the many supportive scholars and researchers I met along the way: César Abadía-Barrero, Rolf Abderhalden Cortés, María José Álvarez-Rivadulla, Emma Shaw Crane, Mark Healey, Cymene Howe, Clara Irazábal-Zurita, Sergio Montero, Ingrid Morris Rincón, Diana Ojeda, José Antonio Ramírez Orozco, Andrés Romero, Andrés Salcedo Fidalgo, Luisa Sotomayor, and Erik Vergel Tovar, among others. Alejandra Leal Martínez, Nitzan Shoshan, and Antonio Azuela de la Cueva invited me to Mexico City for an extremely helpful discussion about early chapter drafts with a remarkable group of scholars at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and El Colegio de México. I thank them for the generosity and insights. My colleagues, friends, and students in Portland have made these years both academically engaging and sufficiently detached from writing and teaching. Thank you to the Honors College community at Portland State University for a welcoming, engaging, and supportive academic home. Many thanks to Mrinalini Tankha and Alpen Sheth for all the good times in the Pacific Northwest.

My sincere thanks to Dominic Boyer, editor of the Cornell University Press Series on Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge, for his interest in this project and his encouragement throughout. Many thanks to Jim Lance, Karen Laun, and Bethany Wasik for their expert guidance during the editorial process, and to Eric Levy for his meticulous copyediting. I also thank Lilia Noger-Onstott for proofreading an early version of the manuscript and Varsha Venkatasubramanian for creating the index.

This book, which is in many ways about home, would not exist without the support of my family. All my gratitude to my parents, Clemencia and Alberto, and my siblings, Natalia and Juan Camilo, whose love and companionship has kept me going. Thank you to Ana María and Juan Felipe and to my wonderful nieces and nephews, María, Isaac, Raquel, Juan José, and Valentina. And many thanks to Clara, Gabriel, and Andrée, for their optimism and warmth.

I dedicate this work to Ivette, Guillermo, and Aurora: makers of worlds of hope. Thank you for all the love, wisdom, and imagination you bring to our life together.

Research and writing were carried out with the generous funding and intellectual support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and Open Societies Foundation (Drugs, Security and Democracy Fellowship), the Inter-American Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, Harvard University, and Portland State University. An earlier version of chapter 4 appeared as “The Archaeology of Decay: Ruinous Knowledge and the Violence of Urban Planning,” American Anthropologist 125, no. 3 (2023): 505–18. Previous material and arguments included in chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6 appeared in “Material (In)securities: Urban Terrain, Paperwork, and Housing in Downtown Bogotá,” Anthropological Quarterly 93, no. 1 (2020): 1491–522. Earlier versions of sections of chapter 5 appeared in “‘The Miracle of Density’: The Socio-Material Epistemics of Urban Densification,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44, no. 4 (2020): 617–35, and “An Anatomy of Failure: Planning After the Fact in Contemporary Bogotá, Colombia,” in Life Among Planners: Practice, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City, ed. Jennifer Mack and Michael Herzfeld (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).