Introduction
In February 2012, commuters woke up to an unusual scene in downtown Bogotá. The city administration had closed off several blocks of the Carrera Séptima (Seventh Avenue) to create a makeshift boulevard for pedestrians and cyclists. The historic avenue, once a colonial icon known as the Calle Real (Royal Road), had been for decades a focal point of anxieties over urban decay. Lined with a mix of republican structures repurposed as cheap cafeterias, small casinos, and artisan markets, as well as modernist buildings housing state offices and financial institutions, the Séptima had been the central stage of downtown’s unbridled vitality and deep-seated fractiousness. On a regular day, buses roared down the avenue spouting smoke and scooping up passengers, while street vendors and pedestrians navigated the clogged street amid a chorus of honking cars. But that February morning, a row of planter pots with stunted trees ran through the middle of the road, separating foot traffic from bikers. Pedestrians reclaimed the thoroughfare, somewhat disoriented, strolling along the temporary signs and plastic barricades. Street vendors, previously accustomed to fierce competition on congested sidewalks, suddenly found ample room for their dealings while making themselves increasingly visible for surveillance and control. The Séptima’s newfound spaciousness and eerie calm showcased the city center’s mounting transformations. It signaled downtown’s long-awaited “revitalization,” as was announced on a street-wide banner hanging at the end of the fifteen-block stretch, where the avenue met the city’s main plaza, the emblematic Plaza de Bolívar.
Yet for many city officials involved in the project, much more was at stake than urban beautification. According to Félix, an urban designer working for the city administration, the conversion of the Séptima into an apparently innocuous pedestrian boulevard was ultimately a form of warfare. “We are at war,” he confided to me as we talked in a small government office overlooking the northern edge of the city center, “and the war is about gaining territory.” A public university lecturer, practicing architect, and longtime city consultant, Félix was far from being a security hard-liner. With his untrimmed gray hair and wool scarf, he was more of an urban intellectual, an urbanist, as his business card read. His career had revolved around public-space policies and regional planning, and he was now advising the leftist administration of Mayor Gustavo Petro (2012–15), a former member of the demobilized M-19 insurgency and four-time congressman since the 1990s. Despite his progressive leanings, Félix rendered a crime-inflected account of the spatial conflicts installed in downtown: “The issue with El Centro is that it’s the city’s most conflict-ridden space. Many interests converge here … criminal interests. The city’s urban mafias are in El Centro. These are mafias that manage prostitution, gun trafficking, street vending, the homeless. They handle all that and they are embedded [incrustadas] in El Centro.”
For Félix, criminality was at the core of local conflicts, a pervasive force that lurked behind even the most fragile spaces carved out by the urban poor. Mafias were materially embedded in the fabric of downtown, incrustadas, so that any attempt to rid the city of their presence required reconstruction. “The administration comes in,” he continued in a matter-of-fact, almost professorial tone, “as just another actor struggling to recover territory.” Even though the avenue had never been a criminal hotspot, the revitalization of the Séptima appeared as a highly symbolic and strategic action that cemented the gradual takeover of the city center. Félix recalled how the mayor himself had recently given him and a group of advisers marching orders: “Look, the only thing that I want with the plan to pedestrianize the Séptima is that we take over and secure the Séptima. This is a question of fighting, fighting for territory. As soon as we capture [tomemos] the Séptima we will move down to Eighth and Ninth Avenues, but we have to continue securing the area.”
As striking as these words were for a leftist administration whose government program was called Bogotá Humana (Humane Bogotá), they also revealed the reach of security as a paradigm of urban intervention across the political spectrum. They offered a glimpse into the connection between the country’s history of warfare and ordinary invocations of security in planning circles and on the street. As I listened to Félix, I wondered about the past insurgent militancy of the mayor and his ex-M-19 collaborators, and how it shaped their views of urban governance and their new roles as state officials. As if guessing my thoughts, and in a surprising gesture for an adviser to a demobilized guerrillero, Félix drew a comparison between the revitalization of the Séptima and counterinsurgency tactics. He recalled a planning workshop between local and regional functionaries, citing an official report that mapped the corridors used by guerrilla fronts in rural areas surrounding the city: “Previously, that [kind of knowledge] wasn’t available, everyone used to simply say, ‘The guerrilla is around’ [por ahí anda la guerrilla]. [With the new study] we identified the corridors that connected Los Llanos [the eastern plains region] to other places, the areas in which they operated.” Tapping on the table as if to refocus my attention, and then using his finger to draw invisible lines on the surface, he concluded his proposition about the metonymic relationship between Andean mountain passes and downtown streets: “These are territories, it’s always an issue of territories, either at the macro, national, or regional level, or at the micro, urban level. It’s always a problem of territories.”
This was not the first time I heard narratives of violence and military control surface in descriptions of downtown Bogotá’s transformations. As my research for this book progressed, I became attuned to the ways in which people invoked the language of security to make sense of and orient their actions within a changing urban landscape. Such speech acts revealed an underlying grammar of security that structured urban politics, planning practices, and the materiality of urban space.1 In his remarks above, Félix conceptualized urban reconstruction as a matter of securing territory. He conjured a battleground, an urban terrain in which opposing factions struggled over state sovereignty. Planning literally emerged as the “continuation of war by other means.”2 Other experts went further in their tactical conceptions of urban design, focusing more deliberately on the form and material properties of the built environment—from the layout of streets to architectural appearance. They evoked what French cultural theorist Paul Virilio calls “military space” and its central problem of the “reduction of obstacles and distances.”3
In following this thread of downtown renewal, I discovered the breadth and lability of security idioms, as well as their varied enactments in everyday urban life.4 While planners mobilized affects and ideologies linked to national sovereignty and public order to articulate redevelopment projects, residents experienced and critiqued such interventions as forms of institutionalized violence. Many of them confronted the threat of eviction as a direct reflection of the country’s entrenched conflicts over rural land and the widespread displacements these had caused. One owner who was facing eminent domain in a neighborhood slated for renewal put it best: “In the countryside they displace with guns; here in the city they do it with decrees.” She had redeployed the language insecurity against the state, locating violence not in decaying street corners but at the core of bureaucratic logics. A community leader living in another downtown neighborhood elaborated further on these forms of bureaucratic violence. She called the use of zoning regulations and their gradual production of decline over the years “a dirty war.” According to her, the prohibition of commercial and building activities had “finished off” the neighborhood, opening it to reconstruction and real estate speculation. Urban property also emerged in residents’ accounts as a battlefield resembling the country’s land-grabbing violence. For residents who had themselves experienced forced expulsion from the countryside and moved into dilapidated tenements and small shacks (ranchos) in the margins of the city center, urban renewal often appeared as just another, more sophisticated strategy of dispossession.5
This book is both about the remaking of downtown Bogotá and about the urban epistemologies through which the city is reimagined and rebuilt. It examines the ways in which broader social currents associated with struggles over sovereignty and belonging shape planning expertise and urban forms—from city spaces and bureaucratic artifacts to housing arrangements. I am concerned with how the imagery and lived experiences of insecurity make their way into the constitution of expert and non-expert knowledges about the city. If security and its criminal obsessions have become key organizing frameworks in the current era, then this book illuminates the long-standing and shifting entanglements between insecurity, urban knowledges, and the city’s material form.6
The rise of contemporary counterterrorism and the fear-ridden and surveillance-infused spaces it has engendered in the North and South, East and West, are by now well established in the global urban imagination. This is what Stephen Graham calls the “new military urbanism”: the city reenvisioned as a site of boundless warfare through an expanding array of technologies of control, defense, and disruption.7 Although these portrayals usefully call attention to the insidious operations of security apparatuses in everyday urban life, they are primarily modeled after the cities of the global North and projected through the lens of the global war on terror.8 Post-9/11 sensibilities take precedence here. They have structured a global common sense about planetary urban securitization and suffused the design and governance of urban space with the language of defensibility and resilience.9
In Bogotá, narratives of terrorism are undoubtedly relevant to securitized urbanism, yet they predate such global milestones and have been filtered through a range of understandings of danger associated with contests over sovereignty, military warfare, criminal violence, bureaucratic force, and economic dispossession.10 This book explores this historically layered and differentially experienced landscape of urban (in)security. My analysis centers on the multiple and emergent meanings of security and their situated influences on individuals’ knowledge practices as they seek to understand, transform, and inhabit urban space. In doing so, I show how the security-inflected composition of such epistemic forms is inextricably connected to deeper conflicts over the material fabric of urban governance and belonging.
In Colombia, the ideological effects of security discourses are wide-ranging and kaleidoscopic. Throughout the nation’s string of post-Independence wars, decades of guerrilla and paramilitary warfare, and contemporary drug wars, security has proven to be a fundamental register in which national identities are forged and contested. Views of Colombian society as inherently insecure and inevitably prone to violent conflict have saturated public imagination through tropes of an essentialized and ahistorical “culture of violence.”11 Most revealing of the reach of security within national representations was the emergence in the late twentieth century of a distinctively Colombian intellectual tradition known as “violentology.”12 Although this tradition comprises a vast and heterogeneous body of social science scholarship, which produced nuanced accounts of the historical, political, and geographic dimensions of violent conflict, violentologists largely approached insecurity as an objective reality in need of expert diagnostics. Political violence and the country’s armed conflict of the twentieth century were central to their work, overshadowing the intimate and quotidian cartographies of individual and collective insecurities.13
Moreover, as violentologists produced some of their key works under commissions created and funded by the state, their reifications of security became integral to projects of nation building and, ultimately, to the formation of a “nationalist epistemology” rooted in the violent conflict.14 Such forms of knowledge not only exacerbated the conceptualization of violence as “an ontological reality of Colombian culture,” as Myriam Jimeno puts it, but also reified processes of state formation and their spatial coordinates.15 National identities were shaped by an enduring sense that insecurity originated primarily in the countryside as a result of the incomplete radiation of state power from the administrative center.16 The imagery of guerrilla-infested jungles, isolated towns terrorized by paramilitary forces, and crime-ridden shantytowns dominated this geography of insecurity and reverberated with colonial echoes of a civilizing urban core and an unruly rural periphery. The city appeared as a bastion of order imperiled by the invasion of outside forces: of peasant migrations and forced displacements, rural warfare, drug violence, and criminality.
This book unsettles such spatial praxes of security by attending to the ways in which “security talk” has permeated planning expertise and citizenship practices in downtown Bogotá.17 Security emerges in this context as a malleable and shifting vernacular through which urban actors stake claims on space and contest the meanings and everyday politics of urban governance.18 Vernacularization here does not simply indicate the vertical flow of global ideas to local settings, but rather the dialectical constitution of epistemic frameworks.19 It points to the urban habitus and material environments that mediate and are in turn produced by understandings of insecurity. Etymological variants of vernacular associated with domesticity, as in vernacular architecture, are particularly apt in this context. In this sense, residents’ and planners’ allusions to the imagery of warfare, crime, and territorial control are best viewed as integral to their modes of inhabiting the city. If building is already a form of dwelling, then the making of urban worlds in Colombia proves inseparable from the sedimentation of repertoires of insecurity.20 Experiential and affective dispositions toward the country’s securitized institutions and social spaces are inseparable from the knowledge and organization of urban space. This book tracks these modes of practical awareness as they are transposed into seemingly abstract and fixed epistemic forms. Furthermore, it shows how they are reified in the material qualities of city life, rendering buildings into battlefields, legal documents into artifacts of destruction, and property regimes into sources of danger.
Security, Planning, and Knowledge
From the medieval citadel to the geometric spaces of modernist cities, scholars have long recognized the security and defense underpinnings of city building. In his monumental treatise on the history of cities, Lewis Mumford went so far as to argue that “war and domination, rather than peace and cooperation, were ingrained in the original structure of the ancient city.”21 The figure of the military engineer, Mumford noted, was instrumental to the development of the destructive and ordering capabilities of baroque town planning. The invention of radiating streets from a central point meant “that artillery could command every approach”—it embodied a “military aesthetics … for the parade of power.”22 And perhaps nowhere was the technology of the grid more visible than in colonial Spanish America, where the fetishization of spatial form—the symmetrical organization of streets and elaborate design of facades—became integral to authoritative conceptions of urban order and security.23
Most famously, Baron Haussmann’s emblematic renovation of nineteenth-century Paris became widely recognized as much for paving the way for modern capitalism and bourgeois aesthetics as for expanding military surveillance and control.24 The ample boulevards built on the ruins of the rebellious Parisian slums facilitated both the flaneur’s stroll and the circulation of police troops. Such spatial techniques, as further scholarship demonstrates, grew out of earlier experiments of pacification and control in colonial settings from Algeria and Morocco to Indochina and Madagascar.25 Critics have followed the reverberations of securitized planning across imperial geographies and into the present. Twentieth-century slum clearance schemes in New York and London, modernist utopias from Brasilia to Chandigarh, and contemporary mass evictions in Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro have all borne the imprints of this history. In his characteristically climactic tone, Mike Davis writes about the rapidly expanding cities of the global South as the “distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century,” with the “counterinsurgency-driven strategy of slum removal” reemerging as “Haussmann in the tropics.”26
Far from presupposing an ontological link between security and the city, these accounts pose fundamental questions about knowledge-making practices: How is the urban realm made into a security issue? How do urbanites come to think about urban phenomena as security problems? What are the experiential bases and material implications of such epistemological orientations? Anthropological critiques of city planning offer a useful point of departure to consider these questions. In his ambitious study of French planning in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Paul Rabinow examines the emergence of the “practices of reason” that constituted what came to be known as “social modernity.”27 He follows a loose network of colonial administrators and planners, “technicians of general ideas,” to illuminate the construction of “society” as an object of knowledge and intervention.28 Significantly, security emerges in his account as an essential component of what early French technocrats envisioned as a modern, regulated urban society. “Pacification policy,” Rabinow argues, encompassed both discipline and welfare: military force, health, education, sanitation, roads, and markets. It “rested on the artful combination of politics and force” and was ultimately geared toward the “transformation of the socio-natural milieu into a healthy and peaceful environment.”29
While Rabinow offers an illuminating genealogy of modernist planning and its relationship to security discourses, his main concern is with knowledge as a detached and abstract field. Insofar as urban knowledges appear primarily as “norms and forms,” their situated enactments and on-the-ground modulations remain out of sight.30 In the larger body of scholarship on modernist rationalities, similar issues come to the fore through the analysis of technocratic epistemology as vision.31 Take for example James Scott’s influential study of “high modernism” and its portrayal of state classificatory and planning schemes as constituting a unique mode of “seeing.”32 Epistemological optics emerge here as a tool of wide-ranging simplification and control whose power resides in its alleged transparency and transcendence. But taking at face value this “gaze from nowhere,” to borrow Donna Haraway’s famous phrase, occludes the material and pragmatic foundations of knowledge practices.33 It overshadows other ways of knowing that are constitutive of urban experience, including the experiences of planners and experts.34 Put differently, social science research on planning can easily mistake technocratic claims of visual mastery for actual practices. This results in portrayals that reinforce dichotomies between state and nonstate actors, expert and non-expert knowledge. Technocrats are portrayed as disembodied agents removed from the everyday traffic of social life, while ordinary citizens are viewed as radically removed from expert practice.35
This book is partly aimed at dissolving this binary by shedding light on both experts’ social praxis and non-experts’ intellectual labor—that is, by showing that planning expertise is crafted as much in offices and boardrooms as it is in urban neighborhoods, and that everyday urban knowledge is produced both in homes and on the street and through quotidian engagements with technical documents and instruments. Adopting this perspective has direct implications for questions about security and urbanism. It entails tracing how experiences and understandings of security are enacted and distributed in the construction of urban worlds. The main issue in this regard is how security ideologies circulate and how they are materialized in the things and forms of everyday city life.36
Literature on urban neoliberalism and the rise of insecurity has emphasized these ideological mediations. From the securitized “rescue” of downtown Mexico City and the “pacification” of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to the policing of Cape Town townships and the criminalization of poverty in US cities, scholars have stressed the increasing confluence of urban development policies and security agendas.37 This is what geographer Neil Smith famously termed “urban revanchism” in his analysis of gentrification and class and racial violence in the New York of the late 1980s and early 1990s.38 But exactly what role do security frameworks perform in these urban processes? How do they refract modes of urban transformation? In his critique of public security and contemporary capitalism in Mexico and Brazil, John Gledhill offers a compelling account of the ways in which the “securitization of poverty” is central to strategies of urban governance and accumulation. According to Gledhill, the rendering of certain populations and spaces as threats to public safety has come to define neoliberal development in the region. The war on drug trafficking and criminality, Gledhill shows, slips easily into a war on the poor. Brazil’s favela pacification policies since 2008 have made life for residents more insecure both in terms of greater vulnerability to criminal networks and racialized police violence and in terms of land speculation and market-driven displacement. In one revealing example from his work in Salvador da Bahia, Gledhill recounts how private security agents and off-duty police perversely stretched the meaning of favela pacification, forcefully evicting shantytown dwellers on behalf of real estate developers. Most significantly, he argues, the logic of securitization “distorted understandings of social life in favelas,” portraying them as inherently disorderly and as requiring militarized control and an entrepreneurial makeover.39
Gledhill moves beyond analyses that conceive security only as a discursive formation integral to urbanism and state policy. Instead, he examines “how social situations shape the way that different kinds of social actors think about questions of security” and how they in turn shape their “behavior and subjectivities.”40 This approach illuminates the contradictory processes through which ideologies of security get woven into the urban fabric and entangled in everyday practice. At the same time, however, and despite his attention to how diverse actors shape and deploy security knowledges, Gledhill views contemporary security paradigms as essentially concealing the operations of global capital. He writes about the need to “peer through the smoke created by the securitization of poverty” to shed light on its “hidden agendas.”41 In this context, as in other critiques of neoliberal urbanism, security ideologies take on a rather narrow meaning as class-based sources of mystification. But conceiving security primarily as a smokescreen for real estate speculation and urban displacement leaves little space for considerations of the diverse historical and institutional settings in which security knowledges are forged and the different political agendas to which they are linked. Most problematically, it precludes fine-grained analyses of individual praxis—that is, of the experiential, affective, and semiotic dimensions of security ideologies as they are put into practice and materialized into built forms. Additionally, such views ignore the fact that residents themselves often critique certain uses of security as tactics of obfuscation geared toward displacement and speculation. This is precisely what Keisha-Khan Perry shows in her fine-grained ethnography of “black women’s collective resistance against the violence of land evictions and displacement” in Salvador da Bahia.42
Rather than adopting a narrow view of security as a tool of misrepresentation used by planners and real estate developers, I am interested in the various ways in which security becomes constitutive of understandings of and interventions in urban space. A dialectic between actors’ social locations and their epistemological commitments is certainly at work here, but it is not one that is based only on suppression and concealment. Instead the main issue is how contingent and situated experiences of (in)security are objectified and transposed into forms of knowledge about urban reality and its material embodiments. How are they reified into ideas about city life and, more tangibly, into things and forms? How and to whom do certain urban spaces emerge as inherently insecure, while others appear to create order and safety? Addressing these questions requires a study of security frameworks in all their plurality, within and beyond the confines of state institutions. More importantly, it involves a subtler tracking of the idioms, practices, and embodied experiences through which security knowledges are formed and projected back onto the urban world. At stake here is what Teresa Caldeira describes as the productive qualities of security narratives. In her pathbreaking work on urban insecurity in São Paulo, Caldeira carefully follows the circulation of the “everyday talk of crime,” making a powerful argument about security narratives as epistemological forms that not only “produce certain types of interpretations and explanations” but also “organize the urban landscape and public space, shaping the scenario for social interactions.”43 In the São Paulo of the 1990s, discourses about crime constituted a critical medium for individuals to make sense of wide-ranging social realities such as poverty, inflation, police authority, citizenship, and urban transformation. They produced a “symbolic order,” Caldeira argues, that had sociopolitical and material repercussions: most notably, the reproduction and legitimation of urban violence and spatial segregation.44
This book expands on these critical insights to explore the multiple and contradictory ways in which experiences and narratives of (in)security mediate urban plans, practices, and materialities. Rather than focusing on urban policing and crime, I adopt an oblique perspective through the lens of planning expertise, urban law and bureaucracy, and property.45 In this regard, this book contributes to a growing anthropological literature that takes as its central objects of inquiry the various forms, practices, and effects of security.46 Moreover, it builds on ethnographic work that explores the variegated urban realms that are shaped by securitization processes—from development and mobility to the environment—and follows recent calls to explicitly address the spatial dynamics of security at the urban scale.47
This shift in outlook is important for several reasons. First, looking beyond traditional security sites illuminates the scope and malleability of security thinking. Rather than presupposing the circulation and reproduction of a culture of (in)security, the main question here is how security ideas are assembled and recontextualized across multiple sites. In Bogotá, urban actors are constantly recalibrating repertoires of (in)security to make sense of and intervene in redevelopment processes. They stretch narratives tied to the historical and geographical registers of Colombia’s armed conflict and its trials of nation building and anchor them to the interactional contexts of urban planning and renewal. Far from a coherent cultural formation, security appears as an unfinished category that individuals continually mobilize, resignify, and reenact. Adopting this vantage point thus allows for a more fine-tuned account of the ways in which security is brought into the composition of urban knowledges.
Second, focusing on planning practices and urban materialities allows for closer scrutiny of the relationship between security frameworks and sociospatial realities. While scholarly literature has emphasized the connection between urban insecurity and segregation, security frameworks can become entangled with a wide variety of spatial formations, from high-rise development and infrastructural networks to technologically infused spaces of surveillance.48 Instead of presupposing an immanent relationship between security narratives and built forms, it is necessary to interrogate the mechanisms and practices through which social actors materialize repertoires of (in)security in different ways and contexts. Of critical importance, in this regard, is an analytical approach that, according to Lucy Suchman, Karolina Follis, and Jutta Weber, can account for both “the material and discursive infrastructures that hold the logics of (in)security in place, as well as the practices through which these logics realize their effects.”49 This requires attending to what Keith Murphy, writing about the anthropology of design, calls the “form-giving” practices through which people shape their sociomaterial worlds.50 Rather than privileging urban materiality and its securitized effects and then assuming a correspondence with cultural forms or retroactively imputing agency to social actors or things, this perspective foregrounds the dynamic interactions between intentional human action, ideological mediation, and material forms.51 It illuminates more clearly how planners, designers, developers, and residents mobilize security knowledges in their city-making projects, and, importantly, it brings into sharper relief the politics of urban securitization, in particular what Murphy describes as “the structures of accountability and responsibility that undergird social relations.”52
Finally, this book is inspired by what Laura Nader famously called “studying up, down, and sideways” in her 1969 essay “Up the Anthropologist.”53 Although her intervention has been typically interpreted as a call to study the powerful, Nader was pointing to a more complex and integrated understanding of power relations across social realms—what she described as a “vertical slice.”54 For her this brought up both ethical and methodological questions about how, why, and from what locations a researcher studied what they studied. Building on these insights, I move vertically, but also horizontally, across social domains to grasp the power and epistemic relations and frictions that surround urban transformation. This entails the recognition of social actors’ critical and self-aware knowledge-making practices and their overlapping affinities with scholarly critique. My aim is thus not to subordinate local understandings of urban life to the analytical lens of social theory and anthropology, or to carry out an exercise in demystification aimed at lifting the veils of misrecognition.55 The following pages recount instead the uneasy yet generative encounters between ethnographic research and the parallel “epistemic jurisdictions” of urban experts and non-experts alike.56 My research was directly informed by planners’ analytical orientations toward urban space, policy implementation, and local socialities, including their frequent use of ethnographic methods in their professional work. Developers, property owners, and residents also developed their own theories and collected data, articulating sophisticated critiques of urban governance, insecurity, and material transformations. In this context, I became directly enrolled in contradictory knowledge-making projects ranging from community leaders’ drafting of bureaucratic complaints and their documentation of neighborhood conditions to planners’ organization of academic and policy conferences and the design and analysis of field research protocols. These tentative collaborations not only exposed the divergent locations and sociopolitical circumstances of urban knowledge production but also made apparent the “epistemic contingency” of my own project.57
Reflexive awareness—a central feature of the anthropology of expertise, as Dominic Boyer argues—is particularly relevant in the study of (in)security and its intersections with urban knowledges and practices.58 Looking up, down, and sideways compels the recognition of the shifting nature of security ideologies, their situatedness, and their interactions with other logics of urban sociality. In short, it helps avoid the reification of security as a totalizing narrative and an overly coherent semiotic and material order. Capturing the conceptual slipperiness of security through lateral epistemic engagements is therefore important not only for analytical purposes but also for ethical and political reasons.59 Representations of insecurity—scholarly and otherwise—ripple through social worlds, creating fear, criminalizing populations and places, and creating the conditions for more violence. They reproduce the “finer weave of terror,” as Michael Taussig writes.60 An approach guided by reflexivity and collaboration highlights instead the contingent and contextualized links between security, knowledge making, and sociomaterial life, allowing for more nuanced accounts and new political imaginaries to take shape.
Topographies of Urban Knowledge
This book is based on research conducted in the offices of city officials and developers, ruined and semiabandoned construction sites, and the living rooms and neighborhood stores of residents caught up in urban renewal struggles. My entrance into these circuits of urban knowledge and transformation was guided by my previous experience working in Bogotá’s city administration in the early 2000s. This was a period in which Bogotá was making headlines for its innovations in urban governance under the leadership of Mayors Antanas Mockus (1995–97, 2001–3) and Enrique Peñalosa (1998–2000). Policymakers during these years focused on the so-called “construction” of urban citizenship and public space.61 Social practices and interactions—what the city government named “culture of citizenship [cultura ciudadana]” with distinctly class-related and civilizatory overtones—became key objects of expert knowledge. The Mockus administration developed a range of communication strategies—from street mimes to artistic interventions—designed to interpellate city dwellers and compel their transformation into law-abiding, democratic citizens. Equally central to these experiments in “pedagogical urbanism” was the rebuilding of public space.62 City parks, plazas, and sidewalks—the “environs in which one is a citizen,” as a policy document put it—emerged as critical sites for the forging of “good citizen behavior.”63 As public-space policies gained more visibility during the Peñalosa administration, they also became more directly associated with policing tactics and spatial control. Crucially, the remaking of culture and spaces of citizenship emerged as both the inversion of and the alleged antidote to the country’s purported culture of violence. Most striking to me, as a recent college graduate working closely with senior officials in city hall, was how the crafting of urban policy became intimately tied to broader understandings of national security and sovereignty.
Drawing on this background, I conceived this book as an ethnography of the constitution and materialization of urban knowledges and their wide-ranging political meanings. Upon my return to Bogotá in 2009 to launch the project, I initially focused on the site most directly associated with the production of urban expertise: Bogotá’s Secretaría Distrital de Planeación (City Planning Department). As a technocratic space ostensibly shielded from the politics of everyday urban life, the Secretaría provided a unique opportunity to bring into sharper relief the opaque intersections between planning expertise and security ideologies. I gained full access to the institution in July 2011 and became embedded within a team of mid-level and senior functionaries responsible for revising the city’s master plan, the Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (Territorial Ordering Plan), or POT. For seven months, I followed experts in their quotidian activities and interactions. Part of my time was spent in the team’s office, an open layout of modules where I was furnished with my own desk, chair, and landline. As planners became more comfortable with the idea of having an anthropologist in their midst, I became privy to everyday office routines, off-the-record debriefings, and casual exchanges. I also became a regular participant in the team’s coffee breaks and lunches outside the office. Cafeterias and neighborhood restaurants proved key sites in which my “coworkers” shared some of their most critical perspectives about planning knowledge and institutions.
A significant portion of my time was devoted to attending official meetings between members of my adopted unit, senior planning officials, and other dependencies within the Secretaría. Meetings were typically held in the planning director’s boardroom around a long, polished wooden table with leather-upholstered chairs, next to a large window overlooking the city. Introduced sometimes as a visiting researcher, other times as part of the planning team, I sat in the corner, notebook in hand, documenting the scripts and choreographies of technical meetings. Planners also dedicated considerable time to presentations in town hall meetings and policy conferences. This circuit of public exchanges constituted a critical site in which experts not only crafted but, more importantly, performed planning knowledge and its broader significance. Finally, as my research progressed, I conducted in-depth interviews with my immediate collaborators and with other planning officials and consultants, allowing for more reflexive commentary on the politics and practice of their professional work.
Carrying out ethnographic research at the core and interstices of Bogotá’s Secretaría Distrital de Planeación evinced the subtle ways in which repertoires of security shaped bureaucratic routines and technical discussions. This was apparent in one of the focal areas of planners’ efforts (and of my own research): the restructuring of the city’s Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial. As much as the POT consisted of technical regulations to guide real estate and infrastructure development, it was also a critical site to reimagine state power and urban order. Making territory knowable and manageable was paramount to planners’ designs and was intimately tied to their understandings of security. Far from representing a static backdrop for state intervention, territorial qualities and potentialities appeared as objects of intense scrutiny and debate within planning and policy circles. At the core of the revision of the POT was the creation of legal and technical frameworks to reenvision territory as a collection of building and population densities—what planners called urban densification (densificación urbana). Urban governance appeared as a matter of stimulating and harnessing the distribution of people, activities, and structures in space. If the planning frameworks of the late 1990s had focused on the creation of open spaces and corridors, experts redrafting the city’s plan conceived of territory as dynamic and relational—a “volumetric terrain.”64 Following Stuart Elden, territory emerged as a “political technology” central to projects aimed at making the city governable and secure, and terrain as the material expression of such territorial practices.65 Significantly, such calculative techniques were permeated with planners’ situated knowledge of the country’s histories of contested territorial sovereignty and sociopolitical conflict.
Tracking the production and materialization of densification policies and their entanglements with repertoires of (in)security led me to explore circuits of knowledge and practice beyond planning institutions. Downtown Bogotá became the focus of my study in 2012. Given the city center’s position as a seat of official bureaucracy, a hub for cultural institutions and businesses, and a haven for working-class residents and popular commerce, downtown’s social topography has been one of extreme proximity and friction. Its entrenched conflicts and symbolic weight as a stage of nation building and citizenship have made it a recurring target of state intervention and reconstruction. Since at least the 1940s, planners and designers have repeatedly called for the “renewal,” “recovery,” “revitalization,” and “redensification” of downtown districts. Such plans were originally motivated by the rapid influx of rural migrants escaping violence in the countryside and the steady flight of middle- and upper-class residents to new affluent neighborhoods in north Bogotá. A downtown of overflowing commerce, bustling crowds, dilapidated tenements, and clandestine operations gradually encroached on the downtown of museums, stately buildings, and official heritage.66 Renewal and densification plans—large-scale demolitions, displacements, and projects to attract middle-class residents—emerged as a siege on these insurgent geographies and forms of sociality.67 Significantly, shifting repertoires of (in)security mediated planners’ expert practices and residents’ critical interpretations of urban transformation and shaped the material and aesthetic qualities of city spaces.
During 2012 and over the course of research trips in the following years, I explored how wide-ranging repertoires—from militarized warfare and land grabbing to bureaucratic violence and postconflict security—had been discursively and materially sedimented in downtown spaces. I followed city planners, project promoters, consultants, residents, and community leaders who had been involved or were actively engaged in some of the city center’s emblematic renewal plans. It was in the performances and materiality of these encounters that security emerged as a crucial vehicle for the enactment and contestation of urban transformation: both a rationale for intervention and a medium for critique and dissent. Urban securitization appeared here not as a detached and technocratic affair, but rather as a process grounded in everyday experience, local knowledge, and the materiality of urban environments.
I moved primarily through three downtown districts—Las Aguas, La Alameda, and Santa Inés—and excavated local histories of reconstruction reaching back to the mid-twentieth century. Far from telling a story of singular events and representative places, I explored the spatially and temporally interconnected production and materialization of urban knowledges. Geological and archaeological metaphors seemed particularly apt in this context—in some cases quite literally, as when the ruins of an early twentieth-century bridge resurfaced in the 2000s during the construction of a pedestrian boulevard and as an adjacent block of houses and small apartment buildings were being expropriated and demolished for the development of high-rises. Sitting in disrepair behind a chain-link fence, next to an emblematic public space, and under the shadow of the new residential towers, the early twentieth-century remnant revealed a textured palimpsest of built forms and discursive layers.68 At the core of this urban topography was the juxtaposition of fragments of urban security linked to visions of hygienist reform, sociospatial order, bureaucratic force, and property development.
From this perspective, downtown emerged not as a collection of discrete spaces but as the sedimentation of epistemic and material traces (chapter 1), and its transformations resembled tectonic shifts in which movements in one area had durable impacts on others. To parse these ruptures and continuities, I focused on the logics behind four renewal projects: the militarized planning and design of an emblematic city park in the late 1990s and early 2000s (chapter 2), the use of bureaucratic force and expropriation in two mixed-use developments launched in 2006 and 2010 (chapters 3 and 4), and the rise of models of inclusionary and participatory densification crystallized in an inner-city revitalization project put into motion in 2012 (chapters 5 and 6). I followed planners, designers, and experts who had crafted and negotiated these plans, from officials and developers staking claims in specific localities to investors and consultants shaping downtown imaginaries from the upscale neighborhoods of north Bogotá. Many experts had worked in several of these or related downtown projects, and they often moved fluidly between public and private institutions. Ultimately, urban professionals contributed to the creation and circulation of techniques and conceptual frameworks, shaping a distinct, if changing and contested, “ecology of expertise.”69
In addition to analyzing policy documents, conducting in-depth interviews with key officials and consultants, and attending public meetings, during most of 2012 I became embedded within the planning team in charge of designing the city’s first inclusionary renewal project. The official promoter of the plan was an elite, private university, the Universidad de los Andes, and the team comprised faculty and researchers from a range of disciplines. Here again, as in the Secretaría Distrital de Planeación, I became privy to official and informal planning practices. In contrast to city officials’ fairly contained professional milieus, university experts moved between citywide regulations, neighborhood specificities, and the concrete aims and demands of the project. They produced multiple forms of knowledge about the area—financial, legal, ethnographic—and engaged in sustained negotiations and communications with residents.
In addition to inhabiting the worlds of these planners and experts, I also created lasting relationships with community leaders, property owners, and renters.70 My research followed residents closely as they, too, engaged in the production and materialization of urban knowledge. This included attempts to contest and reinterpret opaque regulations and authoritative planning frameworks, as well as the production of alternative modes of knowing and city-making. Knowledge practices were thus far from homogenous, and they often reflected neighborhood fissures and conflicts. Some residents articulated forms of dissent that questioned the assumptions of planning expertise, others pragmatically pursued advantageous positions of negotiation, while others exploited renewal struggles to further their own political and economic agendas.
Taken together, however, Bogotá’s waves of downtown renewal reveal changing security logics, from overtly militarized projects of spatial control, to the insidious operations of urban bureaucracy and law, to mixed-income housing and participatory development. Such transformations parallel Colombia’s embattled transition from counterinsurgent warfare to the postconflict era. More broadly, they mirror global shifts from policing and militarism to “human security” paradigms that, as Paul Amar puts it, seek to “expand the notion of politics to reintegrate social justice and economic development.”71 But the emergence of new security frameworks, as Amar argues, constitutes not a linear progression but unstable amalgamations that are “intensely dynamic” and “contradictory.”72 Crucially, while militaristic and criminal narratives seem to have receded in the official scripts of Bogotá’s downtown renewal plans, the specters of warfare have continued to reemerge as residents fight urban transformations and call attention to their underlying violences. This book’s three main parts follow this contested submergence and reemergence of urbanism as warfare and its translation into the city’s materialities. Urban knowledges mediate the constitution of material forms so that city spaces emerge as terrains of military control (part I), paperwork as a site of (para)state violence and opposition (part II), and housing as a landscape of progressive promises and covert displacement (part III).
A final note on my position within these topographies of urban knowledge: My research was marked by the sense of familiarity and discomfort afforded by my place within Bogotá’s stark social stratification. As I am a white middle-class Colombian from north Bogotá, it was inevitable for my field counterparts to either assume my work carried a certain class politics or suspect where my true sympathies lay.73 From the perspective of many policymakers and experts, ethnography and social critique were directly at odds with the technical and pragmatic exigencies of their work. Planners often assumed that I shared their technocratic ethos—particularly when they identified me with the many consultants working in the city government. At other moments, when my interest in power relations and the contingency of planning practices became apparent, our exchanges became somewhat strained. In my work with downtown residents and community leaders, the risk was to appear insufficiently critical of the alleged intentions and agendas behind urban renewal. Given my close ethnographic work with planners, developers, and experts—of which residents were aware—locals often pressed me to disclose my affinities. They worried that I might be too close to city managers and urban promoters, whom they viewed as irredeemable neoliberals (as they themselves often put it), elitists, or dishonest opportunists.
There was no obvious solution to these issues. Instead of limiting my study to any faction in Bogotá’s renewal battles, I provided different people with nuanced portrayals of each other and of the processes in which we were all involved. To do this I relied on urban actors’ knowledge and followed as closely as possible their critical engagements with and reflexive understandings of the city’s circuits of expertise and material transformation. This was central to my work with urban planners, where their research and critical insights blurred into my own analysis. Yet there is no monopoly over urban expertise, and urban renewal is instructive of the ways in which local populations craft themselves into epistemic communities to articulate critiques of power arrangements and advance political claims. Many of my interlocutors in downtown neighborhoods had become specialists in planning law and surveyors of their own districts to engage in a politics of counterexpertise.74 I followed closely these everyday practices of dissent as they recast the meaning of urban insecurity and rearticulated planning and city building practices. In every case, performances of knowledge materialized conflicting urban visions and forms. This book is thus also about ambivalent ethnographic collaborations and their critical place in the contemporary research of emerging urban worlds.
Throughout the book’s six chapters, I excavate the city’s epistemic and material layers from the mid-twentieth century into the present. Rather than being a rigid chronology, the narrative seeks to show the recursive nature of city making: the gradual and fractured processes of destruction and reconstruction on which actors ground their knowledges and political claims and which in turn feed back into projects of urban transformation.75 This is what Alberto Corsín Jiménez describes as “the city as a problem of method … of designs, problematizations, and theories—in constant auto-construction.”76 In this regard, scholars have shown how urban informality and peripheral urbanism constitute modes of inhabiting and envisioning urban space that unsettle dominant urban epistemologies: the “slum as theory,” in the words of Vyjayanthi Rao.77 In downtown Bogotá, center and periphery comingle, and the lines that separate them are contested through disputes over the texture, aesthetics, and experience of urban space. In this sense, this book follows the shifting lines, traces, and voids left by processes aimed at peripheralizing the center and recentering the periphery. What emerges is an unruly repository of urban practices, knowledges, and materials—of epistemic spaces shot through with the country’s pervasive registers of security. This is “a very messy kind of archive,” as Rao argues, and one that is deeply processual and emergent. “As an evident, material archive,” she perceptively notes, “the built environment of the city reveals as much as it conceals about the political and historical processes to which cities are subjected through time.”78 It is the contested production, destruction, and materialization of urban archives that is at the core of this book.
Chapter 1 begins by showing how urbanization in twentieth-century Bogotá became entangled with counterinsurgency and national security agendas. I revisit an emblematic event of downtown destruction in the late 1940s and its aftermath as the city center was becoming a key object of planning expertise and intervention. Reading this history against the grain reveals the critical ways in which security knowledges linked to militarism and territorial control were encoded in the recurring dialectics of destruction and reconstruction that have shaped modern Bogotá. In chapter 2, I follow these trajectories as they made their way into one of the city center’s most momentous contemporary transformations: a project of large-scale demolition launched in the late 1990s for the construction of an expansive park known as Parque Tercer Milenio (Third Millennium Park). Drawing on research with planners and experts and engaging with scholarship on the affective and material qualities of space, I show how repertoires of militarized policing, risk management, and humanitarianism came together to render urban space into a terrain to be cleared and conquered.
Chapter 3 focuses on the shift from overt securitization and “spatial cleansing” to plans centered on bureaucratic operations and real estate development.79 Based on fieldwork on one of Bogotá’s first renewal projects of the twenty-first century, Manzana Cinco (Block Five), I turn to residents’ experiences as they were being evicted in the name of the downtown recovery and development. In close conversation with work on bureaucratic materiality and legal geography, I examine emergent knowledge practices centered on juridical insecurities and materialized in official paperwork. The chapter shows how neighbors carved out an epistemic space to articulate critiques of renewal, recasting urban policy and property development as oblique manifestations of state violence and land grabbing. In chapter 4, I expand my analysis of local strategies of dissent, drawing on fieldwork with community leaders and city officials in a neighborhood targeted for infrastructural and real estate development through a plan known as Estación Central (Central Station). Contests over the aesthetics and value of urban property were at the core of local renewal conflicts, as neighbors questioned official representations of the area’s history of decay. Drawing on their intimate knowledge of neighborhood dynamics, residents unearthed a very different story of decline and ruination. For them, government action—from zoning regulations to building codes—had been integral to the gradual erosion of built forms and land uses and to the expansion of property insecurities linked to criminal organizations and the violent misappropriation of land.
The last two chapters explore the apparent move away from securitized interventions through policies of urban densification and inclusionary revitalization. Chapter 5 takes the reader into the offices and boardrooms of city planners and developers and tracks the discourses and practices surrounding the revision of the city’s Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial. It examines the rise of “densification” as a paradigmatic category of urban expertise, a political tool, and a framework to reenvision urban space. The chapter builds on the growing anthropological interest in design and what Lucy Suchman calls its “cultural imaginaries and micro-politics,”80 and it draws inspiration from the “volumetric turn in political geography,” as Franck Billé puts it.81 Far beyond the two-dimensional surfaces of maps and blueprints, at stake here are urban epistemologies centered on the management of spaces and populations as three-dimensional assemblages. Tracing such forms of knowledge and their textured material projections reveals shifting regulatory and territorial practices, as well as the implicit reworking of notions of security and sovereignty through techniques of “territorial ordering.”
In chapter 6, I return to downtown Bogotá to explore the on-the-ground practices and conflicts associated with inner-city densification. I draw on fieldwork with experts and residents who became involved in an ambitious participatory revitalization plan, Progresa Fenicia (Fenicia Progresses). In contrast to previous interventions that “emptied out” urban areas for spatial control and real estate speculation, the plan set out to reassemble local populations and structures to attract new residents while ensuring the permanence of existing inhabitants. Far from flattening urban space, the project aimed at harnessing—in an allegedly more inclusionary manner—the potentialities of a multidimensional urban terrain composed of heterogenous actors, uses, and material structures. Critical to these designs were modes of knowledge production aimed at making urban dwellers and their homes amenable to the physics and metrics of a particular conception of urban density—as a collection of entrepreneurial partners, floor areas, and land uses. Residents, for their part, controverted such epistemologies, drawing on the long-standing insecurities and conflicts that had permeated regimes of property and belonging.
This book ultimately calls attention to the politics entailed by the recursive nature of urban knowledge and material transformation. Social actors’ epistemic engagements are inextricably bound to the unfinished and sedimentary character of cities—to their recurring processes of accumulation, accretion, and destruction. City making is always already a form of knowledge, and knowledge takes shape in the materiality of urban life. And because cities are the outcome of continual overlaying, erasure, and recomposition, epistemic frames resurface and get reencoded in new urban forms. These are not mere iterations, as Ann Stoler argues, but “partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations.”82 In Colombia’s uncertain transition to a postconflict era, urban fragments and shards of knowledge are recomposed to create new openings.83 But these new urban worlds, even in their most progressive incarnations as ruptures with the past, are still partially constructed with the materials and ideas of yesterday.84 Similar processes are also at work, although often less visibly, in urban landscapes across the globe, where the echoes of older violences—racial, economic, ethnonationalist—reverberate in the sleek and glitzy spaces of rapidly gentrifying cities.85 This book invites more encompassing reflections on the afterlife of (in)securities across historical trajectories and social contexts, and on their enduring cultural and material legacies in contemporary urban life.86