Managing Volumetric Densities

The Grupo POT was critical of an epistemology of surfaces in which mapping and zoning took precedence. This is what Doreen Massey calls “space-as-surface”: a cartographic imagination in which space is “continuous and given” and overtly tied up with projects for spatial colonization and mastery.¹ In downtown Bogotá, the demolition of El Cartucho and the construction of Parque Tercer Milenio had embodied these modes of knowledge (see chapter 2). Planners had marked what they called a “polygon of intervention [polígono de intervención]” and set out to domesticate the area’s allegedly unruly topography. It was a territorial technology imbued with military-strategic logics and centered on the flattening of a rugged and disorderly space. In the case of Tercer Milenio, the unwieldy terrain had ultimately escaped planners’ control and continued to live on in the park’s empty expanses, deserted underground levels, and fearful landscape.²

The revision of the POT was an attempt at retooling technologies for more effective sociomaterial interventions. Critical to such redesigns was the reconceptualization of territory in the language of urban density.³ While planning in Bogotá had been long concerned with density—what I described earlier as policies for the rarefaction of disorderly crowds and the creation of modern densities (see chapter 1)—with the modification of the POT, the concept took on unprecedented centrality in both expert circles and public opinion. Partly a reflection of global “smart growth” policies, the ideal of a “dense and compact city” emerged as a recipe to spur economic development and alleviate housing and environmental crises.⁴ Surfaces here were “filled with spatiality,” to borrow Clancy Wilmott’s term, and “solidified” into a three-dimensional and dynamic sociomaterial arrangement.⁵ Planners in Bogotá took up density as a more sophisticated and effective technology to track the ways in which people and things “occupied territory.” Yet as a supposedly neutral metric of urban form, its political effects and limitations remained occluded.

In this chapter, I argue that far from a stable, descriptive category, density is a profoundly generative practice. Contrary to its usual treatment as a “self-evident” concept, I follow Vyjayanthi Rao and adopt “a socially and culturally inflected understanding of density.”⁶ I also build on Colin McFarlane’s call to study the “multiple spatialities of density” and its ideological and political substrates.⁷ McFarlane develops the notion of “topological density” as a fundamental counterpart to “topographical, linear, or numerical” views.⁸ In this manner, he points to the “malleable, plastic nature of density both as a political tool and as a geographic imaginary and form.”⁹ From this perspective, planners’ calculative (or topographical) orientations toward density in Bogotá were ultimately linked to the making and ordering of urban territory.¹⁰ “In a topological frame,” John Allen argues, “power relationships are not so much positioned in space or extended across it, as compose the spaces of which they are a part.”¹¹ With urban densities as their central objects of knowledge and intervention, planners recomposed the materialities and geometries of urban territory. Instead of a bounded and fixed backdrop to be conquered, experts became engaged with the “instabilities and fluctuations of state territory,” its “ambiguity and uncertainty,” in the words of Penelope Harvey.¹²

Planners reconceptualized the city as a shifting assemblage of densities and redefined the parameters of urban territory and how it would be governed. Earlier downtown plans had aimed to secure urban perimeters, delineating “decayed” areas for state intervention and real estate development. With the revision of the POT, experts now sought to manage urban volumes.¹³ In contrast to the two-dimensional renderings of zoning maps, the city emerged here as a volumetric process—the constant coming together and spreading out of people and material structures.¹⁴ Density thus became a powerful device to simultaneously conjure, harness, and regulate space in multiple dimensions.¹⁵ It represented a more complex engagement with the “materiality of territory,” or what Stuart Elden calls “volumetric territory.”¹⁶

What this meant ranged considerably throughout the POT’s long-running revision across different city administrations. The Grupo POT’s revision project was launched during the administration of Samuel Moreno (2008–11) and largely sought the technocratic harnessing of densities for “efficient” and “sustainable” growth. Like his predecessor Luis Eduardo Garzón (2004–7), Moreno was only nominally a leftist mayor. During his time in office, he did not introduce substantive reforms and remained close to the city’s real estate and infrastructure development sectors.¹⁷ By the end of his term, he was found responsible for one of the largest corruption scandals in Bogotá’s recent history, ultimately landing in jail along with a network of local politicians and contractors. Within this context and partly to separate themselves from the mayor, planners presented the revision of the POT as a highly technical, nonpartisan, and untainted project. Following the suspension of this modification project, the administration of Gustavo Petro (2012–15) launched a new revision project that more directly confronted real estate interests. The POT revision now promoted participatory and inclusionary densification in the inner city and wide-ranging visions centered on housing and environmental justice. This modification project was ultimately blocked, and a new group of planners returned to the drawing board after the reelection of Enrique Peñalosa (2016–19). For Peñalosa, who had decreed the original POT during his first term in 2000, this was the opportunity to deepen reactionary public-space policies and expand the reach of real estate interests, sidelining planning laws’ more progressive applications.

Despite these contrasting visions, however, territory-as-density reappeared in every case as a taken-for-granted epistemology: a naturalized sociomaterial dynamic subject to expert assessments and experimentation. As an unquestioned urban grammar, it both limited and obscured political agendas.¹⁸ Compared to the overt bids for spatial control and the forceful displacements of earlier renewal plans, redensification seemed an innocuous technical instrument. As a city official once explained during a public presentation of the POT modification project, the main challenge was to undo “imaginaries” of renewal as a “process that razes entire areas of the city” and leads to “evictions and social conflicts.” Instead, he suggested, the city had to “reposition [renewal] as a logical urban process [un proceso lógico de la ciudad].” As seemingly neutral descriptors of urban realities, “density” and “territory” would thus serve to render urban renewal an unquestioned phenomenon. But as performative categories with material effects, such technical concepts inevitably enacted specific political projects. Contrary to what the expert suggested, “social conflicts” were not defused but rather relocated and submerged in the management of dense volumetric territories. In this sense, the focus on “complex volumetric geographies,” as scholarship on volumetric politics has shown, did not lead to the “weakening or dilution of the logics of territorial control,” but rather to their reconfiguration.¹⁹

Planning and managing densities resemble what architectural theorist Keller Easterling describes as the “operating system for shaping the city.”²⁰ Drawing on informatics, Easterling calls attention to the kinds of power that reside not in the “content” but rather in the “medium” of spatial production. From special economic zones to telecommunications networks, these “infrastructure spaces” operate as a “content manager dictating the rules of the game in the urban milieu.”²¹ In Bogotá, planners themselves often employed cybernetic language, describing new planning instruments as a “self-regulating system.” In the following sections, I track how densification became an unobtrusive yet consequential “spatial software.”²² The epistemics of density not only actively shaped sociomaterial forms and relations but also tacitly imposed limits on urban imaginaries and politics. Even progressive planners who attempted to “hack” such technical platforms and make them more inclusionary and redistributive, continued to operate under the rules and protocols of urban densification as a naturalized process.²³ Finally, by reconceptualizing planning as the management of fluid volumetric densities, experts remained beholden to the securitized logics of territory and property. Territory-as-density ultimately reproduced Colombia’s longer history of governmental technologies aimed at expanding territorial control and entrenched regimes of ownership and development.

Planning the “Real City”

Writing about the so-called “independent republics” of the 1960s—the rural enclaves of peasants fleeing partisan violence that led to the creation of the FARC—sociologist José Jairo González Arias argues that “Colombia is a country whose territory surpasses the nation, and its society is more solid than the state.”²⁴ He evokes a textured and expansive sociomaterial topography that exceeds the workings of an idealized technocratic apparatus and of the body politic itself. Variations on this theme, as I mentioned earlier in this book, have been common in academia, among bureaucrats, and in public opinion, including in the boardrooms where Bogotá planners discussed the revision of the POT.²⁵

By the end of 2011, the Grupo POT held meetings almost every afternoon until late at night as they rushed to submit the revised plan for approval at the city council before the end of the mayoral term. Planners were “in the barracks [en acuartelamiento],” as they called this period of intense work. During the day, the group worked in a temporary, windowless office that had been set up in a semideserted mezzanine of the concrete, boxlike structure that housed the offices of the Unidad Administrativa Especial de Catastro Distrital (public land registry) and a citizen services center where throngs of people paid bills and carried out official procedures, or trámites. The building was connected through a glass-and-concrete tunnel to the Secretaría Distrital de Planeación, a taller gridded tower where offices were also flooded with people submitting requests and checking on their trámites. The two structures formed the Centro Administrativo Distrital (City Administrative Center), a modernist monument to bureaucratic management built in the early 1970s.

The Grupo POT planners—most of them consultants hired exclusively for the revision project—had found themselves in a paradoxical position: They were at once thrust into the core of the city’s overwhelmed bureaucracy and cut off from it in their lonely office, where internet and phone connections broke down frequently and rolls of maps were strewn across desks and cabinets. But not having a direct phone line had advantages, Andrés once noted, “because we can avoid meetings.” Diego agreed: “One of the good things that came with this workspace is that we were removed from the day-to-day [trámites] that take place upstairs [in the main office tower].” Looking at the cubicle divisions and overhead fluorescent lights, he said, “We didn’t have a window, but we had time. We had time to discuss, to debate. The layout of our workstations [open cubicles with an open space in the middle] allowed us to unroll plans on the floor, sketch, all that.” More than anything else, this “relative distance” offered experts a vantage point from which to understand the contradictions of daily planning procedures and policy implementation.

The more time I spent with the Grupo POT planners, the more I found that their work was shaped by something like an ethnographic sensibility. Being “neither totally inside the institution nor really outside of it,” as Diego put it, they aimed to track the uses and conflicts associated with everyday planning practice. This is what they called “planning from reality.” Significantly, they recruited collaborators from within the Secretaría—seasoned functionaries and bureaucrats—who offered critical insights based on their grounded experiences. The Grupo POT’s intervention was thus informed by what Douglas Holmes and George Marcus call “para-ethnography”: “the de facto and self-conscious critical faculty that operates in any expert domain as a way of dealing with contradiction, exception, facts that are fugitive.”²⁶ For Diego, functionaries’ critiques and interpretations, their “marginal ways of knowing,”²⁷ as Holmes and Marcus put it, were “especially useful because when you have that kind of help [from insiders], you learn about what’s really going on inside the institution.” So even while Grupo POT experts carved out time for reflection, theirs was not the “mental space … inhabited by technocrats in their silent offices,” in Henri Lefebvre’s words.²⁸ Instead, their “phenomenology of expertise,” to use Dominic Boyer’s term, was defined by sustained collaborations around the messy realities of planning-in-action.²⁹

Like other office workers, the Grupo POT planners spent considerable time in front of their computers processing data, creating maps, and editing the text of the revised plan. Yet their screen work was constantly punctuated by meetings, presentations, and discussions as well as ongoing conversations among each other and with friendly bureaucrats during breaks and lunches. Following these routines revealed not only the socially mediated and materially situated nature of their work but also the extent to which Grupo POT planners aimed to unravel the specific circumstances in which planning unfolded. They took on the role of experts of urban expertise, as they became immersed in and critically analyzed the ways in which planning knowledge was composed, negotiated, and materialized. At stake here, beyond the institutional and technical contexts that animated planning, were experts’ “habituated patterns of interaction,” as Keith Murphy puts it in his study of Swedish designers.³⁰ Murphy offers a close-up portrayal of how everyday “patterns of talking” and “habits of thought” mediate designers’ creative, “form-giving” practices and instantiate broader cultural and political imaginaries—what he calls a “cultural geometry.”³¹ Although planners in Bogotá did not craft things as tangible as design objects, they did approach their work as if they were giving form to the city as a scaled-up, dynamic object.³² Like the creative practices of designers and architects—and many of the planners at the Secretaría had actually been trained in these disciplines—theirs were mediated by specific ways of talking and thinking with other planners, designers, policymakers, real estate developers, and the larger public. These sustained interactions became integral to planners’ rendering of the city as a volume to be modeled and, ultimately, to the reproduction of long-standing “power-geometries” of territorial control and security.³³

During the Grupo POT’s meetings with senior planning officials “upstairs [arriba],” usually in a boardroom that overlooked the city’s rolling landscape of brick and cement, one recurring interaction revolved around the administration’s “lack of teeth” in the face of the city’s “lot-by-lot” development. Many evenings, after rushing from their mezzanine office through the glass-and-concrete tunnel and up to the eighth floor via the unfailingly congested elevator, the Grupo POT experts discussed new instruments to finally “get ahold of the city’s dynamic [agarrar la dinámica de la ciudad].” Central to these conversations was what policymakers and scholars often described as Bogotá’s profound “fragmentation.”³⁴ This referred both to the piecemeal character of construction and to the fractured nature of underlying social, legal, and political structures. As Andrés often remarked, lamenting the recalcitrance of Bogotá’s urban development trends, “The main problem is that Colombians have a very low capacity to associate with one another.” He gestured in this way to broader representations of Colombia’s history of sociopolitical conflict and its deep-seated divisions. What emerged from these exchanges, in one sense, was the idea of a broken sociomaterial terrain shaped by the whims of the real estate market and its operators—from entrenched landowning elites and developers, to the politically connected urbanizers of informal settlements (also known as urbanizadores piratas), to small-scale builders and autoconstructors. In another sense, planners recognized that plans and regulations themselves had critically contributed to urban fragmentation and disorder.

Not only did urban regulations vary significantly across the city’s geography due to local-level zoning and planning mechanisms, but they had also accumulated over time, creating inscrutable amalgams of building codes and rules. Crucial in this regard was a zoning figure called urbanistic consolidation (consolidación urbanística). Real estate development within a zone under consolidación was supposed to follow the area’s “original regulation.” This meant that construction might be regulated by a forty- or fifty-year-old decree, including all the modifications the decree had undergone—many of them contradictory and incomplete—over the span of several decades. Deciphering these complex legal landscapes required what planners, lawyers, and developers called a form of “juridical archaeology [arqueología jurídica].”³⁵ The sedimentation of legal frameworks became not only a significant space for contestations over development but also one of the main obstacles to the implementation of more recent planning instruments such as the POT. In one memorable meeting, the Grupo POT experts projected an up-to-date map of the areas that were covered by the treatment of consolidación (tratamiento de consolidación). One of the Secretaría’s senior officials, a young Ivy League–trained economist named Catalina, could not hide her astonishment as she looked at the almost completely yellow map on the PowerPoint slide. “So what you’re telling me,” she said, “is that the POT basically doesn’t apply to anything that’s in yellow?” Satisfied with the persuasiveness of their presentation, Grupo POT experts confirmed that nearly 70 percent of the city’s building permits were issued under the figure of consolidación. As things stood, they concluded, most of the “built city [ciudad construida]” was beyond the purview of the POT’s instruments and regulations.

To make matters worse, one of the main planning tools designed to counter the unruly and patchwork densification of consolidación—the plan parcial (partial plan)—had proved to be a failure. Planes parciales aimed to bring together property owners, developers, and the state for the comprehensive development and redevelopment of urban land. In contrast to lot-by-lot development, planes parciales were meant to promote “the urbanistic development of a specific area with the corresponding road infrastructure, green areas, amenities, and public services,” as urban legal scholar and practitioner Juan Felipe Pinilla Pineda explains.³⁶ Additionally, planes parciales assigned a series of charges to developers—for example, the financing of public infrastructure—seeking to distribute the rents generated by urban development in a more equitable manner. Yet very few planes parciales had been implemented since the figure was established in the late 1990s. Significantly, the instrument had been used only on the city’s outskirts (planes parciales de desarrollo), on vacant land with few to no inhabitants and where ownership was concentrated in a few hands. As Catalina, the senior planner, once quipped about planning on empty land, “Well, it’s pretty easy to get cows out of the way, isn’t it?” Within the built city, no plans (planes parciales de renovación) had yet been implemented, and many of the projects under consideration were being strategically deployed by developers to change land uses, obtain permission for more intensive development, and compel property sales by locals through state-backed expropriations.

With planes parciales stalled, a vacant land shortage within city limits, and shrinking expansion areas in the periphery, the demands for real estate translated into increased lot-by-lot development. The fact that construction was taking place in areas of consolidación meant that it was regulated by older decrees, which typically allowed greater building heights and did not impose development exactions or strict guidelines regarding public space and infrastructure. Developers had thus been rapidly acquiring and demolishing old houses and small apartment buildings for the construction of high-rises. “The city is building itself up [la ciudad se construyendo sobre sí misma], constructing its second story,” planners often noted with a sense of urgency, evoking a densifying terrain beyond the control of authorities.

For the Grupo POT, urban territory thus emerged as an unwieldy assemblage of people and things mediated by an equally unruly palimpsest of urban laws and regulations. Planning became a matter of tracking, managing, and reshaping this sociomaterial formation and its shifting dynamics. The older versions of the POT, Diego once argued, contained a “vision” of the “desired city” that “simply crashed against reality.” In their efforts to return to the “real city,” he explained, the Grupo POT had considered two alternatives. First was “modeling the city based solely on urban dynamics, on the recognition of reality.” But this approach, taken to its full expression, Diego admitted, “[means that] you’re not really planning, you’re only following existing urban trends.” What the Group POT aimed for instead was a “middle ground.” In the face of the city’s haphazard and fragmented densification (densificación desordenada), they were trying “to go down the middle, tying [amarrando] things together.”

At stake here was a critique of long-standing engagements with the city as a static, two-dimensional territory ready to be controlled and transformed: planning as a blueprint to be materialized in space. The Grupo POT experts sought instead to work with and harness existing urban processes in their active, volumetric manifestations. Not only did their approach infuse planning with pragmatic sensibilities, but it also marked a shift away from the overtly securitized modes of territorial control that had permeated planning in Bogotá. Rather than the conquest of an unruly terrain, for them it was about “tying” back together a broken sociomaterial topography. In doing this, however, territory-as-density emerged as a naturalized sociomaterial dynamic. It became an unquestioned urban grammar through which planners reinscribed a particular epistemology of the city as the ongoing agglomeration of people and things.³⁷ In their efforts to manage and adjust densification patterns, as I show below, planners ultimately evacuated the political complexities and modes of agency that mediated sociomaterial processes. Territorial control reemerged here as a more insidious technical exercise around the very conditions of urban transformation: It sought primarily to steer urban development, leaving intact and further occluding the conflicts surrounding governance, property, and development.

Cybernetic Densities

As the drawn-out revision of the POT gained visibility, notions of density and densification began to circulate far beyond planning circles. During these years it was not uncommon to see posters on home windows with the phrases “No to densification!” and “Yes to densification!” Densification, understood as the spontaneous filling in and building up of space, had captured the imagination of developers, property owners, and residents. Urban growth and agglomeration appeared as natural, almost inevitable tendencies that could be either fostered or impeded. Earlier frameworks had aimed to control density in space, whether through the destruction of unruly crowds and their physical environments or through the assembling of new, desirable populations and structures. In these more recent approaches, urban territory itself appeared as an expression of the ebbs and flows of densities.

The shift from density in territory to density as territory was spectacularly embodied in the construction of Colombia’s tallest skyscraper, the BD Bacatá. The sixty-seven-story building began construction in 2011 and was marketed as the world’s largest crowdfunded building. Over the course of several years, close to four thousand small to midrange investors purchased fiduciary shares in the project. With BD Bacatá, urban crowds reemerged not as a threat to be suppressed or replaced, as in earlier decades, but rather as a “tellurian force” that could be channeled through financial tools.³⁸ Far from requiring the expulsion of unruly multitudes for its creation, the BD Bacatá project sought to manage and capitalize on existing flows and concentrations of people.

One of the developers behind the project, a middle-aged Spanish expat from Barcelona called Daniel, made this point when I interviewed him in his downtown office in 2012. He had left Spain during the 2008 real estate crisis, looking unsuccessfully for new markets in Portugal and Poland. A chance encounter with another European developer at an airport, however, led him to Colombia. Upon arriving in the capital in 2010, Daniel was struck by the “dynamism” but also the relatively “neglected state” of many areas in the city. He was drawn to the city center, which he said reminded him of the downtown districts of Madrid and Barcelona during Spain’s boom of the late 1990s. “For us,” he told me, “[Bogotá’s] Calle 19 [the future site of BD Bacatá] is the Calle de Pelayo of Barcelona in the 1990s.” Both avenues “have masses and masses of people walking up and down the street.” With a streetscape packed with “low-profile” storefronts and restaurants but relatively “higher-profile” pedestrians, he was certain the avenue would change rapidly in the next few years.

In this view of densification, BD Bacatá would unlock and materialize the power of the existing “masses” of passersby and anonymous “crowds” of investors. It would transubstantiate low- and mid-profile urban dwellers into global citizens and tourists. One of the promises of the project was to make real estate investors out of regular and working-class citizens: the gentrification of the urban mass, so to speak. This spectacular rendering of densification, furthermore, would be inscribed in the building’s architecture. In contrast to the city’s widespread use of brick, the project had a decidedly “international vocation,” Daniel noted. This was reflected in the use of concrete, steel, and glass, and in the project’s unique division of labor: Spanish design, Colombian construction, and North American marketing. The global icon would be inserted into downtown’s urban fabric to allegedly have a rippling effect on its surroundings. It would be a “drop of oil, with a contagious effect,” Daniel mused. Tellingly, in visualizing this path to a new urban age, he evoked the immiscibility of oil—a qualitatively different and incommensurable form of urban density compared to the city center’s existing densities.³⁹

Small developers and property owners also came to view the city as a densifying terrain ready to be reaped. Nelson, a young architect turned developer, had been successful in the reconstruction of several properties within a city block in central Chapinero, a bustling commercial and aging residential neighborhood a few miles north of downtown. He had graduated from the prestigious architecture school of the Universidad de los Andes in 2002, right in the middle of a “construction crisis.” After a few years of dim professional prospects, by 2005, when the real estate industry started to recover, he decided to use family capital to go into lot-by-lot development on his own. “I started looking [for potential sites],” Nelson explained in his office in one of the four buildings he had recently built and where he also lived. He became interested in an area near the recently reconstructed Fifty-Third Avenue. The expansion of the avenue had “reactivated” the once “depressed sector,” he said, and young professionals, couples, and “higher-profile” businesses had been increasingly trickling into the neighborhood.

Over six years, he had acquired several properties—from low-income retirement homes and cheap student residences to semiabandoned houses—and assembled enough land for the construction of six- and seven-story buildings. For Nelson, everything in the process had been “hard work [un camello]”: negotiating with multiple owners, creating designs for highly irregular lots (lotes irregulares con muchas muelas), and navigating changing building codes to build as much as possible. Despite recognizing the work that went into reassembling the block and creating a demand for small, stylish apartments through his brand—what he described as “nice” and “flexible spaces”—Nelson portrayed densification as an inevitable and irreversible process. “These are not family sectors,” he explained causally, but rather areas for single people and investors looking for new central spaces. As we toured the buildings and visited his newest construction site—the largest lot he had so far managed to put together—he pointed to a mid-century, four-story apartment building and said, “This one is in danger [of disappearing] in the next five years; it’s a shame because it’s a very good building.” He then turned to an aging low-rise: “This one is also in danger of extinction [en vía de extinción].” Significantly, the phrase evoked a naturalized ecology of densification in which buildings died out and inexorably gave way to new, denser, and “higher-profile” sociomaterial assemblages.

Projects like Daniel’s and Nelson’s largely eluded a key value-capture mechanism, known as plusvalía, or state participation in land value increments, by following older regulations under the consolidación treatment.⁴⁰ They were also not subject to other urbanistic contributions, such as the improvement of public infrastructure or the creation of urban amenities. This was critical in the case of BD Bacatá and its impacts on its surroundings—from the increase of traffic in an already gridlocked corner of downtown to the rising flow of wastewater into decrepit sewage systems. As one city official warned during a long session in the planning boardroom, “We can’t have Bacatás going up all over the city!”

For Grupo POT experts, however, densification was a reality that could not be ignored, much less prevented. Once again planners evoked a form of pragmatic planning that acknowledged and intervened in the “city’s actual dynamics,” rather than aspiring to create urban realities ex nihilo. In this sense, they would seek to shape—temper, stimulate, order—densification through planning logics based on incentives, self-adjustment mechanisms, and a minimal set of rules. Ultimately, planners aimed to generate public goods and some measure of redistribution through the expert management of densification. Central to city officials’ revision of the POT, therefore, was the creation of mechanisms to do away with legal loopholes, recognize densification trends, and, most importantly, obtain part of the value created through densification for public investments. The key vehicle to this end was edificabilidad, a figure that Grupo POT experts centered in almost all their presentations.

In its most basic expression, edificabilidad was the technical designation for the relationship between the permitted area of construction in a plot and its original area. The Grupo POT had expanded the concept, making it a key planning and financial mechanism. They had reconceptualized it as an algorithm that would require developers to contribute the equivalent in cash of 1 square meter for every 5.6 square meters of construction when the built area surpassed an established threshold.⁴¹ Beyond its technical dimensions, edificabilidad constituted a mode of thinking about and giving form to urban territory. In their elaboration of the notion, experts evoked a landscape of volumetric densities whose modulations could be planned and redirected toward the construction of a more “orderly” and “balanced” city.

Andrés enacted these forms of knowledge during one early Saturday meeting with representatives of the Consejo Territorial de Planeación Distrital (Territorial Council of City Planning), or CTPD, a citizen organization for planning participation established by law in the 1990s. For planners, the stakes of talking in front of the small audience of community leaders, local politicians, and urban professionals were not very high. As we stood outside the nondescript government building, waiting for the meeting to start, Andrés causally mentioned that the CTPD “had a voice but not really a vote.”⁴² As a mostly non-expert yet politically active group, however, the CTPD tested planners’ capacity to communicate their vision of an allegedly more realistic and less legally and technically convoluted POT.⁴³

One of the CTPD members, a middle-aged man dressed in his weekend sweatshirt who took short sips of coffee from a small plastic cup, introduced the “compañeros técnicos [expert comrades]” who had come to share their progress on the revision project. Andrés took the microphone and walked toward the front of the small meeting room, which looked more like a classroom. “This is a moment in which the city has a lot of data available, a battery of data it didn’t previously have,” he said. He explained that the data were instrumental in reaching a “balance between the public and the private,” between public infrastructure and real estate development and land uses. The concept of edificabilidad would play a crucial role because it provided “the leverage for [public] projects across urban zones.” He continued: “Explained simply, it means that if I have a plot, edificabilidad is the number of times I can build the area of that lot.” Andrés stepped back and pointed to the table in front of him. “If this table is my lot, it’s like taking this table and putting another one there. Edicabilidad one. Edificabilidad two, well, it’s building two tables. But if the norms say I have to leave fifty percent of the lot empty or have some setbacks, I could build the two tables but it’s going to be higher; it would maybe be four stories.” He then reiterated the fact that most of the city was built without making contributions. Higher edificabilidad meant more people, and this created an “unbalance,” a “deficit” in terms of parks, roads, and other amenities. “One of the main bets [of the POT] is to have a share in the city’s edificabilidades,” Andrés noted as he leaned on the table. “Whoever wants to pass the [established edificabilidad] limit will have to pay, because we don’t have the money to provide roads, public space, and amenities that those new edificabilidades require.”

Turning to a slide with a graphic of a city block—a series of heterogenous volumes with intersecting planes—Andrés elaborated on the methodology that Grupo POT planners had used to establish edificabilidad thresholds. Drawing on the city’s cadastral database, they had calculated the geometric medians for each block’s construction areas and set them as edificabilidad targets. “You reach this point without paying,” Andrés said. “Beyond that point,” he explained, more animatedly, “is where the real planning exercise [ejercicio de planeación] says, ‘We would like this sector to have edificabilidad five, which is very high edificabilidad, in some cases reaching fifteen stories.’” Pointing to the upper bound on the graphic, he continued: “When you go beyond that point and want to reach higher, well, you’re going to have to contribute to the rest of the city.” In addition to the cash payment (the equivalent of 1 square meter per every 5.6 square meters), greater building rights would require the construction of public spaces and amenities. Ultimately, Andrés explained, the edificabilidad instrument would accomplish what plusvalía, with its heavily legalistic approach, had not. It was a critical “adjustment to the method [through which the city] captures increasing urban values.”

During a meeting at the Secretaría boardroom a few days earlier, Susana, a senior planner overseeing the POT revision, had described edificabilidad as an instrument that would make planning more “operational” and “grounded.” She stressed that “this is a POT of opportunities, not of restrictions” and called attention to a planning logic aimed at mobilizing existing densification potentialities to create more “equitable” and “orderly” urban spaces. The Grupo POT experts had thus created a “sociospatial strategy [estrategia socioespacial]” that established edificabilidad limits across city districts based on existing public infrastructure and amenities. Within this scheme, planners had identified two key “zones of opportunity,” or “pockets [bolsas],” for intensive densification. “These pockets will be the palace of the market!” Andrés exclaimed during the same meeting, noting the potential for significant densities given local conditions and the funds obtained through edificabilidad. As Javier, a Grupo POT legal expert, put it, edificabilidad would ideally become a “self-regulating instrument” that fully acknowledged the “dynamic” and “unplannable” nature of urban realities. Experts thus reenvisioned the POT as a data-driven platform that both tracked and intervened in the city’s volumetric shifts. The envisioned outcome would be the almost automatic production of the necessary material conditions for densification or its efficient regulation, depending on the realities of different urban zones.

Despite their pragmatic sensibilities, Grupo POT planners had ultimately subscribed to an overtly technical approach that naturalized densification and left unquestioned its politics and forms. Although they had opposed developers’ speculative mining of density, experts had still approached densification as a taken-for-granted phenomenon waiting to be harnessed. In this context, the edificabilidad proposal embodied a mode of cybernetic planning “centered on a model of feedback-driven adaptive systematicity” and aimed at “manag[ing] dynamic, real-time environmental inputs,” to borrow Dominic Boyer’s definition of the “cybernetic imagination.”⁴⁴

Planners, however, were not unaware of the problems created by this approach. Would these instruments not simply “trail behind the city’s trends,” one city planner asked, instead of more substantively “transforming it”? At one official meeting, Catalina, the senior planner, was even more vocal about her misgivings. She worried that by focusing on the provision of the local infrastructures—the creation of “self-sustaining zones”—they would ultimately reproduce the city’s “logic of perpetual inequity.” In what sounded like an admonition, she exclaimed, “What we need is to transfer [resources] to the zones that are in real need!” The proposal’s lack of direct engagement with deeper political questions was something that several other Grupo POT experts acknowledged, although less openly. Fernando, a public official who had worked alongside the team, once told me, off the record, that he felt “they were letting the private sector act and not demanding enough as [the] public sector.” During one of our final conversations, Diego reluctantly admitted that the revision project had failed to articulate a policy for affordable housing and thereby address one of the city’s most critical problems. Andrés, who was usually enthusiastic about the edificabilidad mechanism, also became concerned about how it “tied [contributions and investments] to real estate dynamics” and how this would limit redistribution to zones with less intense densification patterns.

During the revision of the POT, technical considerations had ultimately overshadowed the sociopolitical contexts of planning. Cybernetic planning had privileged the idea of the efficient management and taxation of densities. In doing so, the revision project had continued to treat densification as a natural urban trend, accepting its forms and relations as paradigmatic. As a result, planners had addressed substantive political questions—for example, about access to housing and redistribution—only timidly and as ex post facto issues. Density emerged as a technical platform that further obfuscated the city’s contentious conflicts over property and belonging. Despite commitments to greater state intervention in land markets and public funding of collective goods, state-backed real estate development had continued to be at the core of planning visions. Far from a transformative project, the POT revision implied the expansion and refinement of territorial techniques and their more subtle and encompassing reinscription into the language of densification.

The Contradictions of Progressive Planning

By the end of 2011, the Grupo POT planners were coming to terms with the looming failure of the revision project. After several months of busy routines and long work sessions, the team’s mezzanine cubicles were now eerily still. With their contracts expiring in a few months, experts were looking ahead to new jobs and consultancies, while career bureaucrats were preparing for the change of administration. During this period, Grupo POT members came to accept the political limitations of their technocratic approach and the extent to which it had contributed to the revision’s demise. On our way back to the office from the group’s usual lunch spot one day, Diego lamented how “mere politics” had blocked the plan, while he described himself and his colleagues as “técnicos” who had nothing to do with the world of “personal interests and ambitions.” After a few steps he added, “Although as técnicos we are also political in the sense that we have a particular vision of the city.” It was the tenuousness of this vision that Diego and others had come to reluctantly blame, at least in part, for the collapse of the revision. Looking back on their work, Andrés was openly critical about the gap between the group’s technical work and its political resonance: “Nobody wants to be planned, and least of all politicians.” For him, the modification project had failed to “allow [social and political actors] to play their part [in the planning process]” and “grab them [agarrarlos] through technical knowledge.”

If the Grupo POT planners had embraced the ideals of liberal technocracy and sought to stay above ideological frays through their pragmatic commitments, the new group of experts under the incoming Petro administration were intent on repoliticizing the POT. In contrast to the previous team’s focus on the micropolitics of implementation and technical adjustments, these experts set out to directly confront entrenched development patterns and economic interests. These two opposing planning factions were no strangers to each other. For years, the soon-to-take-office cadre of planning academics had been critical of practitioners’ moderate and market-friendly interpretation of Colombia’s progressive planning frameworks. Técnicos, in turn, portrayed these critical planners as “too radical,” as a veteran and well-respected planner once told me, and overzealous about financial redistribution mechanisms, or what he called the “urbanism of additions and subtractions.”⁴⁵ Many of these practitioners, who had been for years ensconced in governmental institutions and private-sector consultancies, dismissed activist planners for being “destructive,” “rhetorical,” and “preachy.”

The new administration was thus viewed by many as a seismic shift in planning logics. It represented the waning dominance of doers, to borrow again the language of former mayor and champion of técnicos Enrique Peñalosa (see chapter 2), who legitimized their expert interventions by appealing to pragmatic imperatives. In question here was planning’s long-standing reliance on what Ananya Roy aptly calls the “tyranny of practicality” and its silent complicity with the violent workings of property and development regimes.⁴⁶ The election of the Petro administration, in turn, would test the promise of a form of activist planning aimed at transforming territorial ordering through vigorous political commitments to social justice.

The stakes of this transition, as well as its less visible continuities, were dramatically exposed during the final months of the Grupo POT’s now-struggling revision project. One afternoon in October 2011, soon after the mayoral elections, the team was informed about a long-awaited meeting with the new administration’s top planning adviser. Rosario was a well-known academic who specialized in urban law and had gained prominence among environmental and housing activists. She was both well respected and disdained in urban planning circles. Many técnicos and developers, especially those with ties to the construction sector, considered Rosario to be polarizing in her positions. “She loves anything that means developers have to pay [the state],” one functionary once quipped. Other officials with a more activist bent silently admired her unwavering critiques of “neoliberal development,” as one seasoned bureaucrat put it, commenting on her antagonistic relationship with the Cámara Colombiana de la Construcción (Colombian Chamber of Construction), or CAMACOL. She had also been a vocal adversary of the POT revision, voicing her critiques both from her academic platforms and in her consultancies with environmental agencies. Not surprisingly, Grupo POT experts waited for her in the boardroom with apprehension. “So now we have to pay our respects to her?” one of them asked.

Rosario walked briskly into the room, accompanied by another well-known urban scholar. The cold and curt greetings made it impossible for anyone to ignore the tense atmosphere. After two Grupo POT experts clicked through their PowerPoint presentation, Rosario launched into what seemed more like a cross-examination than a government transition meeting. “Will Planning Zonal Units disappear?” “How do you define the central district?” “What about maintenance of the sewage system?” Planners responded, defensively and unsure about where she was going with her line of questioning. Rosario finally revealed her main point of contention when the discussion arrived at the instrument of edificabilidad and its proposed “contributions [aportes],” in space or cash, of 1 square meter for every 5.6 square meters of construction. “Where does that charge [carga] come from?” she asked, testing the group. Experts scrambled to justify the number, implying it was what developers had considered a reasonable percentage of their sales. Rosario countered: “We have to stop playing the political game of asking developers if they’re willing to pay.” She then stressed developers’ meager contributions in terms of public space and the staggering differences between requirements for development in vacant land and those for construction within the built city. While Grupo POT experts would have in principle agreed with these points, Rosario pushed further and insisted on the need to increase the scope and scale of exactions on development. For her, current attempts were “too modest” and there was still a lot of room to produce the public space and housing that the city needed through more aggressive financial and densification policies. “We need to stop giving away regulations [regalar la norma],” she reprimanded the meeting’s assistants, “and [recognize] there is a significant margin for more verticalization.”

At this point her companion, who had thus far remained silent, interjected with some realpolitik: “Are you still really presenting this revision project to the city council? Because [this term] is over …”

“Of course we are; we still have three months left,” Catalina, the most senior official at the meeting, replied bluntly.

Rosario turned to her friend and echoed his deflating comment: “Yes, you’re right, this is not going to pass.” A politically savvy lawyer who advised the secretary of planning tried to dissipate the tension: “Look, we’ll submit the project to the council and it’s the best of both worlds [if it’s approved]: You can blame us for the revision and you’ll have new regulatory instruments for your administration.” Although the discussion did not go further, the exchange was revealing of the distance between both groups. The Grupo POT had dealt with the political ramifications of their proposal too late and too little. For Rosario and her new cohort of critical planners, political questions about redistribution and equity were at the core of technical interventions. Significantly, however, the meeting had also made apparent the extent to which this more ambitious and progressive agenda would reproduce the grammar of territory-as-density. By relying on existing conceptions of densification and its expert management, planning for sociospatial justice once again risked naturalizing development and property as unquestioned categories. Such assumptions, as progressive planners would themselves later admit, ultimately limited their political agendas and even resulted, in some cases, in the paradoxical favoring of real estate interests.

I met Rosario again several months later, in August 2012; she was now a senior official in the Petro administration working to shift the city’s planning apparatus. For most of this first year of the term, Rosario and a new team of urban experts had been creating an agenda for what they now called urban revitalization (revitalización urbana). Planners aimed to reduce the influence of large-scale developers and focus instead on small construction firms and redevelopment partnerships with residents. The administration also set ambitious goals for the construction of thousands of units of subsidized housing, a significant proportion of which it would seek to assign to victims of the armed conflict—an important postconflict reconciliation gesture—and locate within central districts.⁴⁷ Planners thus imagined a densified inner city, which they called the expanded center (centro ampliado), with mixed-uses, affordable housing, and robust public infrastructure. It was a potentially radical vision that promised to unsettle the dominance of the real estate sector, reverse deep-seated patterns of urban segregation, and prevent further ecological destruction stemming from sprawling urbanization in the city’s peripheries. By the end of the term, however, the city had made only a few symbolic conquests, such as the construction of two subsidized housing complexes on public land in the city center, while its more wide-ranging goals had proven largely elusive.

“The worst mistake … [was] to move from academia to the public sector,” Rosario sighed as she sat at the far end of the meeting room table. She was hinting at the mounting obstacles the administration was facing with its planning agenda, from the stark opposition of the private sector and the national government to managerial weaknesses within the city government and the mayor’s own combative style of governing.⁴⁸ Beyond such barriers, however, her account of the city’s planning disputes revealed the extent to which radical urban visions had been themselves entwined with and limited by the grammar of territory-as-density. According to Rosario, the real estate sector, the national Ministerio de Vivienda, Ciudad y Territorio (Ministry of Housing, City, and Territory), and their supporting “epistemological communities”—allied academics and professionals working within the public sector—had for years “eroded” the country’s so-called urban reform laws of the late twentieth century (Law 9 of 1989 and Law 388 of 1997). These legal frameworks had introduced a range of planning instruments with the promise of promoting the “social function of property,” an ideal cemented in Colombia’s 1991 constitution that aimed to subordinate individual property rights to collective interests. They expanded planning authority to undercut real estate speculation through eminent domain (extinción del derecho de dominio), the mandatory development of vacant land (desarrollo prioritario), and the capture of added value (participación en plusvalías). Ultimately, such measures were meant to unsettle what María Mercedes Maldonado Copello describes as Colombia’s “myth of absolute property” and its long-standing traditions of civil law and individual rights.⁴⁹

For Rosario and her colleagues, the previous POT revision had been yet another weak interpretation of the urban reform laws: Based primarily on the physical or “urbanistic [urbanístico]” understanding of territory, the plan had been mostly aligned with real estate interests. “I always tell my students that planning per se [doesn’t have an objective] because plans can be either mainly regulatory or more interventionist: Either the plan simply accompanies the private sector’s contested interests and follows the market, or the plan intervenes,” she explained. The administration’s new proposal would aim to do the latter and recover the POT’s central mandate. “[The POT] is really about land uses and you shouldn’t be afraid of that. It’s about how activities are distributed in the territory and how land rents are redistributed,” Rosario asserted as she paused for a moment to look at her buzzing mobile phone. And yet, while critical planners decidedly embraced the POT as an “institutional space for the struggle of political forces and very concrete urban interests,” as Rosario put it, their political agendas ultimately unfolded within the entrenched grammar of density. Plans for affordable housing, public space, and environmental sustainability would once again rely on harnessing what Rosario described as the city’s “strong dynamic of densification and growth.”

At their most radical, new plans for inclusionary densities challenged the prerogatives of property development as well as long-held assumptions about planning and the creation of economic value. “The POT,” Rosario explained, “will require [land] transferences [cesiones] for public space [within the built city], and if we manage to include the [significant] percentages for required subsidized housing [we are currently considering], we will really be intervening in the use of land.” Recentering the access to housing and equity inevitably went against what she called the “popular imaginary according to which the state [is meant to] valorize land.” The new POT would open a space for the “arrival of the other [el otro], of the unknown urban poor who had been confined to the periphery, into the [densifying] inner city,” Rosario argued, even if this entailed “devaluing land.” At the same time, and as would become increasingly apparent, such progressive plans continued to adopt density and its assumptions about urban sociomateriality as their points of departure. “I don’t know if we are going to reorganize densification, but at the very least, we are going to bring more social inclusion to the process. We are going to stick the poor [meter pobres] into an area [the inner city] which I am sure is going to transform radically,” Rosario said, concluding our conversation as she prepared for another meeting. More than transforming territorial imaginaries, the implication here was that planning would stretch the logics of property and development to make them more inclusionary. Experts would continue to manage volumetric assemblages, but now with the aim of “stick[ing] the poor” inside, as Rosario tellingly put it, evoking the normalized and depoliticized physics of density. The enduring influence of territory-as-density as a mode of knowledge and intervention would not only limit urban imaginaries but, as experts would later admit, lead to intractable contradictions in the use of progressive planning instruments.

Cake Buildings and Volumetric Designs

In August 2013, Mayor Petro decreed the administration’s new version of the POT, known as the Modificación Excepcional del Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial (Exceptional Modification of the Territorial Ordering Plan—Decree 364), or MEPOT, after much debate and despite the active opposition of the construction sector and its allies in the national government. Lucía, another scholar turned functionary who had overseen the formulation of the revision, described the MEPOT as moving closer to an actual “turn in the politics of territorial ordering.” If previous modification projects had continued to follow the “[real estate] market’s signals,” Lucía told me a few years later, looking back on her time in the Secretaría, the MEPOT had aimed to “generate a better city,” one with less sociospatial segregation and urban sprawl. Densification, however, would still appear as the main path toward such urban ideals. The MEPOT’s promotion of an inclusionary city hinged on the intensive densification of a large central area, the so-called extended center: more than eleven thousand hectares, or approximately 25 percent of Bogotá’s total area. Although the plan conceptualized density as a sociospatial process to be actively intervened in and more decisively molded, densification still emerged as a naturalized dynamic whose benefits were waiting to be reaped.

The conflicts surrounding inclusionary densification surfaced early in the revision process when the national housing ministry issued a decree (Decree 075 of 2013) restricting municipal regulations for the production of affordable housing on urbanized land. “So, we came up with something else,” Lucía explained. In a similar vein to the previous revision’s edificabilidad proposal, the MEPOT would create incentives linked to greater floor-area-ratio allowances. But in addition to introducing general urban contributions (cargas urbanísticas) linked to public space and infrastructure, the plan established guidelines so that a percentage of construction areas could be devoted to affordable housing (vivienda de interés prioritario) or translated into an equivalent payment to a municipal urban housing fund. Additionally, the percentages of required affordable housing would be lower if developers constructed the housing on-site or within the limits of the extended center. As Lucía explained, “It was a mechanism to gradually generate small affordable housing projects mixed in with other uses, with housing of other socioeconomic strata, [to] transform the stigma of segregation this city has so deeply interiorized.”

The MEPOT’s promises were short-lived. In March 2014, less than seven months after the MEPOT was decreed, an administrative tribunal suspended the plan indefinitely on procedural issues: It had been a leguleyada, or legal sleight of hand, as one city official put it. Lucía told me that the city administration followed the legal defeat with a “shock strategy” of its own, seeking to recover the “territorial vision” inscribed in the MEPOT. A key component within this new regulatory tactic was Decree 562, issued by the city government in December 2014. Although the areas it covered were less expansive compared to the MEPOT, the decree made similar commitments to promoting “densification with urbanistic contributions” in central districts that were either “frozen in time” or developing lot by lot without making contributions to the city—such as the infamous BD Bacatá skyscraper. The decree represented an evolution of financial instruments, Lucía noted, and of “volumetric regulations.” Its generous building allowances would be tempered not only by infrastructural and housing contributions but also through elaborate codes on building setbacks and “terraced volumes [volumetría escalonada].” Decree 562 and its contestations would be materialized in what several planners called “[wedding] cake buildings [ponqués]”: the ziggurat-like tiered towers that started dotting the Bogotá skyline in 2015.

Opposition to the Skyscraper Decree, as it became known, was fierce and quickly jumped from the legal battlefield to the public sphere. News media published reports, and opinion columns warned that the regulation would unleash chaos and destroy the city’s “social fabric.”⁵⁰ The country’s leading newspaper, El Tiempo, featured a video news story on its YouTube channel in which an eminent architect toured buildings erected under Decree 562. He described the “aggressiveness” and the “threatening” nature of their designs and decried the “deep wounds” they had left behind.⁵¹ CAMACOL commissioned a short film titled The Dark Side of Skyscrapers in Bogotá, which circulated widely on YouTube and among planning and development circles under the hashtag #ojoal562 (#keepaneyeon562).⁵² Using colorful stop-motion animation, the developer-backed video argued that the regulation would benefit property owners, constructors, and the administration at the expense of “the city and its citizens, who will lose, who will have to live in the insufferable chaos of Bogotá, which will be worse when it feeds off this decree.” In denouncing the decree’s deleterious effects, it called for planned densification of the kind that had failed throughout Bogotá’s modern history, and it willfully ignored the fact that the city had already been densifying in these areas with no obligations or contributions. Elite ownership and long-running development interests informed these critiques, as did ideologies of segregated, expansionary, and low-density residential urbanism.

In the end, large-scale developers had sought to preserve their high-profit and fairly unregulated construction activities in the built city. The city administration, in turn, had sought to destabilize the entrenched political economy of the construction sector. As Sonia, another former high-ranking official and university professor, explained to me, “While CAMACOL and the national government trained their sights on us, we educated small and midsized developers about the decree. [Our aim was] to diversify the kind of constructor that took on these projects.” The decree was less beneficial, Sonia continued, for large-scale developers that already owned extensive areas of land, had very high financial expectations, and operated with complex administrative structures. But many developers, both small and large, rushed to request building permits under the decree: In fifteen months, around nine hundred had been approved, and many others were still under consideration.⁵³ According to Sonia, the administration collected around US$63 million in these months, while the total funds obtained through other value-capture mechanisms over the course of the previous twelve years had been US$46 million. Contrary to the fear of excessively tall, predatory skyscrapers, she added, most buildings had been around twenty stories high.

A few years later, however, after returning to her university position and with the benefit of hindsight, Sonia had come to terms with the contradictions of her work in the administration. We talked at length about the limitations of progressive planning one afternoon in 2018 in her duplex apartment. She lived in an affordable enclave, or conjunto residencial, of narrow, brick townhouses, much like the ones the administration had envisioned for the extended center and had been unable to materialize. As a young planner who had entered the city government right after finishing her doctorate in urban studies, she had been invested in the administration’s ambitious housing and inclusionary redevelopment plans—her main fields of expertise. After seeing the gradual collapse of the administration’s policies, she had been left wondering how the politics of implementation had undermined radical planning agendas. “I have a self-critique,” she confessed pensively, “and it’s that we focused on the large objectives and forgot the procedures [trámites], everything that passed underneath. [It’s critical to understand] how the bureaucratic machine moves, because the devil is in the details, in the technical details of the chain of urbanistic procedures and land development.” Operational flaws, Sonia and many of her colleagues argued, had critically undermined Decree 562, in particular the delayed creation of a related regulatory decree that finally came out in April 2015 (Decree 138) and established the guidelines for the production of affordable housing. For more than four months, Decree 562 had thus created considerable financial incentives without the complementary affordable housing requirements. “So it was a mistake,” Sonia admitted, “because it unleashed a building permit boom partly because developers wanted to get permits before the Priority Interest Housing [subsidized affordable housing] decree came out.”

As Petro’s term concluded in December 2015, the most visible outcome of the government’s contested plans had been the sprouting of “cake buildings” across a handful of central neighborhoods. Very little subsidized housing had been produced within the extended center, and the considerable funds that the administration had collected remained in the city’s treasury without a clear destination. Yet the technical shortcomings of Decree 562 pointed to a deeper problem. Despite their critical reenvisioning of planning logics, experts had continued to conceive of and intervene in the territory in reductive and depoliticized terms—as a volumetric assemblage of densities. While plans for redistribution and desegregation pushed the boundaries of traditional planning and development, they still operated within the confines of its entrenched imaginaries. The MEPOT’s and Decree 562’s political impetus had been constrained by something similar to the previous proposal’s cybernetic approach: Planners had aimed above all to anticipate and modulate densification as a self-generating and recursive sociomaterial dynamic. Instead of seeking to transform the territory of planning—its underlying logics of control and ownership—they had continued to plan the territory, redesigning its forms and relations within the established coordinates of state and development logics.

Beyond the Horizon of Territory?

The reelection of former Mayor Enrique Peñalosa for a second term starting in 2016 marked a regressive reinstantiation of territory-as-density. Only a month after taking office and signaling his allegiance to the construction sector and landowning elites, Peñalosa repealed Decree 562. By 2018 the city was back to business as usual: Unfettered lot-by-lot rebuilding in the inner city had gathered momentum, and the administration had started calling for the intensive urbanization of vacant land on the city’s outskirts. Lucas, a planner who until recently had worked in an architecture firm, talked to me in his office at the Secretaría about the inevitability of densification and the need to both stimulate and regulate its patterns outside central districts. “Bogotá is already a very dense city,” he said, “and it is one of the few cities in the world that is still densifying. Not even Dhaka is densifying like us.”

In its own project to revamp the POT, the new administration did not entertain questions about different types of densities and lopsided distributions, let alone about housing segregation. Peñalosa’s planners returned instead to the drawing board to “review each zone, block by block of the city,” Lucas explained, “using parametric design.” In what planners presented as an unreservedly technical approach, they would now seek to create a template for the efficient modeling of urban densities across the city’s varying conditions of public infrastructure. Sitting at his desk, Lucas turned to his computer to show me a video that the Secretaría had made to illustrate the city’s approach to densification. Opening with a black screen, the video’s computer-generated animation depicted the settlement of the entire region of the Sabana de Bogotá from an imagined year 0 to 2050. Set to a mellifluous nocturne by Chopin, the video juxtaposed two scenarios. First it showed the accelerated and chaotic urbanization of the Sabana under the title “If the City Grows Without a Project”; then it displayed a slower and more orderly expansion, “If It Grows with a Project.” The video, Lucas explained, was made by “taking the city’s growth algorithm for the past fifty years and reproducing it, making it run along wherever the topography allowed.”

The animation enacted a distinctly reified understanding of densification as a forceful and naturalized sociomaterial dynamic. It also offered a compelling alibi for a planning rationale aimed at creating new land markets for the real estate sector. In Lucas’s phrasing, “Sooner or later this will end up happening, for good or for bad, but the proposal is that it be planned correctly.” Unbridled urban growth across a variable topography emerged here as an inevitable outcome, so that all that planners and citizens could hope for was to anticipate and organize this urban sprawl—what planners now called “dense expansion.” In marked contrast to the MEPOT and Decree 562, and “the monsters it generated in the middle of neighborhoods,” as another planner in the Peñalosa administration put it, this outlook not only justified but urgently called for the urbanization of exceptionally valuable expansion land (suelo de expansión) in north Bogotá. Opening such land for urban development would constitute nothing short of the most profitable opportunity for the real estate sector in the city’s contemporary history. Additionally, this “dense expansion” would encroach on and threaten the connectivity of an important and contested area that regional environmental authorities had declared a natural reserve in 2011.⁵⁴

Despite its contrasting agenda, this most recent iteration of the POT made apparent the shared centrality of density to Bogotá’s shifting planning models. As an urban epistemology and sociomaterial ideology, it proved a common thread in divergent expert frameworks, both obscuring and limiting the politics of urban intervention. In this sense, Lucas’s parametric and algorithmic urbanism gave full expression to the idea of density as a detached, agentive reality that planners had to bring under the reins of calculative and managerial techniques.⁵⁵ And it was precisely by conjuring density as an unwieldy yet generative sociomaterial process that experts, across the political spectrum, enacted specific urban realities and normalized particular political agendas.

What is most significant about the epistemics of density is that it replicated the long-standing relationship between urban planning and territorial control. Planning knowledges centered on densification moved beyond earlier approaches that conceptualized urban space as a static surface to be bounded, smoothed, and tamed. These latter interventions, which defined planning in Bogotá during much of the twentieth century, brought together the logics of militarism and developmentalism with projects to discipline the city’s unruly crowds and terrains. As I showed in previous chapters, this resulted in the contested materialization of urban frontiers and voids, a history that paralleled the conflict-ridden production of a national territory and its unreachable corners.⁵⁶ With the rise of density as a central planning logic, experts now conceptualized urban territory not as a tabula rasa ready to be filled with the wide-ranging visions of urban modernity, but rather as a dynamic sociomaterial formation to be administered and gradually modulated. Experts all but abandoned the language of security so integral to planning practices in previous decades, turning instead to the imagery of distending volumes and solidifying assemblies of things and people. Instead of creating blueprints for new realities, planners would now seek to give form to the city’s unfolding materialities and try to steer them, at their most progressive, toward redistributive and inclusionary outcomes.

Yet far from leaving behind the logic of territory, such approaches recast it in the language of density. As the taken-for-granted medium of urbanism, territory-as-density naturalized specific sociomaterial relations and political-economic assumptions. Cyphered in the epistemology of density were once again the entrenched territories of the state, property, and development.⁵⁷ For all their pragmatic commitments, the city’s new plans were “still modernist urbanism,” as Javier, the Grupo POT’s legal expert, once told me. Planners bounded densities in space and translated them into quantifiable magnitudes, ultimately seeking to render them into “controllable futures,” he further noted. Their attempts to reshape the city’s volumetric densities—from the narrowly technical to the more progressive and political—had thus tacitly reinscribed the univocal vision of territory as the product of modern sovereignty and as a space to be parceled out according to the logics of individual ownership and market dynamics. Even apparently radical agendas aimed at reversing deep-seated patterns of urban segregation and exclusion—most notably the Petro administration’s plans for subsidized housing in the inner city—became subordinated to the assumptions of territory-as-density. They emerged as collateral effects of the densifying landscape of real estate development, rather than the transformative political projects planners had intended: a reordering of sociomaterial elements—for instance, Rosario’s quip about “stick[ing] the poor” inside central districts—within a fundamentally unchanged structure.

At stake here, ultimately, was planning’s enduring entanglements with colonial and modernist projects aimed at redressing what Vincent Gouëset calls Colombia’s “deficit of territoriality.”⁵⁸ This was reflected in the notion of ordenamiento territorial, which was institutionalized in the 1991 constitutional reform as a means to attain “national integration.”⁵⁹ Ordenamiento territorial took on particular significance as the alleged solution to the country’s deep-rooted and violent conflicts over land and governance. Sociologist and historian Orlando Fals Borda, who famously stated that Colombia was not a nation but a “country of regions,” echoed such promises after having served as a member of the commission for territorial ordering at the 1991 constitutional assembly. He saw ordenamiento territorial as a potential platform for a grassroots reconstruction of administrative institutions from the ground up—what he called “reordered zones” or “peace zones”—and as a critical step in the “search for peace and good governance” and a resolution to the country’s so-called “voids of power.”⁶⁰

Such visions not only resonated with progressive urban plans such as those of the Petro administration; they were also taken up in the landmark negotiations that led to the peace agreement with the FARC in 2016. “Territorial peace,” peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo argued in a public talk in 2013, would follow a “logic of integration and inclusion, based on a new alliance between the state and communities to construct together institutional infrastructure [institucionalidad] in the territory.”⁶¹ But despite acknowledging a “plurality of uses and appropriations of territory,” geographer Alice Beuf notes, ordenamiento territorial continued to reproduce, in practice, a “reductive conceptualization [of territory] … as an instrument of domination in the service of development.”⁶² Progressive and emergent postconflict rearticulations of territorial ordering were thus still very much territory by design. Experts imagined a unitary territory to be known, managed, and reshaped: the territory of the state, property, and development.

A central question in this regard is whether and how city planning can move beyond what Arturo Escobar, in a critique of urban design and habitability, calls “heteropatriarchal capitalist colonial modernity.”⁶³ Following his earlier and influential work on the “colonizing politics of development knowledge,” Escobar turns to design, broadly construed, as a crucial site for decolonial struggles and the remaking of lifeworlds.⁶⁴ Drawing on his long-running scholarly and activist work with Afro-Colombian communities in the country’s Southwest around processes of regional ordenamiento territorial and local ecological, cultural, and socioeconomic struggles, Escobar asks, “Can design be reoriented from its dependence on the marketplace toward creative experimentation with forms, concepts, and materials?”⁶⁵ Extending this question in the terms of this book, one could ask whether urban planning and design can be untethered from deep-seated epistemologies of security, order, and development. What would planning look like if its horizon were not territory—in the singular—and territorial control? For Escobar, the answer lies unequivocally outside the realm of liberal modern epistemologies and their inherently destructive and “defuturing” effects. Expanding world-making imaginaries to render them truly transformative—what Escobar calls “autonomous” and “transitional” design—thus necessitates a radically different grounding. This is what he describes as non-Western, place-based, “relational ontologies” emerging from the experiences and knowledges of Indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descendant groups. Of central importance for Escobar is subalterns’ own making of alternate territories, those “other territorialities” that starkly oppose the expanding territory of capital and the state and embody “strategies for the persistence of the place-based and communal weave of life.”⁶⁶

In the context of contemporary sociopolitical and ecological crises, the attention to “new territorialities” and their liberatory potential is undoubtedly urgent and far exceeds academic debates—something that is clearly attested to by Latin American social movements and their sustained engagement with territorial politics in the past decades.⁶⁷ At the same time, however, burgeoning calls for the decolonization of planning and territory risk replicating the persistent “dualisms of modernity,” as Kiran Asher argues, as well as “reify[ing] … the ‘non-Western’ and other ‘Others’” on which many of these critiques rest, not to mention modernity and the state itself.⁶⁸ Such slippages may lead to what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui describes as the “cooptation and neutralization” of counterhegemonic agendas, something that in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America has been most visible in the codification of multiculturalism and territorial autonomy in the law.⁶⁹ In this regard, Rivera Cusicanqui reminds us that “there can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice.”⁷⁰ In Bogotá, as I have shown in this chapter, progressive planning did not sufficiently reckon with the materiality of territory, its underlying violence and security-laden contours, and the political-economic conditions that historically shaped ordenamiento territorial in Colombia. New urban rhetoric about social justice and inclusion thus came dangerously close to enacting “the policy of changing everything so that everything remains the same,” as Rivera Cusicanqui puts it.⁷¹

These contradictions call for analyses of urban planning and development not only as discursive or epistemological constructs but as conflict-ridden and sociospatially mediated processes that are materialized in wide-ranging ways. As much as planning is born out of this “political wrangling,” as Ajantha Subramanian argues about development policy, so, too, are local communities shaped by their struggles against and alliances with state officials, experts, and economic actors.⁷² Far from representing unitary worldviews and experiences, let alone overarching political and economic interests, subaltern groups are shot through with divisions and hierarchies. Reimagining urbanism as an anticolonial and desecuritized project must therefore begin with the study of the conjunctures—historical, political-economic, epistemic, and material—within which specific forms of colonial capitalist modernity are enacted and contested in the making of urban worlds.⁷³ In Bogotá, this entails tracing the specific circumstances through which planning is shaped by state officials, developers, experts, and city dwellers. Of critical importance here is what Subramanian calls the “sedimented forms of power and protest” through which people signify and materialize strategies of rule, rights claims, and modes of belonging.⁷⁴ It is these obdurate sediments and their materialization through territory, security, and dispossession that I have been probing in this book to better understand the emergent potentials and entrenched limits of urban imaginaries. Urbanism as warfare, from this vantage point, is far from finished and all-encompassing. Rather, it is a paradoxical and irregular epistemic and sociomaterial space that is continually redefined.

I turn next to another, more localized and allegedly progressive plan in Bogotá to look at how the making of urban knowledge presses against the limits of security and violence while reinscribing their “stubborn materiality,” to use Donald Moore’s phrasing.⁷⁵ At stake here is the very possibility of a “dissenting design imagination,” to borrow from Escobar again, in which experts and non-experts “think communally and relationally.”⁷⁶ Such planning and design spaces, and their potential for epistemic multiplicity, transformative imaginaries, and the co-construction of new urban worlds do not unfold in a vacuum. They are mediated by the layered repertoires and materialities of territorial control and propertied citizenship so central to Colombia’s enduring political violence and elusive postconflict era. Contemporary plans in Bogotá and their alternative visions, I argue in the following chapter, reveal the entrenched workings of what Rivera Cusicanqui calls a “political economy of knowledge,” in which hierarchies, modes of domination, and everyday violences are woven into collaborative and inclusionary schemes and their everyday materialities.⁷⁷