Notes
Introduction
1. I am following John Austin’s (1975) conceptualization of speech acts as “performatives” that have concrete social effects. I am also drawing inspiration from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s reflections on grammar as linguistic patterns and uses that are radically grounded in experience and inextricably connected to “life-form[s]” (1953, 7). In a passage that is particularly relevant to my thinking about urban grammars and spaces, Wittgenstein conceptualizes language as a city: “a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses” (7).
2. This is Foucault’s (2003, 16) inversion of Clausewitz’s famous dictum, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” My analysis is closely related to scholarship on the everyday entanglements between planning practices and militarism, particularly in the context of colonial violence and sectarian and ethnonationalist conflict (Çelik 1997; Yiftachel 2006; Weizman 2007; Crane 2017; Bou Akar 2018).
3. Virilio 1994, 18.
4. The most common terms for “renewal” within planning circles are renovación and the more technical redesarrollo (redevelopment). I use “renewal,” “renovation,” and “redevelopment” interchangeably and reserve “revitalization” (revitalización) for the self-described progressive renewal plans launched since the early 2010s (see chapters 5 and 6).
5. See Andrés Salcedo Fidalgo’s (2015) illuminating analysis of internal displacement in Colombia and the production of urban space.
6. Goldstein 2010, 488.
7. Graham 2010.
8. It is important to note here that after 9/11, the United States’ war on drugs under Plan Colombia (1999) was reframed as part of the broader war on terror. Drug eradication and counterinsurgency were recast as counterterrorist efforts: As María Clemencia Ramírez (2019, S138) observes, “Guerrillas came to be known as ‘narco-terrorists,’ peasant coca growers were criminalized, and the US view of Colombia exclusively through a national security lens was reinforced.”
9. Coaffee 2016.
10. In his ethnography of environmental risk in Bogotá, Austin Zeiderman usefully identifies the convergence of multiple and overlapping dangers, or what he aptly terms “hybrid threats” (2016, 82–88). Similarly, Javier Auyero develops the notion of “concatenated violence(s)” to conceptualize the interconnections between wide-ranging modalities of violence and harm (2015, 89). More broadly, Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois write about a “violence continuum” and what they call the “little violences” of everyday life (2004, 19).
11. For scholarly discussions of this notion in Colombia, see, e.g., Uribe Tobón 1990; Ramírez 1997; Blair Trujillo 2009.
12. The literature in this field is extensive, but for a milestone of what came to be known as “violentology,” see Comisión de Estudios Sobre la Violencia 1987. For an illuminating analysis of the emergence of violentology as a field of expertise and institutional practice, see Villaveces-Izquierdo 1998.
13.For an account centered on the ordinary and experiential dimensions of violence, see Jimeno and Roldán 1998.
14. Boyer and Lomnitz 2005.
15. Jimeno 2001, 239.
16. See Serje 2005; Uribe 2017.
17. Goldstein 2010.
18. For an anthropological study of “vernacular security,” see Bubandt 2005.
19. On the concept of “vernacularization” in the context of human rights discourses, see Goodale and Merry 2007; Merry 2009.
20. Martin Heidegger’s article “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1971), which I am paraphrasing, has been widely influential in architecture circles. While the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his involvement in the German Nazi Party are beyond the scope of this book, it is crucial to recognize what architectural theorist Neil Leach (1998, 35) describes as the “violence repressed” within his phenomenological elaboration of dwelling in connection to ideas of national identity and homeland.
21. Mumford 1961, 44.
22. Mumford 1961, 388–89.
23. See, e.g., Rama (1984) 1996; Kagan 2000.
24. For a detailed political-economic history that also acknowledges the militaristic overtones of Haussmann’s renovation plans, see D. Harvey 2003.
25. Wright 1991; Rabinow (1989) 1995; Çelik 1997.
26. M. Davis 2006, 205, 109.
27. Rabinow (1989) 1995, 9. See also Holston 1989.
28. Rabinow (1989) 1995, 9.
29. Rabinow (1989) 1995, 149, 12. According to Rabinow, his analysis is a continuation of Michel Foucault’s work on the emergence of modern welfare (8). In this sense, it is intimately connected to Foucauldian conceptualizations of governmentality, biopower, and security as distinctive forms of governing populations and structuring spaces. In his lectures in the Collège de France, Foucault was particularly interested in the relationship between security apparatuses and town planning: “Sovereignty capitalizes a territory, raising the major problem of the seat of government, whereas discipline structures a space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional distribution of elements, and security will try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events or possible elements, of series that will have to be regulated within a multivalent and transformable framework” (2007, 20).
30. As Rabinow ([1989] 1995, 11) explains, “The problem that social thinkers, reformers, architects, engineers, and emperors posed for themselves was one of bringing both norms and forms into a common frame that would produce a healthy, efficient, and productive social order.”
31. See, e.g., Foucault (1966) 1973; Said 1979; de Certeau 1984; Mitchell 1988. For a dialectical critique of modern sight based on Walter Benjamin’s work, see Buck-Morss 1991. On the role of “visualism” in anthropological knowledge, see Fabian 1983.
32. J. Scott 1998. For a critique that shows how planning instruments create opacity rather than transparency and legibility, see Hull 2012b.
33. Haraway 1988, 581.
34. See Herzfeld 2005; T. Li 2005.
35. See Mitchell 2002. For an alternative representation of planners, see Peattie 1987. For literature on the reflexive and situated character of planning expertise, see, e.g., Schön 1983; Suchman 1987.
36. Drawing inspiration from actor-network theory and new materialist theories, social scientists have countered human-centered accounts of social life that do not sufficiently recognize the agency and qualities of things and material networks. While I build on this work, I do not emphasize nonhuman agency but rather highlight the relational dynamic between social actors’ discursive performances and the constitution of urban materialities (Navaro-Yashin 2012). More than materiality, then, the main concern here is the materialization of urban security (Barad 2003, 810; Aradau 2010; Appadurai 2015). This is what Arjun Appadurai has described as a “mode of materialization”: the mediations—ideational and practical—through which “matter comes to matter” (233–34). Adopting this perspective usefully refocuses attention on the status of human action and political accountability within complex techno-material assemblages.
37. See, e.g., Smith 1996; Samara 2010; Perry 2013; D. Davis 2013; Gledhill 2015; Larkins 2015.
38. Smith 1996.
39. Gledhill 2015, 49.
40. Gledhill 2015, 19.
41. Gledhill 2015, 107.
42. Perry 2013, 157.
43. Caldeira 2000, 19. See also Low 2003.
44. Caldeira 2000, 38.
45. In a major contribution to this discussion, Brazilian urban scholar and activist Raquel Rolnik (2019) offers a sweeping critique of global housing policy and finance as forms of “urban warfare” and “colonization.” Although this book adopts a related perspective, instead of taking up warfare as an analytical category or metaphor, I attend to its grounded uses, deployments, and materializations by a range of urban actors. Here the emphasis is on how urbanism is rendered into a mode of warfare.
46. See, for example, Lakoff and Collier 2008; Gusterson and Besteman 2010; Goldstein 2010; Masco 2014; Jusionyte 2015; Ghertner et al. 2020; Al-Bulushi et al. 2023. Scholarship on Colombia has importantly added to these discussions by examining articulations of security in diverse fields such as ecotourism (Ojeda 2012), environmental risk (Zeiderman 2016), business politics (Moncada 2016), and marketing (Fattal 2018).
47. This ethnographic scholarship includes works on urban fortification and segregation (Caldeira 2000; Low 2003), rights and citizenship (Goldstein 2012), neoliberal development (O’Neill and Thomas 2011), mobility (Monroe 2016), and environmental risk (Zeiderman 2016). In close relationship to this literature, Zoltán Glück and Setha Low (2017, 289) have noted the centrality of “the scale of the city” for “the anthropology of security” and the need to further theorize and develop an “urban-focused analysis of ‘security.’”
48. On the politics of “vertical urbanism,” see, e.g., O’Neill and Fogarty-Valenzuela 2013; Harris 2015; Graham 2016. For an analysis of highway, bridge, and tunnel networks as security infrastructure, see Weizman 2007. On urban surveillance and technology-infused spaces, see Graham 2011.
49. Suchman et al. 2017, 984.
50. Murphy 2016, 443.
51. My formulation here builds on Henri Lefebvre’s influential work on the “social production of space” and his “conceptual triad” of “spatial practices,” “representations of space,” and “representational spaces” (1991, 33). I am particularly interested in a phenomenological exploration of the closely entangled composition of urban knowledges and materialities.
52. Murphy 2016, 443.
53. Nader 1969, 292. See also Hannerz 1998.
54. Nader 1969, 292.
55. See Bourdieu 1977.
56.Boyer 2008. See also Holmes and Marcus 2005.
57. Boyer 2015b, 99.
58. Boyer 2015b, 99.
59. Boyer and Howe 2015.
60. Taussig 2003, 152.
61. Pérez Fernández 2010.
62. Berney 2017.
63. Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá 1998, 466.
64. Elden 2017, 219. For a materialist and affective theorization of terrain, see Gordillo 2018.
65. Elden 2010.
66. Jaramillo 2006.
67. On insurgency in urban citizenship and planning, see Holston 2008; Miraftab 2009.
68. For a discussion of the city as palimpsest, see Huyssen 2003.
69. Aihwa Ong (2005, 339) defines “ecologies of expertise” as “novel combinations of mobile knowledge and actors connected to diverse sites and labors.”
70. I met most residents thanks to a combination of referrals and introductions from officials and experts, contacts made during public events and planning outreach activities, and serendipitous encounters in downtown neighborhoods targeted by renewal. Although some of the residents were established community leaders long involved in struggles against displacement, many others had only just become engaged in antirenewal activism as a result of more recent waves of expropriation and eviction.
71. Amar 2013, 15. For analyses of the notion of “human security,” see also Duffield 2001; Gledhill 2015.
72. Amar 2013, 27. It is worth noting that Michel Foucault’s (2003) discussion of the shifts from sovereignty and discipline to biopower have inspired somewhat linear narratives based on the evolution of governmental technologies in the West. Despite often suggesting such a sense of progression, however, Foucault also writes, “So, there is not a series of successive elements, the appearance of the new causing the earlier ones to disappear… . In reality you have a series of complex edifices in which, of course, the techniques themselves change and are perfected, or anyway become more complicated, but in which what above all changes is the dominant characteristic, or more exactly, the system of correlation between juridico-legal mechanisms, disciplinary mechanisms, and mechanisms of security” (2007, 8).
73. Bogotá’s rigid class stratification is organized around a geographical imaginary in which the South is poor and the North is affluent (cf. Uribe Mallarino 2008).
74. See Fortun and Cherkasky 1998.
75. For an anthropological discussion of “recursivity,” see Kelty 2005.
76. Corsín Jiménez 2017, 455.
77. Rao 2006. See also Holston 1991, 2008; Simone 2010; Roy 2011; Caldeira 2017.
78. Rao 2009, 371, 377.
79. Herzfeld 2006.
80. Suchman 2011, 3.
81. Billé 2017. See also Elden 2013; Harris 2015; Graham 2016. In relationship to the notion of “density,” see Rao 2007, 2015a; McFarlane 2016.
82. Stoler 2016, 27.
83. On the political possibilities of fragmentary, makeshift urbanism, see Simone and Pieterse 2017; McFarlane 2021.
84. This is what Gordillo (2014, 26), in his historical ethnography of rubble and destruction in the Argentinian Chaco, evocatively calls the “debris of violence.”
85.On the notion of “reverberation” in the study of violence, see Navaro et al. 2021.
86. I draw inspiration from scholarship on ruins and its call to explore the “social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things” (Stoler 2013a, 9).
1. Downtown Ground Zero
1. Vignolo 2013.
2. Castro Roldán and García 2015.
3. Agreement 174 of 2005 (City Council Agreement).
4. Vignolo 2013.
5. This was a program led by the city administration’s Office for Peace, Victims, and Reconciliation (Alta Consejería de Paz, Víctimas y Reconciliación) and incorporated into Petro’s government plan, Plan de Desarrollo Bogotá Humana, 2012–2016.
6. Quoted in Revista Arcadia 2019.
7. El Tiempo 2019a.
8. El Tiempo 2019a.
9. Quoted in Revista Arcadia 2019.
10. Rama (1984) 1996, 10.
11. Rama (1984) 1996, 12.
12. Rojas 2002, 29.
13. Trouillot 1995.
14. Huyssen 2003.
15. Dawdy 2016.
16. For a conceptualization of “residues of violence” in Colombia, see Fanta Castro 2015; Acosta López 2016.
17. Navaro et al. 2021, 8.
18. Navaro et al. 2021, 8.
19. Navaro et al. 2021, 10.
20. See, e.g., Weizman 2007; Aradau 2010; Rodgers and O’Neill 2012; Bou Akar 2018.
21. Delgado 2007, 156.
22. Aprile-Gniset 1983, 93.
23. Aprile-Gniset 1983, 91.
24. El Espectador 2021.
25. Medina 1984, 69.
26. See Alape (1983) 2016 for a monumental oral history of El Bogotazo.
27. Quoted in Braun 1985, 160.
28. Braun 1985, 158.
29. Alape (1983) 2016, 291–96.
30. Alape (1983) 2016, 643.
31. Alape (1983) 2016, 650.
32. Aprile-Gniset 1983, 19.
33. Colón 2005.
34. Tarchópolus 2022.
35. Oelze 2016, 102.
36. Alape (1983) 2016, 109–13.
37. Alape (1983) 2016, 110.
38. Alape (1983) 2016, 305.
39. Aprile-Gniset 1983, 34–36.
40. Arango et al. 1948, 11.
41. Quoted in Aprile-Gniset 1983, 49.
42.Sáenz Rovner 1992.
43. Niño Murcia and Reina Mendoza 2010.
44. Palacios 2006, xiii. See also Uribe 2017.
45. Decree 1370 of 1948.
46. Decree 1286 of 1948.
47. Aprile-Gniset 1983, 211–12.
48. Gusterson 2004. See also Low and Maguire 2019.
49. Sánchez-Beltrán 2022.
50. Aprile-Gniset 1983, 206.
51. DAPD 1964, 31.
52. Quoted in J. Dávila 2000, 172.
53. Quoted in J. Dávila 2000, 172.
54. Sandilands 1990.
55. Brittain 2005.
56. In her study of development policy in Colombia and the United States, Amy Offner (2019, 102) explains how Currie “set himself against the signal projects of the early National Front [governments]” with an “economic plan that proposed to accelerate urban migration and liquidate small farmers.” In addition to his conviction about the futility of making campesinos “compete with large-scale, capitalist-intensive agriculture,” Currie also critiqued dominant frameworks focused on “aided self-help housing” (promoted by agencies such as the Instituto de Crédito Territorial and El Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento Urbano) (102–3). For him, not only were these wasteful programs, but they also tended to concentrate public resources and rising land values in the hands of middle-class beneficiaries. Such was the case of Ciudad Kennedy in Bogotá, a housing development on the city’s western edge that was constructed with the support of the Alliance for Progress and that Offner brilliantly dissects in her book (2019, chap. 3). On housing development and its centrality to ideologies of middle-class democracy, see also López-Pedreros 2019.
57. CID 1969, 19.
58. López-Pedreros 2019, 14.
59. For my account of this history, I rely primarily on Torres Carrillo (1993) 2013; and Pinilla 2014.
60. Torres Carrillo (1993) 2013, chap. 3.
61. Offner 2019, 99.
62. Offner 2019, 99.
63. Torres Carrillo (1993) 2013, 132.
64. Torres Carrillo (1993) 2013, 132.
65. Pinilla 2014, 26.
66. Valencia Tovar 1969, 121.
67. Valencia Tovar 1969, 121.
68. Valencia Tovar 1969, 121.
69. Saldarriaga Roa 2000, 131.
70. Currie 1975, 41. In later years, and after the implementation of projects such as the emblematic Ciudad Salitre in west Bogotá, Currie (1989) himself commented on the failure to include low-income residents, materialize ideas of public ownership, and capture value for social purposes. He considered these projects missed opportunities.
71. Everett 1998.
72. This was despite his initial appeal to leftist movements and working-class voters and his historic legalization of the Confederación Sindical de Trabajadores Colombianos (Union Confederation of Colombian Workers), an organization aligned with the Colombian Communist Party. See Restrepo Jaramillo 2016.
73.See Gill 2016 for an anthropological study of antiunion violence, counterinsurgency, and working-class activism in Colombia.
74. Gallón Galindo 1979, 129.
75. Gallón Galindo 1979, 150.
76. Jaramillo 2006.
77. See, e.g., Rodríguez Silva et al. 2004; Jaramillo 2006; de Urbina González 2012.
78. León Palacios 2008.
79. León Palacios 2008, 195.
80. Alternativa 1974, 24.
81. Alternativa 1975, 7.
82. Alternativa 1975, 7.
83. Alternativa 1975, 7.
84. Alternativa 1975, 7.
85. Alternativa 1975, 7.
86. Alternativa 1975, 7.
87. See Sarmiento Rojas 2017 for a detailed analysis of the struggles around heritage and memory in the renewal of Santa Bárbara.
88. Botero Montoya 2006, 28.
89. Botero Montoya 2006, 27–28.
90. Quoted in Hurtado Muñoz 2011, 30.
91. El Tiempo 1992.
92. Agreement 9 of 1977 (City Council Agreement).
93. Molano Camargo 2010, 134. See also Alape 1980; Torres Carrillo (1993) 2013.
94. Molano Camargo 2010, 122.
95. Molano Camargo 2010, 136.
96. Molano Camargo 2010, 137.
97. Molano Camargo 2010, 120.
98. Molano Camargo 2010, 133. See Ranajit Guha’s (1983) 1988 classic essay on the “prose of counterinsurgency.”
99. Molano Camargo 2010, 133. See also Alape 1980.
100. See Fattal 2018 for a revealing anthropological study of media and guerrilla warfare in Colombia.
101. Juzgado Tercero Penal del Circuito Especializado de Bogotá 2010, 59.
102. See, e.g., Vega Cantor 2016.
103. For a detailed account, see M. Maya Sierra 2005.
104. Bou Akar 2018, 37.
105. Bou Akar 2018, 37.
106. On urban residues and the Palace of Justice, see also Fanta Castro 2015, 91; Acosta López 2016.
107. T. Maya Sierra 2007, 14.
108. T. Maya Sierra 2007, 42.
109. T. Maya Sierra 2007, 14.
110. Alape 1997, 41.
111. Caicedo 1990, 14, quoted in T. Maya Sierra 2007, 14.
112. Caicedo 1990, 14, quoted in T. Maya Sierra 2007, 14.
113. Two artistic interventions in the palace in the following years pointed to the history that the building still occluded—first in ruins and then reconstructed. In March 1988, a group known as Movimiento Obrero Estudiantil Nacional Socialista (MOENS) bombed a theater performance during Bogotá’s emblematic theater festival, the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro. MOENS was the first incarnation of one of Colombia’s largest paramilitary organizations, Autodefensas Campesinas de Córdoba y Urabá. By the time of the bombing, the group had already massacred dozens of workers and union members in the Antioquia region (Rutas del Conflicto 2019). A few days after MOENS’s attack against the Bogotá theater festival, the Catalonian theater troupe Els Comediants took over the ruins of the palace for a street performance titled Dimonis. A carnival of performers dressed as demons descended on the burned building and the Plaza de Bolívar and danced in the middle of an audience of one hundred thousand people with music and fireworks. Dimonis not only represented the reclaiming of urban space but also, in keeping with the group’s own post-Franco roots, constituted “a response … to the murderous terror of fascist fire,” as a local news report described the performance (Orozco 1988, 6). More than a decade later, another artistic performance, now in the recently inaugurated palace, called for a reckoning with Colombia’s history of state violence. In 2002, hundreds of empty wooden chairs slowly crawled down a corner of the building, commemorating the victims of the attack and the recapture of the palace. The intervention by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo evoked the silence and forgetfulness that had characterized the aftermath of the episode and its materialization in urban space. The chairs, as María del Rosario Acosta López (2016, 35) aptly puts it, were “witnesses to an absence” (see also Zeiderman 2016, 58–59).
114. T. Maya Sierra 2007, 22.
115. T. Maya Sierra 2007, 42.
116. Trouillot 1995, 30.
117. Trouillot 1995, 30.
118. El Espectador 2016.
119. Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación 2012, 4.
120. Roca 2012, 9.
121. Roca 2012, 10.
122. Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación 2012, 13.
2. The City as Terrain
1. See Zeiderman 2016, 150–56, for an account of the encampment.
2. Bazuco is similar to crack cocaine. It is made from coca paste and other chemical byproducts of cocaine production.
3. References to martial arts and Japanese manga are common descriptors of the code of violence in downtown ollas. Besides the allusion to the Chinese martial arts tradition of the Shaolin Temple, street enforcers and hitmen are known as Sayayines or Saiyayines, the extraterrestrial warriors in the manga comic Dragon Ball.
4. Gordillo 2014, 25.
5. Gordillo 2014, 10.
6. Stoler 2016, 347–48.
7. The notion of “warscape,” discussed by Nordstrom (1997, 37–39) (see also Hoffman and Lubkemann 2005), calls attention to how violence shapes places and ordinary lives beyond the war zone.
8. Virilio 1994, 45.
9. Virilio 1994, 46.
10. See, e.g., Berney 2017; Franco Calderón 2010; Robledo Gómez and Rodríguez Santana 2008; Zeiderman 2016.
11. Donovan 2008, 43.
12. D. Harvey 2006.
13. Here again I am building on Gordillo’s work and his move away from conceptualizations of “creative destruction” that “subsume [destruction’s] negativity to a creative affirmation” (2014, 81). In conversation with the work of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, he writes instead about the “destruction of space” and “destructive production” as processes that need to be explored in their own terms and in all their complexity and variation (81).
14. Clausewitz (1832) 1989, 109.
15. See Gordillo 2023 for a theorization of “hostile terrain” as the material and affective grounding for revolutionary politics.
16. Weizman 2007, 186.
17. Weizman 2007, 5.
18. Weizman 2007, 262. For critical analyses of the geographies of occupation in Palestine that move beyond the narrow scope of security and that consider a broader range of actors and quotidian practices see, e.g., Harker 2020 and Rabie 2021. For a textured ethnography of urban planning and development in Beirut and their complex roles in propagating the logics of warfare, see Bou Akar 2018.
19. Graham 2011. For a discussion of the political challenges of an anthropology of the “forever war” and its “security encounters,” see Glück 2024. See Al-Bulushi, Ghosh, and Grewal 2023 for an important call to decenter Euro-American geographies of militarism and state security in the anthropology of security.
20. The Israel Defense Forces’ near obliteration of Gaza between 2023 and 2024 has taken the urbanization of warfare to new urbicidal extremes. In addition to what international law and human rights organizations have denounced as the genocidal killing of tens of thousands of civilians since 2023 (see, e.g., Human Rights Watch 2024), approximately 66 percent of Gaza’s structures had been damaged or destroyed by September 2024, according to a United Nations assessment (UNOSAT 2024). For a longer history of urbicide in Palestine, see Abujidi 2014.
21. Graham 2011, 138.
22. Elden 2017, 223. See also Gordillo 2018.
23. See Hoffman 2019 for an illuminating analysis of security interventions and urban terrain, and for his emphasis on security operations’ dependency “on the blunt instruments of instituting lines and violently carving shapes in urban space” (S105).
24. Navaro-Yashin 2012, 5. In a similar vein, Gordillo (2018, 54) coins the notion of “affective geometry” to analyze “how bodies are affected by and affect terrain.” His “materialist phenomenology” is thus also committed to bringing together human experience and the physical dimensions of terrain.
25. Despite his penetrating critique of the militarized effects of planning, Weizman (2007) tends to portray the relationship between planning knowledge and warfare primarily as one of ideological mystification, a form of political “camouflage” (91).
26. See, e.g., Mejía Pavony 1999; Carbonell Higuera 2010.
27. Carbonell Higuera 2010, 227.
28. Carbonell Higuera 2010, 236.
29. Quoted in Carbonell Higuera 2010, 236.
30. Carbonell Higuera 2010, 236.
31. Carbonell Higuera 2010, 238.
32. Carbonell Higuera 2010, 237. See also Jaramillo 2006.
33. Carbonell Higuera 2010, 238.
34. Morris Rincón 2011, 26.
35. Cartucho is also the name of the lily flower, which evokes both the gardens of the neighborhood’s bourgeois past and spaces of death, given the flower’s symbolic association with funerals.
36. I am expanding on Navaro-Yashin’s (2012, 27) conceptualization of “affective geography” as “the merging of the forces, energies, and affective potentialities of human beings, with their natural, built, and material environment” (see also Gordillo 2018). Affective geographies, I argue, are inextricable from individuals’ epistemological orientations.
37.Quoted in Morris Rincón 2011, 37.
38. According to Morris Rincón (2011, 54), the term gancho originates from the colored clips or hooks used to pack bazuco doses. Different jíbaros (drug dealers), their foot soldiers, and their products were identified by specific colors—for example, gancho azul (blue hook) or gancho amarillo (yellow hook).
39. Bedoya Lima 2002.
40. Official representations of El Cartucho did not distinguish among the inhabitants of these buildings—impoverished renters, bazuco smokers, and dealers—and criminalized them all as members of the ganchos. Moreover, such accounts disregarded the complex political and social roles that ganchos performed within the neighborhood.
41. El Tiempo 1999.
42. Caldeira 2000.
43. Salcedo Fidalgo 2015.
44. For an intimate account of the relationship between urban life and violence in the Colombia of the late 1980s, see Braun 1994.
45. See, e.g., Safford and Palacios 2002; Serje 2005; Palacios 2006; Uribe 2017. For a broader theorization of how the “margins” are constitutive of state practices, see Das and Poole 2004.
46. Serje 2005. See also Ramírez 2011; Uribe 2017.
47. Serje 2005.
48. Gordillo 2018, 55.
49. Roitman 2014, 13.
50. Cepeda Ulloa 2000.
51. In his work as an international consultant, Peñalosa speaks regularly at academic, policy, and expert venues. He gave a TED Talk about one of his most widely known projects, the Transmilenio Bus Rapid Transit system, in 2013 (“Why Buses Represent Democracy in Action,” September 2013, TEDCity2.0).
52. J. Dávila 2000.
53. Proa 1947, 7.
54. McCann 2011, 119.
55. United Nations Conference on Human Settlements 1976b, 2–3.
56. F. Scott 2016, 228.
57. F. Scott 2016, 233.
58. United Nations Conference on Human Settlements 1976a, 16.
59. See, e.g., Ferguson 1990; Mitchell 2002; Li 2007.
60. Clausewitz (1832) 1989; Foucault 1980c; Virilio and Lotringer 1983. On the military origins of logistics, see Cowen 2014.
61. This is what Foucault (1980b, 196) defined as “strategies of relations of forces supporting, and supported by, types of knowledge.”
62. Clausewitz (1832) 1989, 71.
63. Kornberger 2012, 93.
64. Kornberger 2012, 98.
65. This is the Foucauldian idea of power as a relational field that has strategic effects and operates beyond individual agency and intentionality (Foucault 1980a, 203–24). I am interested here, in contrast, in the contingent and performative character of strategizing.
66. As Masco (2014, 35) argues, “theatricality” is central to the creation of military theaters of operation and the enactment of their boundaries.
67. On the politics of aesthetics, see the influential work of Jacques Rancière (2006). For a scholarly analysis of the role of aesthetics in urban governance, see Ghertner 2015.
68. On the links between Colombian regions and racial and cultural hierarchies, see Wade 1993.
69. Williams 1975, 46.
70.Williams 1977, 132.
71. Weizman 2007, 12.
72. Experts’ adherence to this environmental determinism was itself revealing of the politics of material affordances (Gibson 1979; Dokumaci 2020): a fixing of the emergent and variable relationalities between people and their environments.
73. Elyachar 2010. See also Simone 2004.
74. But as Erika Robb Larkins (2015, 149) points out in her ethnography of favela pacification in Rio de Janeiro, such militarized policing strategies also deployed tactics to garner community support. Building public amenities, she notes, has been central to Rio’s recent policing interventions, which resonate closely with the global counterinsurgency strategy of “clear, hold, build.”
75. On the World Bank’s “involuntary resettlement” policies, see Cernea 1988.
76. I am in conversation here with Zeiderman’s work on the politics of security in Bogotá and his insights about the connections between disparate security logics, from risk management to crime control, and what he calls an “entanglement of diverse dangers” (2016, 82). His account, however, positions environmental risk as an encompassing technology of urban governance, and not enough is said about how logics of warfare and policing continue to shape urban models of intervention. In writing about El Cartucho, he argues that a “shift from center to periphery was encouraged by the progress of the Urban Renewal Program” (15). What I found, instead, was that many of the tactics employed in the Tercer Milenio had in fact originated in experiments to govern urban and rural peripheries. Additionally, even as autoconstructed peripheries became primary targets of state intervention, downtown continued to be a key focus of urban anxieties and policies. What this suggests, then, is a dialectical relationship between center and periphery in which urban security logics are continually reassembled and hybridized across time and space.
77. Fassin and Pandolfi 2010, 9.
78. On the emergence of “human terrain” in the US military and its relationship to anthropology, see R. González 2010.
79. Fassin and Pandolfi 2010, 10.
80. R. González 2010, 116.
81. Taussig 1999.
82. See Bornstein 2012 for an analysis of humanitarian and development aid through a critical engagement with Marcel Mauss’s theorization of the gift.
83. See Mawdsley 2012.
84. El Tiempo 2000.
85. El Tiempo 2005b.
86. It is important to note here that a common pejorative term for unhoused people in Colombia is “disposable” (desechable).
87. El Tiempo 2005a.
88. Stoetzer 2018, 308.
89. See Abderhalden Cortés 2007. The performance was called Prometeo, and it was based on Heiner Müller’s version of the myth of Prometheus. The project was part of a larger initiative called C’undúa, which was funded by the administration of Antanas Mockus from 2001 to 2003. Prometeo was carried out as a symbolic reckoning with the displacements caused by Tercer Milenio, reflecting in part the new administration’s more ambivalent positions with regard to the plan. From 2003, Mapa Teatro’s work on El Cartucho–Tercer Milenio was no longer funded by the city government. On Mapa Teatro’s artistic experimentations and their sociopolitical significance during this time, see Taylor 2009; Till 2012.
90. Abderhalden Cortés 2007.
91.Corsín Jiménez 2014, 343.
92. Pérez 2020.
3. The Violence of Bureaucracy
1. Benjamin 1969, 12.
2. Gutierrez Sanín 2001, 69.
3. Gupta 2012, 33. See also Herzfeld 2009; Graeber 2015.
4. Urbina Vanegas 2015, 237.
5. Gledhill 2015, 3.
6. With their focus on bureaucratic artifacts, residents pierced through representation of “the state” as a coherent and unitary entity, tracking instead “the techniques that enable mundane material practices to take on the appearance of an abstract, nonmaterial form” (Mitchell 1999, 77).
7. Chu 2014, 360.
8. I am in conversation with the growing anthropological literature on bureaucratic and legal materiality (Riles 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2007; Hetherington 2011; Hull 2012b; Mathur 2016; Pérez 2016) as well as with scholarship in legal geography (Braverman et al. 2014).
9. Nakassis 2013, 403.
10. See McFarlane 2011 for an illuminating analysis of geographies of urban knowledge, learning, and dwelling. See Ingold 2000 for an anthropological elaboration of the Heideggerian perspective on dwelling.
11. Ahmed 2006, 3.
12. I am drawing here on critiques of the phenomenological anthropology of space and place (such as Ingold’s [2000]) and the lack of sufficient attention to the critical role of sociopolitical relations and mediations (Myers 2000; Corsín Jiménez 2003). For a review of the rich and changing engagements between anthropology and phenomenology, see Dejarlais and Throop 2011. More broadly, I am inspired by critical reworkings of classical phenomenology and their exploration of the ways in which social processes and political practices inflect embodied perception and experience. This includes scholarship on critical race and postcolonial theory (going back to Frantz Fanon’s influential work), critical theories of space inaugurated with the work of Henri Lefebvre, and queer and gender studies (e.g., Ahmed 2006).
13. Hoffman 2007.
14. I follow here Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria and Colin McFarlane (2011, 7), who conceptualize “urban navigations” as the ways in which “people actively move through, practice, cope with, seek to dominate, and learn how to live in the city.”
15. See Pérez Fernández 2010; Berney 2017.
16. Braun 1985; Rojas 2002.
17. Quijano 2000.
18. Appelbaum 1999, 132; Farnsworth-Alvear 2000.
19. Roldán 2003, 136.
20. Roldán 2003, 135.
21. For a study of “fragmented sovereignty” in urban Colombia, see Gill 2016.
22. D. Harvey 1989, 8.
23. The ERU had its first incarnation in 1999 during the Peñalosa administration. At the time, it was a government program directly under the supervision of the mayor’s office and devoted exclusively to the creation of Parque Tercer Milenio (see chapter 2). In 2004, it was reconstituted as a municipal company with its own budget, an independent organizational structure, and a wide-ranging mandate aimed at “channeling private-sector initiatives” to increase both “urban competitiveness” and “citizens’ quality of life” (Agreement 1 of 2004, Concejo Distrital de Bogotá).
24. In Spanish, manzana means both “apple” and “city block.”
25. Pérez Ballén 2015, 71.
26. In other respects, the comedy was also arguably a middle-class idealization of working-class and peasant cultures.
27. Quoted in Peña Ardila 2012, 108.
28. Peña Ardila 2012, 109.
29. Semana 1983a, 1983b. See Peña Ardila 2012, 20.
30. The term “pariah capitalist” was coined by historian Marco Palacios (2006, 203) in his analysis of the “emergent bourgeoisie” of the drug trade of the 1980s.
31. See Duarte 2015.
32. Aya Uribe 2012. Conceptualizations of the urban sensorium can be traced back to Georg Simmel’s ([1903] 1995) and Walter Benjamin’s (2002; see also Buck-Morss 1991) works on the sensorial and aesthetic experience of urban modernity. I build here on this literature and on scholarship focused on the politics of urban sensory regimes (see, e.g., Goonewardena 2005; Rancière 2006; Ghertner 2015; Jaffe et al. 2020).
33. Similar to the Brazilian jeitinho (finding a way), understood as a form of bureaucratic manipulation (Holston 2008, 226), and the Indian jugaad (making do), viewed as a tactic of urban improvisation (Ranganathan et al. 2023, 33), rebusque points to “the hybridity, ingenuity, and opacity of political practices and gray ethical stances practiced by ordinary people in their everyday lives” (Ranganathan et al. 2023, 34).
34. In pointing to one of the block’s most affluent residents and holding up a form of middle-class respectability, here, too, they paradoxically reinscribed the social hierarchies they were opposing.
35. Calvo Isaza and Saade Granados 2002.
36. For a history of coffee in Colombia, see Palacios 1979. On the relationship between political ideology and smallholding regimes, see Bergquist 2017. In addition to these works, I draw inspiration from Lowell Gudmundson’s argument about how coffee smallholding constituted an “anti-left, petty-bourgeois reformism for the cold war era” (1989, 225).
37. Stewart 2011, 446.
38. Stewart 2007, 129.
39. I am in conversation with the growing scholarly literature in geography and anthropology on affective, urban atmospheres (see, e.g., Anderson 2009; Stewart 2011; Edensor 2012; Gandy 2017), and I draw inspiration from the way in which such works hold in productive tension materiality and meaning, things and subjects. I am interested in illuminating what Matthew Gandy (2017, 365) describes as the “politics of urban atmospheres” and their “historically constituted cultural and sociotechnical constellations.”
40. On the contentious history of land boundaries and peasant mobilization, see LeGrand 1986.
41. The concept of “primitive accumulation” was famously coined by Karl Marx (1977) to describe the violent roots of capitalist development (e.g., land enclosures, slavery, conquest, and robbery). The notion has inspired extensive scholarship in agrarian and peasant studies, political economy, and critical urban studies, including David Harvey’s (2006) influential theorization of processes of “accumulation by dispossession” under global neoliberalism. In the case of Colombia, authors have employed the lens of primitive accumulation to analyze the histories and geographies of violent dispossession and the contradictory processes of state formation in the context of the armed conflict (see, e.g., Ojeda 2012; Gómez et al. 2015; Vargas and Uribe 2017; Ballvé 2020). I build on this literature to explore the links between dispossession in the rural frontier and the urban core and, more importantly, to illuminate the ways in which people encounter, render sensible, and critique these forces in everyday urban life.
42. See Salcedo Fidalgo 2015.
43. Hermer and Hunt 1996.
44. Hermer and Hunt 1996, 465.
45. Blomley 2002.
46. The misspelling of “private,” whether intentional or not, was also illustrative of the opposition to the formalism of bureaucratic language.
47. See Ranganathan et al. 2023, 24, for a discussion of “middle-class respectability politics” in the context of global urban development conflicts and corruption narratives.
48. Navaro-Yashin 2012, 20.
49. Navaro-Yashin 2012, 20.
50. Legal anthropologists have long studied the various deployments of laws in social, political, and military disputes. As Sally Falk Moore explains, since at least the 1960s and 1970s the law “was understood [by anthropologists] to be usable in a great variety of ways by people acting in their own interest” (2001, 101). But with Margarita it was not only that she attended to legal process, politics, and agency; she also brought into focus the experience of legal practice as a form of violence.
51. Das 2007, 163.
52. See, e.g., Das 2007; Gupta 2012; Hull 2012b.
53. On the material mimicry of legal forms, see Ellison 2018.
54. Tate 2015.
55. Tate 2015, 236.
56. Stoler 2009, 52.
57. For theorizations of archives as instruments of power and control, see Foucault (1966) 1973; Derrida 1995; Trouillot 1995.
58. On archiving as an imperative in the context of democratic transitions, see Bickford 1999.
59. See Mbembe 2002 for a discussion of the “tactile” and “material” status of archives.
60. Law 975 of 2005.
61. Riaño Alcalá and Uribe 2016.
62. Riaño Alcalá and Uribe 2016, 9.
63. Law 975 of 2005.
64. Riaño Alcalá and Uribe 2016, 8.
65. Law 1448 of 2011.
66. Weizman 2017, 64. Alan Sekula (2014) originally used the term in his analysis of photographic counterarchives. Significantly, he drew inspiration from forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow and his work on victims of state violence across Latin America and beyond.
67. For an illuminating historical ethnography of archival activism in Latin America, see Kirsten Weld’s (2014) study of postdictatorship Guatemala.
68. Weld 2014, 15.
69. As anthropological work has pointed out, beyond a narrow scope of the law, counterforensic practices are productive in a broad political and affective sense (Azuero Quijano 2023; Bozçali 2024).
70. Theidon 2012, 390.
71. Theidon 2015, 324. Since the early 2000s, the state has negotiated paramilitary demobilizations and struck the landmark peace accord with the FARC insurgency, bringing the country closer to a postconflict landscape. And yet violent conflict is far from over, with the operations of a new generation of paramilitary groups, FARC dissidents, and the ELN guerrillas. In this context, and as has been the case for decades of peace accords with older armed groups, postagreement Colombia is exemplary of the contradictory temporality of an elusive peace yet to come.
72. Valverde 2014, 69.
73. Clarke 2019, 10.
74. Castillejo Cuéllar 2007.
75. See, e.g., Shaw and Waldorf 2010; Hinton 2011.
76. Jimeno 2007, 188.
77. Jimeno 2007, 180.
78. Theidon 2010, 100.
79. Theidon 2010, 100.
80. Hull 2012a, 255.
81. Herzfeld 1992, 20; see also Weber 1978.
82. Cody 2013, 205.
83. Cody 2013, 14.
84. Ricoeur 1984, 65. In their ethnography of urban corruption, Malini Ranganathan, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi (2023, 3) explore the urban “‘plot’ as land and as story” and conceptualize emplotting as “a semantic and sensory framework used by ordinary people to morally assess spatial change in late capitalism.”
85. Tate 2007.
86. Gill 2016, 24, 25.
87. Antonio Gramsci ([1971] 1992, 235) likened hegemony, or “the superstructure of civil society,” to “the trench-systems of modern warfare.” He wrote about “war of maneuver” and “war of position” as two dialectically connected forms of struggle: the former more “tactical” and conjunctural, and the latter more “strategic” and comprehensive (234–35). In this context I understand Manzana Cinco’s “epistemic maneuvers” as tactical forms of dissent that operate within a dominant paradigm of knowledge. Crucially, this hegemonic epistemology is warfare itself and its structuring of sociopolitical relations and material worlds.
88. I am in conversation with Gramscian critiques of ideology as “false consciousness,” such as in the work of Raymond Williams (1977) and William Roseberry (1994). For an important contribution to this debate in anthropology, see Sopranzetti 2017.
89. Williams 1977.
90. Roseberry 1994, 361.
91. For a discussion of how evicted residents participate in hegemonic visions of urban beauty, see Harms 2012.
4. Ruinous Knowledge
1. In her work with agricultural practitioners in Colombia, Kristina Lyons similarly illuminates “the potential for decay to reveal itself not only as erasure, but as a process that can be generative of different kinds of knowledge, different forms of organizing, and different practices” (2020, 39).
2. Writing about waste pickers in Rio de Janeiro, Kathleen Millar makes the important point that “garbage ceases to provoke abjection the moment perception shifts from the amorphous mass of detritus to its identifiable contents” (2018, 58).
3. Kockelman 2016b.
4. Kockelman 2016a, 2016b, 2016c.
5. Kockelman 2016b, 404–5.
6. Kockelman 2016c, 347.
7. See Murphy 2015 for a related discussion on the making of material forms as processes of “crafting and naturalizing signs” (217).
8.Kockelman 2016c, 350; see also Gibson 1979; Ingold 2000. I am most interested in Arseli Dokumaci’s call to “politicize and historicize affordances” (2020, S100).
9. See, e.g., West and Sanders 2003.
10. Boyer 2009, 331.
11. Boyer 2009, 331.
12. See, e.g., Navaro-Yashin 2012; Stoler 2013a; Gordillo 2014; Tsing 2015.
13. Stoler 2013a, 9.
14. See, e.g., J. Collins 2015; Harms 2016; Hoffman 2017; Stoetzer 2018; Schwenkel 2020.
15. D. Harvey 2006.
16. Herscher 2020, 59.
17. Perry 2013, 91.
18. Navaro-Yashin 2009, 7.
19. Jaramillo 2006.
20. Cf. Carrión 2005.
21. Leal Martínez 2016, 556; see also Gandolfo 2009.
22. Amorocho et al. 1946.
23. Amorocho et al. 1946, 16.
24. Arango et al. 1948.
25. Arango et al. 1948, 19.
26. Alcaldía Mayor 1964, 1.
27. Bonilla et al. 1988, 31–32.
28. Li 2007, 7.
29. Li 2007, 7.
30. ERU 2012, 17.
31. ERU 2012, 35.
32. ERU 2012, 35.
33. Serje 2005; Tate 2015.
34. These contradictions were even more apparent in the left-leaning administration of Luis Eduardo Garzón (2004–7) and its reinvigoration of urban renewal with the Plan Zonal del Centro (2007). Paralleling what Austin Zeiderman (2016, 26) describes as the “overarching imperative [of security] across the political spectrum” in Colombia, progressive planners’ attempts to redefine renewal remained conditioned by security and order-inflected views of decay.
35. Herzfeld 2009, 136. Herzfeld’s (2009) study of urban management, historic preservation, and temporality in Rome is an interesting counterpoint to what I describe here.
36. Bear 2016, 490.
37. Herzfeld 2020, 19.
38. This was a reference to the alleged complicity of Colombian institutions such as the ICBF with exploitative international adoption schemes.
39. Posesión is the legal term for continuous use and occupation of a property without legal title.
40. Rao 2015b, 19.
41. Kockelman 2016b, 411.
42. DANE 2015, 19.
43. The other levels are estrato 2: low; estrato 3: medium-low; estrato 4: medium; and estrato 5: medium-high.
44. Tamayo Arboleda and Valverde 2021, 693.
45. DANE 2015, 33.
46. See, e.g., Hankins and Yeh 2016.
47. Kockelman 2016b, 398.
48.Uribe Mallarino 2008. See A. Dávila (2016, 123) for a subtle analysis of estratos in Bogotá and their complex relation to the “denial of racism” and “the continued valorization of whiteness” under an entrenched ideology of mestizaje.
49. Currency amounts are based on the average exchange rate for 2012.
50. Munn 1992; Graeber 2001; Elyachar 2005.
51. Ferry 2005, 13.
52. See Kockelman (2016a, chap. 3) for a discussion of use value through the analytic of “replacement.”
53. Cf. Harms 2016, 15.
54. For a contrasting use of the notion of “archaeology” among bureaucrats and experts in urban law, see Pérez 2016.
55. Decree 400 of 2001. The decree was a response to a court order originated by an acción de tutela (a direct citizen claim to constitutional rights sanctioned by Colombia’s 1991 constitution) presented by a resident in another Bogotá neighborhood. The administration was compelled to “establish tolerance zones in the capital city to avoid the illegal practice of prostitution and related economic activities beyond their limits.” Tolerance zones were thus initially a response to local moral discourses and deep-seated conflicts between longtime residents, sex workers, and brothel owners (Salcedo Fidalgo et al. 2010). Eventually they would acquire a more legalistic character and, in a later iteration in Santa Fe in 2006, a fairly progressive tone aimed at creating a “pact” for mutual respect and for the defense of sex workers’ rights. In practice, however, the talk of rights and equality did not map onto the reality of the area, with its deepening conflicts over territorial and economic control and violence against sex workers and street dwellers (129–30).
56. Ritterbusch 2016, 429–30.
57. While gender also played a role in how Paulina and Enrique related to urban space and danger, violence in the area was mostly directed at women and transgender sex workers (Ritterbusch 2016). “Los muchachos,” as Enrique miscalled transgender sex workers, were being killed every week in the midst of violent territorial disputes—this is something a brothel doorman confirmed on our first stop walking down to Santa Fe. Further complicating the role of gender dynamics was the fact that the two main property and prostitution-business owners in the area were middle-aged women.
58. While most scholarly uses of “urbicide” refer to violence against cities in war and postwar contexts and implicitly draw a contrast with peacetime urbanity, I follow Herscher (2007) in understanding the violence of urban destruction as integral to projects of urban modernity (see also Benjamin 2002). For a comprehensive volume in this vein, see Carrión Mena and Cepeda Pico 2023.
59. I follow here Tania Li’s important point about how, beyond assuming notions of conspiracy or overly “consistent, strategic effects,” it is crucial to recognize that actors “take note of these effects and build them into their plans” (2007, 287n22). In this book I have pushed this line of inquiry to explore the performative dimensions of urban strategy (see chapter 2) as well as the complex ways in which strategic effects are mediated by people’s interpretations, experiences, and practices (cf. Bou Akar 2018).
60. Buck-Morss 1991, 211.
61. See, e.g., Navaro-Yashin 2012; Gordillo 2014; Tsing 2015; Hoffman 2017; Bou Akar 2018.
62. Hoffman 2017, 4.
63. Gordillo 2014, 82.
64. Bear 2016.
65. Bou Akar 2018, 37.
66. Benjamin 1978, 286.
67.Navaro-Yashin 2009, 7. I am inspired here also by Nancy Fraser’s (1991) call to attend to the political and institutional dimension of legal violence, as well as by Nicholas Blomley’s (2003, 133) insight that “the violences of law are socially selective.”
68. Dawdy 2016, 140.
69. In his discussion of “enclosure of value,” Kockelman (2016a, 7) argues that “processes that create, interpret, and reveal value are concomitant with processes that capture, carry, and reify value.”
70. Weinstein 2017. See also Roy 2009; Zhang 2010; Harms 2016.
71. Herzfeld 2009, 64.
72. Hage 2021, 8.
73. These questions, as well as most of the literature on ruins I draw on here, are inspired by Benjamin’s (1978, 2002) insights on the critical and revolutionary potential of destruction.
74. Petro was referring to the Tercer Milenio and San Victorino interventions.
75. For a brief account of some of Maldonado Copello’s ideas on planning and land policy, see Fernandes and Maldonado Copello 2009. More on this in chapter 5.
76. Hoffman 2017, 6. See also Stoler 2009; Gordillo 2014.
5. Territory by Design
1. Massey 2005, 4. De Certeau (1984, 121) writes about how the “map” is an objectifying figure that “colonizes space” and stands in contrast to the “tour,” which is a grounded and practice-based approach to space.
2. On the liveliness and dynamism of “terrain,” see Elden 2017; Gordillo 2018.
3. A key question I take on in this chapter is how territory, as a political and sociospatial category, “become[s] articulated as design” (Suchman 2021, 18)—that is, as a matter of giving form to sociomaterial densities (cf. Murphy 2016). I heed in particular Lucy Suchman’s call to “question design’s modern/colonial genealogies, and design’s capture within dominant modes of neoliberal capitalism” (2021, 31; see also Escobar 2018). This requires attending to the particular conjunction between urban planning, design, and territory in the context of Colombia’s history of struggles over modern sovereignty.
4. Economist Edward Glaeser has articulated influential prodensity discourses in academia and beyond. For a critical review, see Peck 2016.
5. Wilmott 2020, 157.
6. Rao 2007, 229.
7. McFarlane 2016, 632.
8. McFarlane 2016, 631.
9. McFarlane 2016, 644.
10. In addition to drawing on Elden’s (2010, 812) conceptualization of territory as a “political technology” that is “produced, malleable, and fluid,” I follow here a rich body of scholarship that explores Colombia’s nation-building process as the fragmentary, contradictory, and incomplete materialization of modern ideals of territory. This includes studies on the tensions between state-driven processes of territory making and the local geographies and histories of countervailing territorialities (see, e.g., Serje 2005; Escobar 2008; Ng’weno 2007; Ballvé 2020), as well as critical analyses of the politics of ordenamiento territorial (see, e.g., Fals Borda 1996; Asher and Ojeda 2009; Beuf and Rincón Avellaneda 2017). More broadly, my ethnographic approach to territory, territorial ordering, and the afterlives of security is informed by Donald Moore’s illuminating work on territory in Zimbabwe as the product of “historical sedimentations, at once discursive and material” of geographies of violence and dispossession (2005, 12).
11. Allen 2011, 284.
12.P. Harvey 2012, 77, 78.
13. This formulation is inspired by Stuart Elden’s article “Secure the Volume,” where he reconceptualizes security in terms of “circulation and power” in volumetric geographies (2013, 49). I use the term “managing” to draw attention to “calculative techniques” (49) and their centrality to such less overt modes of securitization. This resonates with Foucault’s (2007, 21) thoughts on security and town planning as mainly concerned with the organization and regulation of a “milieu” or “a set of natural givens—rivers, marshes, hills—and a set of artificial givens—an agglomeration of individuals, of houses, etcetera.” Particularly relevant to my discussion of density is his mention of “overcrowding” and “miasmas” as key objects of intervention for early town planners (21). I follow a related line of thinking to explore the links between security, in an expanded sense, and planning as the management of territory-as-density. Yet Foucault’s use of “milieu,” as Elden (2021, 4) points out, fails to “capture the specifically material aspects” of volumetric geographies.
14. For literature in anthropology and geography on volumetric spatialities and their politics, see, e.g., Weizman 2007; Elden 2013, 2017, 2021; Graham 2016; Billé 2017, 2020.
15. While building codes and urban norms have historically regulated volumetry (volumetría), heights, and edificabilidades of construction in Bogotá, the lens of density as proposed in the POT modification projects entailed a much more substantive citywide treatment of the physical dimensions of urban space and represented a broad planning and policy objective.
16. Elden 2017, 219.
17. For an analysis of the politics of leftist governments in Bogotá, see Eaton 2021.
18. Density, in this sense, is part of what Ananya Roy (2016, 205) calls the “universal grammar of urbanism”: hegemonic urban concepts originated in the global North that obscure historical and geographical difference across urban worlds.
19. Billé 2020, 5.
20. Easterling 2014, 13.
21. Easterling 2014, 14.
22. Easterling 2014, 13.
23. Easterling (2014, 21) writes about spatial activism as follows: “Exposing evidence of the infrastructural operating system is as important as acquiring some special skills to hack into it.” Hacking as a form of dissent, however, reproduces the computational paradigm and its assumptions. As Shannon Mattern (2013) argues in her critique of “smart urbanism,” political mobilization around urban data production still entails “facing the city as a computational problem” and “uphold[ing] the algorithmic ethos.” My analysis explores the similar problem of how planners seeking to rework density into more progressive arrangements ultimately reproduced epistemological assumptions about the city as a volumetric territory.
24. González Arias 1992. Karl (2017) offers a perceptive historical analysis of the notion of “independent republics” and their role in the trajectories of violent conflict in Colombia.
25. Extolling the virtues of political decentralization, for instance, former minister and Bogotá Mayor Jaime Castro stated in 1998, “Decentralization … will one day allow us to say that we have as much territory as we have a State, because until now the expanse of the first has been far superior to the authority of the latter” (quoted in Ballvé 2020, 51). In a similar vein, former Vice President Gustavo Bell responded to a 2002 massacre in the town of Bojayá, Chocó, with the declaration, “Colombia has more geography than state” (quoted in Serje 2005, 45).
26. Holmes and Marcus 2005, 237.
27. Holmes and Marcus 2005, 241.
28. Lefebvre 1991, 6.
29.Boyer 2005, 43–44. My use of “planning-in-action” echoes Donald Schön’s (1983) discussions of planners and related practitioners as immersed in forms of “reflection-in-action.”
30. Murphy 2015, 133.
31. Murphy 2015, 132, 171.
32. Despite the increasing influence of data and financial instruments within the profession, planners often brought designerly sensibilities into their work—what Diego described as the need to “sketch out ideas [echar lápiz].” The rise of techniques to reshape density arguably point to the enduring role of architecture and design within city planning even as computer-based, algorithmic approaches of parametric design have taken precedence.
33. Massey 2005, 100.
34. Pergolis 1998. For a theorization of the politics of urban fragmentation, see McFarlane 2021.
35. Pérez 2016.
36. Pinilla Pineda 2010, 353.
37. Roy 2016. Amin and Lancione (2022, 4) have discussed the tacit politics of dominant “urban lexicon[s]” and the importance of exploring “critical grammars for the city.”
38. In her work on Lima, Daniella Gandolfo (2020, 157–58) offers a conceptualization of the “tellurian forces” associated with working-class masses and how they historically clashed with modernist architecture and planning. Building on her analysis, my research suggests a form of planning that seeks to domesticate and exploit the “tellurian power” of downtown’s crowds and what elites and officials typically characterized as their unwieldy activities and forms of organization.
39. The speculative nature of BD Bacatá became apparent as its developer filed for liquidation in 2018 amid not only serious financial issues but also accusations of corruption tied back to investigations in Spain. The building itself, partially inhabited by 2021, has been the subject of ongoing scrutiny, with residents denouncing problems with utilities, flooding, and poorly built (and unfinished) areas. See Agencia de Periodismo Investigativo 2021.
40. In the tradition of nineteenth-century political economist Henry George, Martim Smolka of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy—an influential organization among planners in Colombia and Latin America based in Cambridge, Massachusetts—defines plusvalía in the following terms: “Value capture refers to the recovery by the public of land value increments (unearned income or plusvalías) generated by actions other than the landowner’s direct investments” (2013, 8). In Bogotá, this involved a complex calculus of the potential value added by new urban norms in terms of changes in land uses or building allowances. Overall, collections through plusvalías in Bogotá have been very low as a result of the technical difficulties in determining value increments within the city’s convoluted and shifting legal terrain. In many cases, moreover, because older norms contain greater building allowances, planners often find a “minusvalía [loss of value]” under new regulations, as an expert once told me, making it impossible for the administration to share in the economic value produced by urban development.
41. The ratio (1 to 5.6 square meters) had been established through direct negotiations with the Cámara Colombiana de la Construcción (Colombian Chamber of Construction), or CAMACOL.
42. The CTPD is in charge of channeling wider inputs from communities and localities across the city, which it then uses as a basis to produce a nonbinding “concept [concepto]” about the POT. Although this concept can have an impact on the social and political reception of the plan, the POT’s fate is ultimately decided in the Concejo de Bogotá (Bogotá City Council).
43.In another sense, the meeting exemplified the stark opposition between technocratic conceptions and alternative visions of territory circulating among citizens and activists—what the CTPD called the “social construction of territory.” See Duque Franco 2010 for an analysis of these tensions.
44. Boyer 2015a, 163.
45. “Technical” planners saw themselves carrying forward the tradition of modernist planning and what they called “quality urbanism [urbanismo de calidad]” or “well-designed” urban spaces. Many of these professionals had studied in Spain and followed closely the civic ideals imprinted on urban revitalization projects made famous by the city of Barcelona, replicating what Manuel Delgado (2007, 38) calls the Catalonian capital’s “myth of public space” and its instrumental role in the “capitalist reappropriation of the city.” Generally speaking, these planners—many of them architects and urban designers—moved through institutional spaces such as the Escuela de Arquitectura y Urbanismo (School of Architecture and Urbanism) at the Universidad Nacional, the Departamento Nacional de Planeación (National Planning Department), and CAMACOL. Critical and activist planners, in turn, had less of a background in architecture and were more closely connected to interdisciplinary urban studies and policy research centers such as the Instituto de Estudios Urbanos (Institute of Urban Studies) at the Universidad Nacional, the Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios sobre el Desarrollo at the Universidad de los Andes, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. In contrast to técnicos’ focus on physical forms and their tacit alignment with developmentalist ideologies, activist planners centered questions of land, redistribution, and property and value.
46. Porter et al. 2021, 117. With some exceptions, técnicos typically espoused center and center-right ideological positions and supported market-led reforms.
47. While the Petro administration had pledged to build 70,000 units of Vivienda de Interés Prioritario (Priority Interest Housing), or VIP, between 2012 and 2016, by the end of the term only 11,638 units had been constructed.
48. Eaton 2021, 15.
49. Maldonado Copello 2003, 215. Maldonado Copello herself was one of the most influential academics turned officials during the Petro administration, serving as director of planning and director of housing during the term. She has been a leading expert in urban law, planning, and land policy in Colombia since the 1990s. In addition to her affiliations with local universities, her work has been supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and is central to critical and activist planning networks in Colombia. For a contrasting vision focused on modern planning and development, see Salazar Ferro 2018.
50. El Tiempo 2018.
51. El Tiempo 2019b.
52. Magic Markers 2015.
53. El Tiempo 2016a. For a comprehensive analysis, see Contreras Ortiz 2019.
54. Reserva Forestal Regional Productora del Norte de Bogotá D.C., “Thomas Van der Hammen,” Agreement 11 of 2011 (Corporation Autónoma Regional de Cundinamarca—CAR).
55. According to Simone and Pieterse (2017, 78) the rise of data-driven, parametric urbanism creates “interfaces between the ‘data city’ and ‘real city’ [that] are uncertain even as the pragmatics of these calculations emphasize the sense of stability and order brought to bear on the ‘real city.’” In these terms, urban density is a key parametric function that aims to “stabilize” unwieldy and complex urban processes (84).
56. Serje 2005, 144.
57.I follow Blomley’s conceptualization of territory not only as the material expression of state sovereignty but also as the taken-for-granted instantiation of property regimes, or what he calls “the territorialization of property” (2016, 605).
58. Gouëset 1999, 92.
59. Serje 2005, 139.
60. Fals Borda 1999, 86, 84.
61. Quoted in Beuf 2019, 2.
62. Beuf 2019, 2.
63. Escobar 2019, 134.
64. Escobar 2018, 61.
65. Escobar 2018, xvii.
66. Escobar 2018, 74.
67. Beuf 2019, 5.
68. Asher 2019, 214. For a discussion of decoloniality in the context of urban planning, see, e.g., Ugarte 2014.
69. Rivera Cusicanqui 2012, 99–100.
70. Rivera Cusicanqui 2012, 100.
71. Rivera Cusicanqui 2012, 101.
72. Subramanian 2009, 145.
73. This is what Kiran Asher (2020, 950), writing about territorial struggles in the Colombian Pacific and responding to Escobar, describes as the “key political economic and cultural political conjunctures” that illuminate “how Afro-Colombian struggles, state power, and neoliberal development shape each other in paradoxical and uneven ways.”
74. Subramanian 2009, 250.
75. D. Moore 2005, 210.
76. Escobar 2018, 198, 196.
77. In her critique of decolonial studies and its reproductions of structural inequalities in academia and beyond, Rivera Cusicanqui (2012, 102) calls attention to the “economic strategies and material mechanisms that operate behind discourses,” which she terms the “political economy of knowledge.”
6. Progressive Fictions
1. Miraftab 2004.
2. Baldwin 2021, 6.
3. For more on the continued forms of extractivism and dispossession under Colombia’s “postconflict development” paradigms, see Ojeda and González 2018.
4. Li 2014, 184–85.
5. I follow here what Tania Li (2014, 18) calls a “conjunctural approach.” Inspired by the thought of Antonio Gramsci, Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Williams, Doreen Massey, and Gillian Hart, among others, Li notes that attending to conjunctures “means rejecting the liberal concept of the self-sovereign, strategizing subject” to “foregroun[d] practices, taken-for-granted habits, and material configurations” (18).
6. Muñoz and Fleischer 2022.
7. At stake here was the recognition of what Nicholas Blomley (2003, 132) calls the “violences of property”: the implied and overt, legal and corporeal violences through which property regimes are founded and reproduced. More broadly, residents’ critical knowledges pointed to the materiality of housing as a key “site of struggle over the making and remaking of the political” (Elinoff 2016, 612; see also Holston 1991).
8. Dating back to a 1994 UN Development Program report, “human security,” according to Chowra Makaremi (2010, 108), was aimed at “redefining security as ‘humane’ and broadening the use of the concept from exclusive military threats to economic, social, and environmental threats.” In practice, Makaremi argues, “the concept of human security has been remilitarized in humanitarian interventions, promoting notions of emergency and safety as moral grounds for political action” (108). See also Amar 2013.
9. Duffield 2001.
10. Quoted in Gutiérrez Sanín 2001.
11. Such forms of “epistemic violence,” Santiago Castro-Gómez (2002) argues, are integral to the history of the social sciences in Latin America and their crucial role as vehicles for hegemonic projects of nationhood and citizenship.
12. Jobson 2020, 265. I echo here the renewed sense of urgency that abolitionist and decolonial reckonings have taken in anthropology and urban planning. For this discussion in anthropology, see, e.g., Harrison 1997; Shange 2019; Jobson 2020. For urban planning, see, e.g., Miraftab 2009; Bates et al. 2018; and Porter et al. 2021.
13. Quoted in Bell Lemus et al. 2008, 54.
14. Bell Lemus et al. 2008, 67.
15. Rama (1984) 1996.
16. Bell Lemus et al. 2008, 55.
17. Bell Lemus et al. 2008, 81.
18. Quoted in Bell Lemus et al. 2008, 73.
19. Offner 2019, 122–30.
20. Offner 2019, 131.
21. I follow Steven Gregory’s (2020, 81) call to “attend to the symbolic meanings that verticality obtains through the spatial practices of religious, political, and cultural elites.” Gregory writes about how Columbia University, along with other elite institutions, “harnessed geography” (94) as a strategy of control in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in New York City.
22. On the simplifying optics from above, common in modernist modes of governance and planning, see the well-known works of de Certeau (1984) and J. Scott (1998).
23. Universidad de los Andes 1972, 12.
24. Centro de Planificación y Urbanismo 1967.
25. Bonilla et al. 1988.
26. Muñoz and Fleischer (2022, 44–45) offer a useful analysis of campus maps during these years, showing the shift from an almost pastoral image of a self-contained hillside campus to renderings that increasingly integrated the surrounding urban fabric.
27. Writing about urban universities in the United States, Baldwin (2021, 36) argues that “with the decline in manufacturing, the ‘bell towers’ of higher education were targeted as the new ‘smokestacks’: the signals of a thriving urban economy after the fall of factories.” While nothing comparable to the US back-to-the-city movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s happened in downtown Bogotá, university campuses undoubtedly served as anchors for middle- and upper-class land uses and socialities. More recently, with the expansion of the campuses of Los Andes, the Tadeo Lozano, Universidad Central, and the Universidad Externado de Colombia, and their more active participation in urban renewal plans, universities have emerged as key players in the city center’s rising real estate markets (see de Urbina González 2012).
28. On feminist standpoint theory, see Harding 2004.
29. I follow here Black feminist scholars Patricia Hill Collins (1986) and bell hooks (1984) and their foundational theorizations of the production of knowledge from the perspective of the “outsider within” who is aware of both “margins and center.”
30. According to Tania Li (2007, 7), “The practice of ‘rendering technical’ confirms expertise and constitutes the boundary between those who are positioned as trustees, with the capacity to diagnose deficiencies in others, and those who are subject to expert direction. It is a boundary that has to be maintained and that can be challenged.”
31. In addition to recognizing its integral role in colonial modernity’s regimes of knowledge (Castro-Gómez 2002), my use of “epistemic violence” here follows standpoint theory once again and its attention to oppressors’ “systemic ignorance” (Harding 2004, 5). This is what David Graeber (2015, 45), in a later variation of such critiques, describes as the “structural stupidity” of those in power. As Progresa Fenicia shows, such forms of ignorance do not indicate an absence of knowledge. On the contrary, it is precisely the technical production of knowledge that deepens the obliviousness to facets and experiences of social life. As one faculty member and collaborator in the plan put it, it was hard to imagine a place more studied and “overdiagnosed” than Las Aguas—from student theses to classroom fieldwork to robust research and social engagement programs. The more experts thought they knew about Las Aguas and its people, the more they obscured internal differences, underlying political-economic conditions, and locals’ epistemic practices.
32. Graeber further discusses the violence of bureaucracy as an expression of “highly lopsided structures of imagination” (2015, 72).
33. Escobar 2018, 74.
34. This engagement with informality resembles what Ananya Roy (2005, 147–48) describes as its “[strategic use] by planners to mitigate some of the vulnerabilities of the urban poor.”
35. Zorro and Reveiz 1974, 14.
36. Jaramillo 2006, 10.
37. In an important contribution to the anthropological literature on property, Katherine Verdery (2003, 13) calls attention to the fact that “property is a process (of making and unmaking certain kinds of relationships).” Writing about Romania’s postsocialist transition, she reflects on changing property regimes and their effects on social and power relations. Verdery argues that “property specifies what things have what kind of value and who counts as a person” and that it “sets up inclusions and exclusions,” ultimately becoming a “powerful idiom in processes of appropriation” (18). Progresa Fenicia struck many residents in Las Aguas as potentially leading to such forms of appropriation and dispossession. As a contentious transformation of property regimes, furthermore, it bore troubling resemblances to the violence of changing land rights so central to the country’s armed conflict (Gutiérrez Sanín and García Reyes 2016), as well as to the ambiguous and uncertain promise of property in what Meghan Morris (2019) aptly terms the “shadow of the post-conflict.”
38. Ghertner and Lake 2021, 17.
39. Salcedo Fidalgo 2015, 208.
40. In her work on land conflict in Colombia’s Urabá region, Morris (2017, 49) importantly calls for more careful ethnographic theorization of the “intimate relation” between histories of dispossession (despojo) and the politics of possession (posesión).
41. Alape (1983) 2016, 69.
42. Pinilla and Arteaga 2021, 46.
43. Decrees 420 and 448 of 2014.
44. El Tiempo 1993.
45. Voz 1983.
46. Forero Hidalgo and Moreno Camargo 2015. See also Medellín Pérez 2024.
47. As Tania Li (2007, 282) argues, improvement, as a key governmental logic, “directs the conduct of ‘small people’ while leaving radical political economic inequalities unaddressed.” Something similar was at work in both planners’ and Nancy’s interventions in Las Aguas.
48. Pinilla and Arteaga 2021, 51.
49.Pinilla and Arteaga 2021, 51.
50. Pinilla and Arteaga 2021, 50.
51. Nader 1997, 711.
52. For Escobar (2018, 226), radically new ways of being and envisioning the world are necessary to move beyond the “established politics of the possible and the real.” In line with his theorizations of ontological difference, he suggests that new urban imaginaries would have to emerge from outside the city—namely, by “introduc[ing] a peasant view of the soil into the city, reconstituting the apartment building and the neighborhood as what could be called rurban territories” (Escobar 2019, 136). Instead of looking outside toward idealized urban peripheries or rural enclaves—with the usual pitfalls this entails in terms of reifying difference and reproducing dualisms (Asher 2019)—Progresa Fenicia turns our attention to the dialectical shaping of urban planning and politics within specific political-economic and sociomaterial contexts. From this vantage point, imagining new urban realities and possibilities requires above all an analysis of power structures, of how certain ideas and arrangements become hegemonic, and of their contradictory unraveling through the everyday practice and materiality of politics.
53. Nader 1997, 712.
54. Ghertner and Lake (2021, 17) have elaborated the notion of “value projects” as follows: “What holds together the multiple regulatory, legal, and narrative land fictions we explore, then, is their function as value projects that evoke and emphasize particular commodity registers of land and draw in willing subjects seeking to remake the world through the modified relationships and roles they promise to enact.”
55. It is worth noting here the echoes of longer histories of land titling in Latin America’s peripheral settlements and of their deeply contradictory absorption of urban dwellers into regimes of property and debt. See, e.g., Gilbert 2002 for a critique of urban titling policies made famous by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto.
56. In her piercing critique of the paradoxes of progressivism in an antiracist school in San Francisco, Savannah Shange (2019, 15) writes, “Carceral progressivism functions as a pinnacle of efficiency for late liberal statecraft because the discursive narratives (e.g., liberation) and material gains (e.g., a justice-themed public high school) of redistributive social movements are cannibalized and repurposed as rationales for dispossession.”
Epilogue
1. El Tiempo 2016b.
2. León and Arenas 2016.
3. Marín Correa and Flórez Suárez 2016.
4. The national government rebranded the ESMAD in 2022 as the Unidad de Diálogo y Mantenimiento del Orden (Unit of Dialogue and Order Maintenance), or UNDMO, part of President Petro’s campaign promise to eliminate the ESMAD. The UNDMO is a striking example of the paradoxes of progressivism, in this case of “progressive policing.” People still refer to riot police as the ESMAD, and violent repression of protests is still the usual governmental response.
5. Andres Felipe 2018.
6. Ritterbusch and El Cilencio 2020, 212.
7. Márquez and Góngora 2023, 14.
8. Márquez and Góngora 2023, 14.
9. Márquez and Góngora 2023, 16.
10. Other participating institutions included the Museo Nacional de Colombia (National Museum of Colombia) and the city’s Instituto Distrital para la Protección de la Niñez y la Juventud (Institute for the Protection of Childhood and Youth), or IDIPRON.
11.Márquez and Góngora 2023, 16–17.
12. Márquez and Góngora 2023, 17.
13. Márquez and Góngora 2023, 20.
14. Márquez and Góngora 2023, 11.
15. On learning and the city, see McFarlane 2011 and Corsín Jiménez 2017. On the epistemic and political promises of “fragment urbanism,” see McFarlane 2021.
16. For spatial and visual analyses that establish the intentional killing of Dilan Cruz with a “non-lethal bean bag” fired to the head by an ESMAD agent, see Fiorella 2019 and Forensic Architecture Team 2023.
17. Peñaranda and Gómez-Delgado 2019.
18. Ojeda and Pinto García 2020.
19. Alvarado 2020.
20. Alejandra Azuero Quijano (2023, 21) conceptualizes the Paro as an “epistemic explosion [estallido epistémico]” that reshaped “politics, conditions of the sensible, and modes of knowing.” Her illuminating analysis of the phenomenological ramifications of the event resonates closely with my interest in how the Paro shattered the city’s sedimented history of warfare and opened spaces to counter the “normalization of state violence” (44).
21. Waterhouse 2019.
22. The second wave of protests had been set off by the death of a man under police custody at a CAI.
23. See, e.g., Waterhouse 2019; Montero and Peñaranda 2020; Azuero Quijano 2023.
24. Montero and Peñaranda 2020.
25. Puentes 2021.
26. Caldeira 2012.
27. Quoted in Sanabria Ortiz 2021, 38.
28. Quoted in Sanabria Ortiz 2021, 40.
29. Salge Ferro and Jaramillo E. 2021.
30. Salge Ferro and Jaramillo E. 2021.
31. Salge Ferro and Jaramillo E. 2021.
32. The most concrete manifestation of this new paradigm took the form of a “feminist care policy” implemented through so-called Manzanas del Cuidado (Blocks of Care): public buildings constructed in poor neighborhoods to “address gender and class inequalities and alleviate care burdens on women” (Álvarez Rivadulla et al. 2024).
33. Azuero Quijano 2023, chap. 3.
34. On “abolitionist planning” understood as “abolishing planning,” see Porter et al. 2021, and as a practice inherently at odds with professional planning, see Dozier 2018.