Materializing (in)securities: Urban Terrain, Paperwork, and Housing in Downtown Bogota
Sponsor
Research for this article was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and Open Societies Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, and Portland State University. My thanks to Mrinalini Tankha and Anand Vaidya for their comments on earlier drafts and to Nicolás Ordoñez and Margarita Carrillo for their help in obtaining the photograph by Sady González. I am especially grateful to the residents of Las Aguas, Progresa Fenicia team members, and Bogotá city officials for sharing with me their knowledge and experiences.
Published In
Anthropological Quarterly
Document Type
Citation
Publication Date
Winter 2020
Abstract
In Bogotá, city planners and residents struggle over downtown renewal by mobilizing security frameworks linked to Colombia's history of political and criminal violence. Urban spaces appear as terrains of military strategy, bureaucratic artifacts as weapons of (para)state violence, and housing transformations as incarnations of rural land grabbing and displacement. Far from being only metaphorical reverberations of the country's pervasive imagery of warfare, such discursive maneuvers are practical enactments that become intimately entangled with the constitution of urban materialities. Everyday performances of security activate the physical qualities of urban forms and things, endowing them with significance both as sources of insecurity and as vehicles of securitization. While recent scholarship has explored the ways in which urban infrastructure and materiality mediate urban politics, conflicts over Bogotá's renewal highlight the relational dynamics between social actors' discursive performances and urban materialities. At stake here is what I conceptualize as ongoing and tentative processes of materialization. As urban actors assemble, calibrate, and deploy repertoires of (in)security, they actively contribute to the material shaping of urban worlds. Tracing such security performances and their attendant materialities usefully refocuses attention on human action and [End Page 1491] political accountability within complex social-material assemblages. It reveals the ways in which contests over authority and belonging are enacted by a range of urban actors, mediated through specific histories, and sedimented in urban forms.
Rights
Copyright © 2020 Institute for Ethnographic Research
Locate the Document
DOI
10.1353/anq.2020.0020
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/34806
Citation Details
Pérez, F. (2020). Materializing (In)securities: Urban Terrain, Paperwork, and Housing in Downtown Bogotá. Anthropological Quarterly, 93(1), 1491–1522. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2020.0020