Federico Pérez Fernández

URBANISM AS WARFARE: PLANNING, IN/SECURITY, AND THE REMAKING OF DOWNTOWN BOGOTÁ

Urbanism as Warfare is a study of urban planning, property development, and security in downtown Bogotá from the mid-twentieth century to the present. In contrast to sweeping accounts of global urbanization, the project is concerned with the local histories and grounded manifestations of urban (in)security and how they shape expert and non-expert knowledge, everyday planning practices, and shifting material forms.

In downtown Bogotá, cultural frameworks linked to Colombia's prolonged history of rural warfare reemerge transfigured in the daily encounters, conflicts, and spaces of redevelopment. Actors invoke and redeploy narratives of (para)state violence, territorial warfare, and forceful displacement to legitimate, contest, and make sense of an urban landscape in transition.

Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I explore the ways in which repertoires of (in)security constitute a horizon of urban politics that both enables and limits technologies of governance, modes of citizenship, and socio-material transformations. I argue that downtown renewal is best viewed as a microcosm of wide-ranging political struggles: a stage for the deep fissures of a body politic. As Colombia allegedly moves into a post-conflict era, Urbanism as Warfare traces the less visible ways in which the anxieties of security continue to shape urban life. It is both a reflection on the demilitarization of urban planning and a call to reimagine urban futures. 

This project dates back to 2001 when I worked as UNDP consultant for Bogotá's City Administration. I carried out in-depth fieldwork from 2011 to 2012 and from 2016 to 2019 with the support of the Inter-American Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (Drugs, Security, and Democracy Program), Portland State University, and the American Council of Learned Societies.