Life at risk [electronic resource] : governing the future in Bogotá, Colombia
Keywords: Anthropology.

Now that the majority of the world's population is urban, the future of cities is increasingly becoming the focus of intense concern. Amidst heightened anxiety about global warming, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and disease outbreaks, issues of risk and security have become central to how urban spaces are planned, built, governed, and lived. Public and political debates are suffused with apocalyptic projections that envision catastrophe looming on the horizon and that demand anticipatory action in the present. Such changes are evident throughout the so-called "megacities" of the global South, while similar logics of planning and governance are also surfacing in the "modern" cities of Europe and North America. The following dissertation responds to this widespread phenomenon by critically examining emerging techniques for governing the uncertain future of cities and urban life. It does so in Colombia, a country plagued by armed conflict, where security has become the dominant logic structuring the relationship between state, territory, and population. As elsewhere, Colombia has witnessed an elaboration of governmental efforts to protect life against a broad range of threats—from crime, violence, and terrorism to landslides, floods, and earthquakes. The capital city, Bogotá, is now regarded internationally as an example for other cities to follow. It is, therefore, an ideal site from which to reflect upon an overarching concern of significance both within and outside the academy: what becomes of cities when the future is no longer assumed to be the inevitable outcome of modernization, progress, and development? In the broadest sense, then, this is an anthropological study of how and to what effect the future is being envisioned for the cities of the twenty-first century. As such, it focuses an ethnographic and historical lens on the imperative to govern (and govern through) risk. Based on twenty months of fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, it tracks the political technology of risk by studying state efforts to protect poor and vulnerable citizens in areas recently declared "zones of high risk" for landslide, flood, and earthquake. Following the government agencies charged with the technical designation of these high-risk zones and the resettlement of families living within them, this study reveals the forms of civil society, political authority, and technical expertise that arise when risk comes to structure the relationship between poor urban citizens and the state. It also highlights the formations of political subjectivity that emerge as vulnerable populations governed by these programs engage the state as lives at risk rather than as citizens with rights. While Bogotá's current efforts to manage risk are producing new terrains of political engagement, they draw upon and reconfigure well-established relations of power and modes of governance. These local shifts cannot be understood in isolation from globally circulating models of urbanism that increasingly project futures of risk, regress, and ruin. Yet the emergence of risk as a technique of urban planning and governance in Bogotá is inextricably bound up with historical conditions, cultural sensibilities, and political contingencies specific to Colombia's modernity. Thus, this study develops an historically-informed and ethnographically-grounded approach both to the widespread proliferation of security mechanisms in cities throughout the world and to the ways in which they are assembled and deployed in specific locations.