Book Review: Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá

Abstract

In his ethnography of the politics of security and risk in Bogotá, Colombia, Austin Zeiderman demonstrates the value of ethnographic research for theorizing alternative urbanisms in Latin America and beyond. Based on twenty months of fieldwork between 2008 and 2010, Endangered City centers on a government disaster risk management program in Bogotá that seeks to relocate residents living in areas of high risk to environmental hazards to more secure living conditions. These residents are among millions of internally displaced Colombians that fled violent rural areas to live in self built settlements on the urban periphery. Zeiderman argues that the imperative to manage insecurity and protect citizens against future harm has given rise to governance practices that reshape urban life, political subjectivities, and the state-citizen relationship. The book offers an in-depth exploration of these practices and a contemplation of how they are made/remade and with what consequences.

Introduction: Urban Precarity

“…A particular case in point is Austin Zeiderman’s work on Colombia. Zeiderman (2016) notes how urbanization in Bogota is guided by an overarching feeling that the city is dangerous. This sense of “endangerment” lingers on in lulls between bouts of open street violence, and shows us how decades of intense violence can burrow themselves deeply into the very habitus of urban dwellers.…”

“…It is possible that the discipline’s attraction to the “suffering slot” (Robbins 2013), as well as its dedication to uncovering complex systems of structural and symbolic violence (Fassin 2017), have led anthropologists to explore the dialectic between danger and urbanity. In this respect, much contemporary work on urbanity (e.g., Monroe 2016; Rodgers 2019; Zeiderman 2016) can be read as an exploration of how urban ecologies are shaped by people anticipating and responding to various kinds of uncertainties, vulnerabilities, ruptures, and privations. A second aspect of the dialectic looks at how ideas about and depictions of the urban environment are politically wielded to create precarity in the lives of those who build, govern, inhabit, and exploit cities.…”

The Normalization of Bogota Social Housing Residents: Class Tensions in Third World Urban Peripheries

“…Zeiderman (2016) observes in his ethnography of the politics of security and risk in Bogota that for his interlocutors, “being a citizen means paying yearly property taxes, paying monthly water and electricity bills, and remaining outside the informal economy” (Zeiderman 2016, 116). In another context, Kelly (2013) shows the normative power of the “condo owner” as the embodiment of good citizenship in contrast to the moral flaws of “social housing tenants.” This explains why former residents of informal neighborhoods go to great lengths to acquire property in the social housing complexes we researched, even if the actual conditions—the lack of services and amenities, as well as the official prohibition of economic activities, in combination with the high costs of mortgage and administration fees—might not necessarily be in their best interests.…”