Closing down bars in the inner city centre: Informal urban planning, civil insecurity and subjectivity in Bolivia

Abstract

The paper presents an ethnographic analysis of a group of secondary school students' protests against (illegal) bars in the city centre of El Alto, Bolivia. It shows how informal and formal practices are entangled through the state's dependence on the (illegal) actions of the citizenry in order to ensure civil security. The paper suggests that urban intervention is coproduced by state and nonstate actors at the margins of the state and that urban transformation entails subject formation, in this case that of political youth. Following Hansen and Verkaaik's (2009) argument that the city is essentially multilayered and unknowable, I argue that urban life, as well as state‐citizen relations, is indeterminate, and that it is due to this indeterminacy that the students succeeded in transforming a common association between Alteño youth, alcohol consumption and potential criminal conduct into an alternative notion of youth as responsible citizens of the New Bolivia. This conceptualization permits us to understand the urban sphere as a space not only of conflict but also of endurance and hope, and hence as a zone that allows for the imaginative production of the otherwise (Povinelli, 2011).

Coproducing urban space: Rethinking the formal/informal dichotomy

“…While navigating, people creatively combine what de Certeau (1984) would call strategy (intended and structured plans) with tactics (the everyday practices used to create space on an ad hoc basis), as elaborated upon by Furniss (). As Risør () argues, navigation implies a continuous combining of the formal and the informal. It connects historically structured developments and ahistoric events; it requires invested knowledge, gut feeling and the capacity for impromptu action.…”

Towards a political economy of urban coproduction

“…Conceptually, the navigation approach is effectively based on a form of methodological individualism, when the action of marginalized urbanites, particularly from a political perspective, is more often than not collective, as Partha Chatterjee () has highlighted very well. Indeed, this issue emerges clearly in Helene Risør's () contribution on student clausura (closure) protests against illegal bars and brothels in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. Very much a social rather than an individual movement, these protests are impossible to understand solely in terms of individuals′ motivations but become much more comprehensible in terms of a shared moral community.…”