San José, Colom­bia. We were search­ing for the only house in the street left stand­ing. Jump by jump, we dodged so much debris that I began to ima­gine I was mov­ing through one of those pho­to­graphs of the bomb­ing that took place dur­ing the wars in Europe. What sur­prised us most as we walked was to see so many chil­dren and teen­agers climb­ing over what was left of the build­ings. We noticed that they were pulling off, among other things, pieces of zinc roof­ing, clay tiles, doors that had already been worn away by the ele­ments, and any metal they could find: door handles, taps, and even man­hole cov­ers. When we asked them what they were doing, some answered that these houses had been theirs and their neigh­bours’, and that they had come back to take any­thing they could; they wanted to sell it for a bit of money. They said that they would not leave a thing for the con­struc­tion com­pan­ies, that if they had already removed them they could leave with any­thing that might have some value. There were also some oppor­tun­ists among them who had never had any­thing to do with the neigh­bour­hood. They too took advant­age of its aban­don­ment to find things to sell, but judging by the smell you could tell that oth­ers had used it for other pur­poses, per­haps to defec­ate and urin­ate among the debris, behind the green can­vas that had been used to try to con­tain and pro­tect des­troyed plots of land.

Finally we arrived. The house was the last tree that remained stand­ing. Stub­bornly, it stood upright, although it had already begun to die as trees die, los­ing strength from the inside out. We knocked on the door and Alicia opened it. She imme­di­ately pulled up some chipped chairs for us to sit on, in what had already begun to cease to be a liv­ing room. After serving the cof­fee she had made, she sat down and began her story.

She told us that San José was one of the old­est neigh­bour­hoods in Man­izales, loc­ated right in what is now the city centre. Around 28,000 people lived there. Some of the houses were old, built at the begin­ning of the 20^th cen­tury, the city’s golden age. They were large, and were built in the region’s typ­ical cof­fee plant­a­tion style. The “adobe” – a mix­ture of “guadua” (a bamboo-​like wood found in the Colom­bian Andes), horse manure and plaster – with which they had been built made them spa­cious. It had never been a rich neigh­bour­hood, but there was a cer­tain sense of priv­ilege to liv­ing there. How­ever, as time went by many people moved fur­ther and fur­ther away from the centre of town, and the neigh­bour­hood came to be occu­pied by other kinds of people, in par­tic­u­lar those with fewer resources who had gen­er­ally come from areas near the north of the city.

For the last fifty years, the neigh­bour­hood had grown. Paved areas filled up with new, smal­ler houses, some made of con­crete, oth­ers of wood, tin cans or even card­board, depend­ing on the resources people had avail­able to them. It grew out­wards so much that it got closer and closer to the hill­side at the very edge of the city. Even­tu­ally another way of liv­ing was estab­lished that would endure until today. An informal eco­nomy grew up, with ser­vice gar­ages and sales of spare parts for cars and home appli­ances, as well as brothels and “ollas” – drugs dens. The own­ers of the old­est, largest houses – which were largely still the same except that the own­ers no longer lived there – divided them into two or three apart­ments with the ground floor as com­mer­cial enter­prises, in order to earn more in rent. As a res­ult each big house came to be occu­pied by two or three ten­ant fam­il­ies, which seemed fairly numer­ous not because they had a lot of chil­dren, but because these wide nuc­lear fam­il­ies were determ­ined by the num­ber of people who were depend­ent on the heads of the house­hold. Thus there would be grand­par­ents through to grand­chil­dren, with aunts and uncles and their spouses in between, all liv­ing in the same place. The same was the case in the newer, smal­ler houses too. On the other hand, she said, you could not for­get that many of these fam­il­ies depended on the com­mer­cial enter­prises down­stairs, either because they were employed there or because they were the own­ers or lessees.

But “devel­op­ment” came, and she spoke this word with sar­casm. First the mayor appeared, telling them that the coun­cil would buy their houses from them, that there would be a great pro­ject for the bene­fit of every­one, through which they would have access to “decent housing” – again she spoke with sar­casm. Through radio and the news­pa­pers they heard the gov­ern­ment say­ing that San José was the main hot­spot for crimin­al­ity in the city, that it sheltered thieves, drugs users and pimps for child pros­ti­tutes. That it was also a high-​risk zone for land­slides, due to the steep ter­rain on which the houses had been built. Every­where he spoke, the mayor said that with the help of the national gov­ern­ment he would under­take a “large-​scale hous­ing pro­ject” to offer people bet­ter liv­ing con­di­tions, to re-​socialize the area, to attack delin­quency issues, to solve mobil­ity prob­lems, and to recover the eco­nomy of this import­ant part of the city.

The people of the neigh­bour­hood man­aged to organ­ize them­selves to protest, but they were eas­ily made invis­ible by the media and the gov­ern­ment; she said that some people in the dis­trict were assas­sin­ated in order to do so, but they never knew what came of the invest­ig­a­tions. Today the neigh­bour­hood has begun to be demol­ished in parts. Alicia’s house is right in the place where Aven­ida Colón (Colum­bus Avenue), a street that forms part of the pro­ject, will pass; it is surely no coin­cid­ence that the gov­ern­ment has decided to start with a street by this name. Her house has appar­ently not been pulled down because of a prob­lem with the com­pens­a­tion they must give her. She is, at least, the owner of the house and will cer­tainly receive some­thing, although she does not know if it will be enough to buy one of the new apart­ments they will build. Many fam­il­ies around there are not the own­ers of the houses and so they will not receive com­pens­a­tion; the gov­ern­ment has prom­ised them help in pay­ing rent in another area. Alicia has sent four of her five chil­dren to other parts of the city to stay with rel­at­ives, so that they do not have to put up with the dust from the demol­ished neigh­bour­hood, nor the demoli­tion of the only his­tory they have known. She waits with her daugh­ter for com­pany. She no longer has water and the elec­tri­city only works on and off; she won­ders occa­sion­ally if this is to force her and oth­ers to get out as soon as possible.

Although the project’s name includes the idea of “hous­ing”, most houses in the neigh­bour­hood are to fall to make way for a shop­ping centre, some­thing called a drug-​dependency rehab­il­it­a­tion centre, and call centre facil­it­ies – with the lat­ter being not just the city’s main com­mer­cial activ­ity but also the former mayor’s main private busi­ness interest. At some point the build­ings they claim will provide 5,500 hous­ing units in the form of apart­ments, which they say will be no lar­ger than 100 square metres, will also arrive.

Alicia com­plained that all the project’s jus­ti­fic­a­tions should have forced them to inter­vene in the whole city, or at least the major­ity of it. Delin­quency and drug addic­tion occur in many neigh­bour­hoods, even the richest ones. There are dozens of dis­tricts with more ser­i­ous prob­lems – was it not the mayor him­self who had admit­ted a few days ago that 60% of the city lived in poverty? So why San José? They simply branded the neigh­bour­hood as the worst example of soci­ety, just as one con­structs a pub­lic enemy who must be elim­in­ated. She says that San José may not be a place of com­plete peace, but that she never had to build a bar­rier around her yard before the demoli­tion crews arrived. Before­hand her yard had always been open, with no fence, as around here she shared food, clean­ing products and local gos­sip with her neigh­bours. She says that the neigh­bour­hood was one of good people; that the major­ity of people were good. She thinks that the worst dangers are what they will face in the most dif­fi­cult neigh­bour­hoods of the city, those to which they will have to go to live as outsiders.

If the jus­ti­fic­a­tion were the danger of land­slides due to build­ing on hill­side areas, they would have had to focus on the whole city. What can really be said when an entire city has been built at the top of a moun­tain? Dur­ing the rainy sea­son it was other neigh­bour­hoods that suffered the most, includ­ing those where the people were richer. She said that San José was the place where least ground was touched for con­struc­tion, as it was done accord­ing to the type of houses that people most needed, the land con­di­tions were respec­ted, and there was no need to make large-​scale changes, which was not the case it other areas of the city. So then why San José? She had an answer: it was the neigh­bour­hood with the most flat land in the city; it was a great booty for the build­ing con­tractor or the investor that got hold of it.

*****

The “large-​scale hous­ing pro­jects” in Colom­bia were a legal inven­tion of Álvaro Uribe Vélez’s gov­ern­ment. It was thought that they would allow the national gov­ern­ment to develop “hous­ing” pro­jects dir­ectly in any region of the coun­try, bypassing regional gov­ern­ments. Des­pite Colom­bia hav­ing been a unit­ary state for more than a cen­tury, the 1991 Con­sti­tu­tion had won admin­is­trat­ive decent­ral­iz­a­tion for muni­cip­al­it­ies, through which, among other things, the muni­cip­al­it­ies were allowed to determ­ine the plan­ning and usage of their land in an autonom­ous and inde­pend­ent man­ner. The “large-​scale hous­ing pro­jects” were in this sense a counter-​reform; they were a resur­gence of the most recal­cit­rant form of state mod­ern­ity in which it is believed that the centre, the national “union”, knows what suits the peri­pheral areas it con­trols. Thus it is thought that the centre is more pre­pared, more spe­cial­ized, more tech­nical, more apolit­ical, and so it solves the regional dis­putes on ter­rit­ory con­fig­ur­a­tion which occur in dif­fer­ent municipalities.

Through­out Colombia’s his­tory – includ­ing in the cur­rent repub­lican era – the impetus of dom­in­a­tion has been from the cit­ies towards the coun­tryside. The main pur­pose of the former, since Span­ish col­on­iz­a­tion, was to guar­an­tee the con­quest of rural ter­rit­or­ies, either because they were empty, or because they were defend­ing autonom­ous life­styles. From the city they provided everything needed for the “viol­ent tran­sub­stan­ti­ation of localism” – as Zizek put it – of rur­al­ity: first, the weapons and pro­vi­sions for the armies, but after­wards the laws for the judges, law­yers and landown­ers who were arriv­ing. Thus the cit­ies had ful­filled a vital role in the con­sol­id­a­tion of the national-​state pro­ject in Colom­bia: to func­tion as satel­lites of the dom­in­ant cent­ral nation.

How­ever, the case of “large-​scale hous­ing pro­jects” in Colom­bia has high­lighted another route that the forces of dom­in­a­tion are tak­ing. The issue in ques­tion is an intra-​urban move­ment of people, which, although it may have been hid­den for most of his­tory, is more notice­able now that the cit­ies are grow­ing to take in thou­sands of people forced out of the coun­tryside and smal­ler set­tle­ments. This occurs either through the exper­i­ence of armed con­flict or due to glob­al­ized eco­nom­ies that can only sup­port them­selves by abandon­ing the peri­pher­ies and strength­en­ing urban industry. In short, the peri­pher­ies are return­ing many years worth of insults to the cent­ral areas. The cit­ies, espe­cially the cap­it­als, are over­flow­ing, and the fear is centred on the force that these dis­placed people who are arriv­ing rep­res­ent. It has begun to estab­lish itself as a force that breaks with their plan­ning – that is, with the pro­ject of life that they are defend­ing or claim to defend.

As we see in the case of Man­izales, in the San José neigh­bour­hood – although there are other large-​scale hous­ing pro­jects under­way within the coun­try – it is no longer just a mat­ter of a centre want­ing to take away the autonomy of a peri­pheral muni­cip­al­ity. The autonom­ous powers within the city are also alibis for an elite group belong­ing to the same muni­cip­al­ity act­ing in per­fect syn­chrony with national interest. An elite linked to this national-​centralizing desire through polit­ical parties and pub­lic power, or through fin­an­cial organ­iz­a­tions and real estate spec­u­la­tion. An elite that des­per­ately defends the pro­ject of a city that little by little it has seized for itself, and in which it can no longer find the same bene­fit in dominating.

The “large-​scale hous­ing pro­jects” have drawn up the road map. With them the national gov­ern­ment can bypass land man­age­ment mech­an­isms that the muni­cip­al­ity has imple­men­ted in its planned autonom­ous reg­u­la­tion. This means that it can relax oblig­a­tions and con­trols for build­ing con­tract­ors and urban land investors – who are gen­er­ally busi­ness­men from that city and mem­bers of the described elite – mak­ing it easier to build social hous­ing but at the highest per­mit­ted price. But at the same time, the local gov­ern­ment, under the con­trol of the muni­cipal elite, on the one hand syn­chron­izes the dis­course by speak­ing of “decent hous­ing”, “re-​socialization of deprived areas”, and “risk mit­ig­a­tion” for hous­ing built on hill­side land in order to give legit­im­acy to the pro­ject in front of the city. On the other hand, they also use local law to open doors and change reg­u­la­tions, such as those regard­ing land use. They thereby reduce the sym­bolic impact of the national government’s intervention.

This occurred in Man­izales. In 2007, when the national government’s interest in devel­op­ing the pro­ject in the city was begin­ning to bur­geon, the Plan de Orde­nami­ento Ter­rit­orial (POT) – the local reg­u­la­tion for land plan­ning – was mod­i­fied. Overnight, the city coun­cil changed two aspects of the land reg­u­la­tions that applied to San José: 1) they determ­ined that the area at risk of land­slide was lar­ger, and 2) they increased the dens­ity of com­mer­cial use. Undoubtedly, the first change rein­forced the idea that it was being done for the best and for the pro­tec­tion of the neighbourhood’s inhab­it­ants, without mak­ing it known that the area of greatest rel­ev­ance to the pro­ject was the flat sec­tor of the neigh­bour­hood. The role of the second change was to make the interest already hov­er­ing over the area clear.

Bey­ond the veiled interests of the national gov­ern­ment and the local elite, their desire to rule and the local people’s demand for autonomy has come up against the concept of “decent hous­ing”. What is decent hous­ing? Who decides what decent hous­ing is? This is what Alicia wondered sev­eral times dur­ing our visit, when she was able to leave the sar­casm to one side. It seems as though she is only able to tell her story through ques­tions: Is it decent for them to shut me and my five chil­dren up in an apart­ment, when I have enjoyed so many years in a house? An apart­ment of 100 square metres, when in my house I’ve had over 300? Do rich people really think that liv­ing decently means liv­ing like them? With no patio, no yard, no door onto the street? With a tiny kit­chen? What kind of kit­chen will I have to use to make food for five chil­dren? As well as the fact that around here there are fam­il­ies of more than ten people: what kind of apart­ment will they live in, and in what kind of kit­chen will they cook for every­one? And what will the fam­il­ies who made a liv­ing from the com­mer­cial prop­er­ties do? Don’t they see that that gave them some eco­nomic inde­pend­ence? What now? Beg­ging the gov­ern­ment for jobs? Alicia fin­ishes by recog­niz­ing that per­haps if they had listened to them, if they had sat down to speak with them when everything was being planned, it might have been pos­sible to find some agree­ment, some middle ground. “People around here let them­selves speak”, she says. The annoy­ing thing, the pain­ful thing, is that everything was done as if they had no voice. They didn’t let them speak about what liv­ing decently was for them.

A des­ol­ate dusk had already fallen, with a cold that reached you from every side, when we left her house. I trod through the debris again, and those European wars that we learn to see in Colom­bia through pho­tos and images on the tele­vi­sion came back into my head. As I walked onwards I wanted to work out why that idea kept com­ing back to me; it wasn’t dif­fi­cult to find the answer: Although we believed for a long time in Colom­bia that war scenes were just the jungle and the fields, for a while now the people of the cit­ies have had to put up with bom­bard­ment that neg­ates their souls and takes away their lives while they are still living.

“Mi his­toria no se vende” (“My his­tory is not for sale”) doc­u­ment­ary (in Span­ish) on the San José neigh­bour­hood (Man­izales – Colom­bia). Car­ried out by the depart­ment of visual anthro­po­logy of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­das, Manizales.

The Span­ish ver­sion of this art­icle is pub­lished with our friends Demo­cra­cia en tu Cara. Many thanks to Alex Hig­son for this trans­la­tion.