Abstract
Soacha, a municipality at the southern border of Bogota, has long faced a crisis of governance and legitimacy. This situation has deteriorated further as the government has encouraged the construction of large, privately developed housing. Drawing on detailed ethnography, Hurtado-Tarazona analyses how ordinary people establish legitimacy in their daily lives through actions that range from the illegal to the hyper-regulated. Illegal practices coexist with strict, community-enforced regulations in private and public spaces to ensure order, cleanliness and harmony among neighbours. Residents use their own material and non-material resources to cope with the structural difficulties of their context without feeling detached from the goal of middle-class citizenship. Thus, they face the failures of the municipality, filling the gaps in legitimacy without challenging the deficiencies of governance.
This chapter is based on the fieldwork that I conducted for my doctoral thesis, funded by Colciencias and the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies (FURS).
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- 1.
Soacha had a population of 330,000 inhabitants as per the last official census of 2005. In 2017, an unofficial census carried out by the Mayor’s office counted 1,030,000 inhabitants in the Municipality.
- 2.
The ‘horizontal property regime’ is regulated in Colombia by National Law 675 of 2001, and it applies to all residential units that have any communal properties or assets (which currently constitute 70% of the residential properties in Bogotá).
- 3.
Interviews with residents, informal conversations, observation in public and private spaces, and observation and participation in Facebook groups and pages (of Ciudad Verde and of its condominiums).
- 4.
See Glasze et al. (2006) for an overview of this type of private residential developments around the world.
- 5.
In another context, Fitzpatrick (2000) also shows how complaints about ‘noisy neighbours’ are class-loaded, relying on the imagery of the noisy working-class life versus the quiet, middle-class life, in which making too much noise comprises an anti-social, selfish behaviour.
- 6.
As I suspected these could violate the rights to personal privacy, intimacy, and good name, as enshrined in the Constitution.
- 7.
In Colombia, it is not common to own a clothes dryer, much less in lower-middle-class households.
- 8.
‘A person who ce sap’ fa’ (is clever) is a skilful and resourceful person endowed with a blend of inner strength, determination, and quickness of mind that denies ruthlessness. In the everyday reality of socio-economic competition, the moral and normative sine qua non of this concept of sape’ fa’ is that coping with life is a matter of developing the entrepreneurial ability to construct monetary and non-monetary resources’ (Pardo 1995: 48).
- 9.
A notion inherited from a public programme implemented in Bogotá in the decade of 1990 by Mayor Antanas Mockus, in which the ‘good citizen’ is rule compliant and self-regulated, and helps to regulate the behaviour of other citizens to achieve an orderly urban life in both public and private spaces (Mockus 2012). The best-known interventions in this programme were those aimed at generating civic behaviour in transit (drivers and pedestrians) and those of ‘recovery’ of public spaces by removing illegal enclosures, parked cars on streets, and street vendors.
- 10.
Although these tactics could gradually and cumulatively subvert certain elements of the order of things (De Certeau 1988).
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Hurtado-Tarazona, A. (2019). Privatization of Urban Governance and Legitimacy Disputes in a Social Housing Megaproject in Soacha, Colombia. In: Pardo, I., Prato, G.B. (eds) Legitimacy. Palgrave Studies in Urban Anthropology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96238-2_7
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