Citizenship's Place: The State's Creation of Public Space and Street Vendors' Culture of Informality in Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

In this paper I seek to move beyond understandings of Colombia as a failed state or qualified democracy by exploring how the state continues to govern despite widespread shortcomings. I argue that two technologies of governance are central to contemporary rule in Colombia: state fragmentation and citizen education. These technologies are exemplified by the recovery of public space from street vendors in order to preserve it as a privileged site for citizenship. This process is made possible by the proliferation of state agencies, policies, and plans which define the problem of public space as one of its invasion by ambulant vendors, and the solution to this invasion as the relocation of vendors to spatially marginalized and state-regulated markets where they are taught to overcome their ‘culture of informality’ by participating in political and economic transactions in state-prescribed ways. I argue that the recovery of public space and relocation of street vendors is a spatial technology of governance that codes structural inequalities as a question of culture while producing new forms of segregation in which citizens and street vendors have differentiated places and rights to mobility. This study analyzes the relationship between state and citizen construction while considering the pedagogical work implicated in the resilience of both democracy and neoliberal economic policies.

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