PIRATE URBANISMFIGHTING BACK : STRATEGY AND

TACTICS IN SELF-SETTLEMENTSURBAN MUTATIONS ON THE EDGE/RAUL MARINO/D-ARCH/ETHZ

November, year 1966. The directives of the Hospital Hortuaand city planning department observe form the roof of the main building the recent occupation of this land property of the national government. The hospital board discusses with planning department about the facts behind this occupation organized by a large community of displaced population. One question remains: how do they achieve this in just 20 minutes?

CONTENT

Preface

1. Pirate Utopias Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ)

2. Social Fields and Revolution

3. Fighting Back: Tactics vs. Strategies

4. Self Settlements/Pirate urbanism

5. Case Study 1: From Inside to Outside-The Strategy of the Snail

(Squattering of Casa Uribe –Bogota 1983)

6. Case Study 2: From Outside to Inside – Occupation of Barrio

Policarpa (Bogota 1966)

7. Conclusions

8. Notes

9. Bibliography

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1. Preface

The process of settlement in the city follow by IDP’s in Colombia reflects the history behind their displacement. Colombia is a country affected by an internal conflict during the last 50 years, as result of that the population of the main cities have been increased in an abnormal rate. The government policies for housing are not strong enough to provide effective solutions for all the people in need of a place to live and carry on with their lives.

How is this population solving this problem? If we analyze the history of the city growth, two main facts capture our attention: the illegal settlements organized by the people themselves works better at the end that those provide by the government or by illegal planners. Also this pirate urbanism is the reflect of the rights claimed by the IDPs to have access to land and belong again to a territory. This paper analyze two very interesting cases on how to fight back against the lack of housing solutions by the government in which the actors organized themselves in a very careful and unique way in order to provide a roof for their families and integrate again into a city that most of the times is not ready to receive this new comers. 1

In order to understand better the sociological phenomena behind this cases we framed our investigation into the theories of Fields by Pierre Bordieu and the strategic and tactic definitions by Michel de Certeau, who provided very interesting analysis on how this mechanism of social behavior works into a society and their effects on the urban space. We find these theories very much adequate to understand these phenomena and at the same time allow us to explain in a more detailed way the process behind this resistance tactics and how they generate identity in the community.

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But advisable it is, to confront the mythical powers with trickeryand recklessness. —

Walter Benjamin

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Pirate Utopias: The Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)The concept of TAZ arises first out of a critique of Revolution, and a appreciation of insurrection. The former labels the latter a failure; but here uprising represent a far more interesting possibility, form the standart of a psychology of liberation.

The Sea-Rovers and Corsairs of the 18th Century created an “information network”, whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even for a short but merry life. The author called this zones “Pirate Utopias” This places functions as islands on the net and had the same logic of organization the TAZ. Getting the TAZ started may involve tactics of insurrection and defense, but its greatest strength lies in its invisibility, the state cannot recognize because History has not definition of it. So the TAZ is a perfect tactic for an era in which the states is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies. This nomadic war machine conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted.

T.A.Z.

Temporary

Autonomous Zone

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Social Fields and RevolutionFor Bourdieu, the modern social world is divided into what he calls FIELDS. For him the differentiation of social activities led to the constitution of various, relatively autonomous, social spaces in which competition centers around particular species of capital. These fields are treated on a hierarchical basis and the dynamics arises out of the social actors.

FieldDOMINANT VS DOMINATED

CONSTITUED BY:1. The existence of Common Capital (knowledge,

abilities, power, etc.) 2. The fight for its appropriation

3. Hierarquial Structuring between those who have the capital and those who aspire to have it

Bourdieu shared Weber's view that society cannot be analyzed simply in terms of economic classes and ideologies. Much of his work concerns the independent role of educational and cultural factors. Instead of analyzing societies in terms of classes, Bourdieu uses the concept of field: a social arena in which people maneuver and struggle in pursuit of desirable resources. 4

The differentiation of social activities led to the constitution of various, relatively autonomous, social spaces in which competition centers around particular species of capital. These fields are treated on a hierarchical basis and the dynamics of fields arises out of the struggle of social actors trying to occupy the dominant positions within the field. 7 While Bourdieu shares prime elements of conflict theory, like Marx he diverges from analyses that situate social struggle only within the fundamental economic antagonisms between social classes. The conflicts which take place in each social field have specific characteristics arising from those fields and that involve many social relationships which are not economic.

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Symbolic violence is fundamentally the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon dominated social agents who then take the social order to be just. It is the incorporation of unthought structures that tend to perpetuate the structures of action of the dominant. The dominated then take their position to be "right." Symbolic violence is in some senses much more powerful than physical violence in that it is embedded in the very modes of action and structures of cognition of individuals, and imposes the vision of the legitimacy of the social order.

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Fighting back: Tactics Vs. Strategies

Certeau defines two kinds of behavior, the strategic and the tactical. He takes the terms out of their military context and injects them with new meaning. He describes institutions in general as "strategic" and everyday people who are non-producers as "tactical".

Perhaps the most influential aspect of The Practice of Everyday Lifehas emerged from scholarly interest in Certeau’s distinction between the concepts of strategy and tactics. Certeau links "strategies" with institutions and structures of power, while "tactics" are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies. In the influential chapter "Walking in the City," he describes "the city" as a "concept," generated by the strategic maneuvering of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole, as it might be experienced by someone looking down from high above. Between this strategy control field the tactics arose as a way to effectively deflects a strategy’s influence and it renders its own activities in an “unmappable”form of subversion. 3

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Aware that the things around it have been created to cater to the lowest common denominator, it expects to have to work on things in order to make them its own, or to make them "habitable". Its products are not necessarily objects (e.g. they may be as invisible and personal as the alteration of a story during the process of reading, or of a recipe while cooking). The tactic manifests itself not in its products but in its methodology. It might be performed by an individual or a transient grouping that does not last long enough to require a label. Unlike the strategy, it lacks the centralized structure and permanence that would enable it to set itself up as a competitor to some other entity.

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Informal Settlements/Pirate Urbanism

In order to clarify the criteria that were adopted to manage theinformation on slums and poverty in Bogotá, it is worth establishing the following points:The majority of the slums in Bogotá originated in illegal processes of urban sub-division that took place on the peripheral areas of the city. Considering that these processes are dynamic, it must be taken into account that the physical and social conditions that classify them as slums are present only during the first years of the settlement. The indicators used to consider an urban area as a slum freeze the situation of a settlement that evolves every day, in a specific moment. Furthermore, the occupation and development that take place in the illegal urbanization process generate a territory in which individual processes of construction of habitat combine in diverse stages of development, which is reflected in the social conditions of the inhabitants. This reality can hardly be measured and registered using different living conditions measures. 2

The social information that exists about the city refers to the localidades, within which one cannot necessarily find social and urban homogeneity. As such, in a heterogeneous localidad, in which no one group has a clear predominance, the information generated for the localidad as a whole distorts the real conditions of the groups with lower incomes.

The process of growing and shape in Latin-American cities is directly relate to large peripheral human settlements that only after a long period of time are assimilated by the main cities.For the case of Bogota, this process had been influenced, as in most of main Colombian cities by the internal conflict and the social tension: squattering of lands, pirate urbanizations, massive evictions and fight for access to basic services (water, light, communications etc). Every peripheral barrio in the city have its own traumatic history of born and rich cultural memory waiting to be interpreted and transmitted.

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Informal Settlements/Pirate Urbanism

As a result of the processes of the city’s transformation, some of the traditional downtown areas were abandoned and progressively destined to low level economic activities and to the inadequate and disordered location of housing, in conditions that progressively generated a high degree of social and physical deterioration.In general, in these zones tenement houses in bad conditions co-exist with sectors that mix housing with other activities, in most of the cases, illegal activities.Even though it is true that these zones represent a small relative proportion of the city area, its strategic location and the gravity of the social conditions have been important factors in the last few years in the remarkable actions involving urban recuperation, conducted and sponsored by the District. 5

Inner-City SlumsIn the middle of the 20th century, the central deteriorated sectors were mainly associated with tenement houses, defined by the Administrative Department for the District’s Planning, (DAPD in Spanish) (1997) as: ”...large houses occupied permanently by a number of families, in independent rooms, with collective sanitary services, kitchen and a laundry area...” (DAPD 1997: 66-68) During the sixties, central tenement houses played an important role in receiving immigrants just arrived in the city who were looking for temporary housing, moving later tomarginal and unplanned settlements. Nowadays, tenement houses still exist, but their overuse has contributed to a reduction in their importance, as well as the development of a business of room renting in marginal houses, whose owners want to increase the family’s income.Besides the tenement houses, in the traditional centre of the city there are numerous places that have suffered a high degree of physical and social damage. Although they have a limited importance in relation to the total area of the city, some of these areas have developed critical situations of poverty, drugs and delinquency.

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Informal Settlements/Pirate Urbanism

There is not a generally used official name for these sectors. The DAPD (1997) refers to them as “Social Deviation Zones”, “Tolerance Zones” or “Pots”, with the following definition: “Social deviation zones, tolerance zones or pots are the physical spaces of the cities inhabited mainly by human groups known to engage in delinquent behavior, prostitution, or distribution and use of illegal drugs” (DAPD 1997: 68) 6. It is exceptional to find these definitions in an official document, since traditionally some of them are not used officially.

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Case Study 1: From Inside to OutsideThe Strategy of the Snail

The Strategy of the SnailThis particular case of Squattering and later demolition of a house in the centre of Bogota took place in March of 1983. Six years later, Sergio Cabrera, a Colombian movie director took the history to a film called “The strategy of the Snail”. The originals inhabitants of this house are now settled in a plot of land in the south of the city where they reconstructed the house they dismantle before. This very unusual case of fight back the powers of government was organized by Don Jacinto Ibarburen, an old Spanish anarchist how fight in the Spanish Civil War. He create a tactic to resist to the eviction of the house were he and another 30 families lived. Later he exposed his ideas to his neighbors and together they decided to follow this resistance tactic until the last consequences.

As the snail carries its house whatever it goes, the inhabitants of this house adapted this tactic of housing to fight back the injustice eviction from their legal property. A hidden uprising against capital powers.

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Case Study 1: From Inside to OutsideThe Strategy of the Snail

The owner of the house, a rich man from an aristocratic family in Bogota, wanted to evicted the residents of this house, who have legal right to claim property of the house according with the Colombian law that state “a resident of a property can claim the right of possession after 40 years of living in the same place”.

The owner of the house manipulate the law and together with corrupted lawyers and judges forced the eviction of the inhabitants of the house. The community organized by don Jacinto and Romero, alawyer who also lives in the same house, begin to look for legal ways to stop this injustice but the power of money was stronger. So they decided to take another way to claim for their right for housing and property, and applied the tactic proposed by don Jacinto, which consist in the total dismantle of the house, brick by brick, tale by tale, and window by window, and transported by air poles to an empty backyard in the other corner of the block. This construction materials were later transported in small amounts to avoid any suspicion by the police, to a plot of land bought by all the neighbors in the south of Bogota were they later reconstructed the dismantle house.

Uprising communities

The sense of community organization to achieve a common goal is what I found particularly interesting in this case, a form of passive rebellion against the powers of money and corrupted laws, in this way theylegitimize their right for property and at the same time teach a lesson to the people who wanted to evicted them in an injustice way. As de Certeau exposes, this tactics do not seek to overcome strategies but seeks to fulfill its needs behind an appearance of conformity.

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Case Study 1: From Inside to OutsideThe Strategy of the Snail

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Case Study 2: From Outside to InsideOcuppation of Barrio Policarpa

November, year 1966. The directives of the Hospital Hortua and city planning department observe form the roof of the main building the recent occupation of this land property of the national government. The hospital board discusses with planning department about the facts behind this occupation organized by a large community of displaced population. One question remains: how do they achieve this in just 20 minutes?

Research back in history is sometimes tricky. Facts can be changed or memories distort. The scenario transformed with time in a integrated part of the city and its inhabitants become a productive part of the community. If they think back probably just one fact remains: they fight together for this land and this generates a common urban identity, a force that keep them through the daily life.

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Case Study 1: From Outside to InsideOcuppation of Barrio Policarpa

The occupation of this empty piece of land close to the center of the city, started actually with just one woman, Rosa Quintero de Buenaventura and her children who doesn’t have a place to live after being remove from the place she lives because she couldn’t pay the rent anymore. In a communal meeting organized by the Central Nacional Provivienda(CENAPROV) 8 organization of the Colombian Communist Party (PCC) she propose to begin a scale occupation of this land instead looking for remotes empty lands in the periphery to organized the more than 2000 families in the same situation. This idea immediately arose public interest because this land had access to public services and it was located very close to the center of the city. After the meeting, the committee proposed to support this woman and help her to settle in this plot of land. The operation was held during the night, to avoid any interfering of the police. So in an small truck she arrives with their personal belongings and her children and together with the members of the Central began to construct an improvise shelter to spend the cold night of Bogota.

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Case Study 1: From Outside to InsideOccupation of Barrio Policarpa

The D DayAfter the first person settled in this territory, in the same week 5 others families move in at night and constructed their shelters with the help of the other squatters. The police notice this new occupants and try to remove them but they answer that they didn’t have another place to go, so they will have to take them all to prison with their families. In 2 weeks 30 other families move in and complete the ocupation of the wall dividing the Hospital from the empty land.CENAPROV decided then to organized a massive occupation during the day, because the police were then controlling the movements of people to this place during the night. It was decided then to occupied the next piece of land to the south together with 250 families of displaced population.9 The tactic was planned: between the whole community they constructed transportable shelters made of light wood and cove by plastics sheets of about 8m x 4m, to be able to carried out for no more than 6 persons.

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Case Study 1: From Outside to InsideOccupation of Barrio Policarpa

The day decided to do the operation was the Friday of the Holy Week, because they thought that the police will be more relaxed this national holyday and will not attack them during the occupation. The distribution of the land was planned and different plots assigned to every family so they knew already where to place their shelter and conform the units of housing.

The Battle beginsAt 11:40 the operation began. 250 families cross the roads to the squatter territory running with their transportable houses and placed them in the selected areas. At 12:00 pm the occupation was finished and to take possession of the land the woman and children started to make the celebration dinner for the Holy Week in their new home.At 1 pm the police in the area realized what happened and mobilize troops to remove this massive invasion. The new community realized this and prepare to defend their shelters from the attack of the police. The battle began and the police throw tear gas in the whole area to forced the people to go out. But they resisted andfight back with rocks and hot water. Then the police increase the attack and mobilize to the shelters to set them on fire. Some gunshots were listened and the people run in fear, but is was too late. Luis Antonio Vega, one of the first settlers of this land was killed by the attack of the police. When the community realized that they increase the attack to the police telling them that they will have to kill them all to take them out of this land. The police then move backward and wait for instruction from the Central Station,where it was decided to suspend the operative to avoid any more deaths. They battle was win by the community and the neighborhood is today an integrated part of the city.

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ConclusionsFuture UtopiasThe forced displacement in Colombia and displace people drama have become the most urgent dilemma for our society in this decade. Many questions remains without an answer, particularly everything related to return, relocation or reintegration. In any of these scenarios, the question for the problem of change or transformation in social identity becomes the cornerstone to build projects of society. Identity, as explained by Silva (1994) 11 points out as that complex of articulation and relation of memory (rebuilding of past) with social practice(appropriation of present) and Utopia (appropriation of future) and the representation the subject has of that process because of his/her consciousness.

Uprising communitiesThe empowering of communities by the fight for their right to housing and access to territory is a key factor in the shape of urban conditions and development. The claim for land is one of the oldest motivation of humans to belong to a territory and settled in a organized way. Therefore, this movements of people displaced from their original lands in the countryside take their position inside the social field and claim their position to be right. The symbolic violence is then fight back and the strategies from government to stop this kind of settlements are challenged because its ineffectiveness.

The art of Self-SettlementAs much of this families came from parts of the countryside that were colonized by their own families hundred years ago, they applied this knowledge to settle in a territory and move on with their lives. The new urban conditions present in the cities forced them to act indifferent ways to provide a roof to their families. It is not our intention to promote the massive occupation of empty lands in the city area, instead we want to show how this persons organized themselves in a very efficient way to achieve this goal. This community sense of belonging to a territory is in our opinion the main factor in the appropriation of the community and generates the starting point of self-urbanization processes in our cities.

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ConclusionsInformal Markets and Pirate UrbanizationThe markets of land in developing nations tend to reflect the social conditions behind them. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policies have been analyzing this informal markets in order to provide solutions to the big problem of people living without the basic conditions in the city. The surplus of urban land is now most of the times controlled by a illegal planners, commonly know in Colombian slang as “Pirate urbanizations” as pirate means in this context “illegal or non-authorized” We want to provide a new meaning to this word as we thought that the logic of piracy, as it was in old sea rovers, applied to this kind of situation were the tactic to fight back to establish powers are planned as an assault to a ship or a a city to extract their loot. As the example we saw in the eviction of the Casa Uribe there is alternatives to confront social injustice without violence and direct fight with the authorities. We wonder if the violence that took this people away from their lands in the countryside generates exactly the opposite attitude to violent actions and promotes a sense of pacific resistance in this communities.

Marginality and TAZThe tactical ways in which IDPs settle in a territory belong to the borderline between two worlds. A tactic as de Certeau establish“insinuates itself into the other’s space, fragmentarily, without taking over its entirety, without being able to keep a distance” 10. Is these form of resistance an example of modern TAZ? The temporary character of some of this interventions remind us the principle behind this concept. The invisibility and temporal dimensions change over time but it is the beginning what capture our attention. As IDPs fight back defending the land they occupied these territories became “Independent” of social laws and the regulations. After all, if we look back in history of Colombian armed insurrection we realize that everything began with the occupation of a territory by the insurrected in the middle of Colombia that they called “Independent Republic of Marquetalia”. So if its true what Lamborn states, “Revolution is closed, but insurgency is open” 12

maybe these examples of fight back we show here are the key to understand the evolution of resistance tactics in the Latin-American urban context.

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Notes

1. Lincoln Institute of Land Policies, Land Lines Magazine Nr.34 March 20022. DAPD-Departamento Administrativo de Planeacion Nacional- Report Urban

Development 20053. De Certeau, Michel: The practice of everyday Life4. Urban marginality and displacement, Equipo Nizkor, Bogota 20035. COHDES, 20046. COHDES, 20047. Bordieu, Pierre: A World Apart 19948. CENAPROV, PCC- History of a fight9. CENAPROV, PCC: In a night a neighborhood was borne. 10. Pirate Utopias and TAZ11. Urban Imaginaries in Latinamerica, Armando Silva-Documenta 11 Kassel12. Temporary Autonomous Zones- Peter Lamborn

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