How ‘creative’ is remembering? Culture-led regeneration and the politics of memory in Bogota, Colombia

ABSTRACT

Recently, Colombia’s post-conflict transition has experienced strong international attention. In Bogota, commemorative politics of the conflict insert themselves in complex processes of place branding: employing culture to rescale the city image from unsafe and violent to culturally vibrant. However, how to reckon with the country’s violent past in the culture-led renaissance of Bogota? Based on the author’s four-month of in-depth qualitative fieldwork on the main street Avenida 26 – at the center of both branding strategies and politics of memory – this paper shows the failure of institutional efforts to promote a brand of Bogota as a ‘City of Memory’. Socio-political divisions over the interpretations of the country’s past result in multi-scalar conflictive negotiations between politics and practices on the street: they reveal the tight link between memory, social justice, and urban segregation while denouncing the exclusionary visions of citizenship bared in political efforts to display memory as a territorial mark.

KEYWORDS:

• Politics of memory
• culture-led urban regeneration
• urban governance
• everyday practices
• city image
• Bogota

Disclosure statement

The author declares that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Notes

1. On political analysis of the Colombian conflict, see the works of Restrepo and Aponte (2009) and Daniel Pécaut (2001).

2. FARC – Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia.

3. ELN – Ejército de Liberación Nacional.

4. Transitional justice relates to the urgency for countries facing conflictive and repressive histories, characterized by serious human rights violations, to provide accountability for their victims. Transitional Justice aims to bring alternative responses than traditional juridical ones; it redresses for victims, focuses on their dignity, and rights as human beings. To know more about Transitional Justice, see (Rush and Simic 2014) and (Arthur 2009).

5. Interview with Catalina, representative of ProBogotá, conducted on 22 February 2018.

6. Interview with Jorge, graffiti artist. Conducted on 5 February 2018.

7. Interview with Clara, graffiti artist. Conducted on 17 February 2018.

8. Interview with Clara, graffiti artist. Conducted on 17 February 2018.

9. Interview with David, owner of a bike-tour company. Conducted on 27 January 2018.

10. Interview with Roger, owner of a bike-tour company. Conducted on 9 February 2018.

11. Interview with Miguel, staff member of CMPyR. Conducted on 22 February 2018.

12. Interview with Leonardo, marble worker. Conducted on 15 February 2018.

13. Interview with Luz, marble worker. Conducted on 18 February 2018.

14. Interview with Carolina, informal flower seller. Conducted on 8 February 2018.

15. Interview with Diego, coffee stall owner. Conducted on 25 February 2018.

16. Interview with Andres, skater on Avenida 26. Conducted on the 2 March 2018.

17. Interview with Sandra, flower seller. Conducted on 1 March 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Violante Torre

Violante Torre is a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Lausanne. She works within the research group of Urban Studies and is part of the research team M3 (Materialities | Multiplicities | Metropolis). She previously worked as a Policy Officer at the European Cultural Foundation, for the Creative Europe project Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities, where she investigated urban commons, participatory processes in cultural policy-making, and sustainable urban regeneration in several European contexts. Violante has received a Master’s in Urban Governance at Sciences Po Paris, with Summa cum laude honors. The main research topics of her Ph.D. research consist of culture-led regeneration; everyday politics and informal uses of space; memory politics in Latin American and European contexts.