Abstract

GONGORA, Andrés  and  SUAREZ, Carlos José. For a Bogotá Without Filth: Violence, Life and Death in the Urban Sewer. univ.humanist. [online]. 2008, n.66, pp.107-138. ISSN 0120-4807.

This article resumes a social investigation that tried to show the interrelationship between death zones and serious architectural deterioration in the center of Bogotá; the processes of urban renovation that took place in the former "Calle del Cartucho" and the people that used to live there (mainly homeless people), and the use of violence. Analysis of the results evidenced that social cleansing is not the principal cause of death of homeless people; furthermore, there is no apparent institutional control and state monopoly over the violence in this sector, because these zones, despite the previously mentioned circumstances, maintain a series of implicit rules that govern and limit them, based on the structurizing use of violence. We also saw that there is a clear coincidence between the homicide maps and those zones of urban deterioration, and finally, how social representations about the people that live there reinforce the initiative of urban renovation, based on an aesthetic and utilitarian ideal that responds to the logic of the capital. With this panorama, we conclude that the recuperation process of deteriorated urban centers form part of a "kitsch" strategy that privileges the embellishment, perpetuating and displacing social problematics.

Keywords : homeless people; violence; urbanism.

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