UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Bogota Humana's Climate
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Bogota Humana's climate resettlements: Displacement and the limits of the housing market in Colombia A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Planning by Hugo Sarmiento 2018 © Copyright by Hugo Sarmiento 2018 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Bogota Humana's climate resettlements: Displacement and the limits of the housing market in Colombia by Hugo Sarmiento Doctor of Philosophy in Urban Planning University of California, Los Angeles, 2018 Professor Christopher C. Tilly This dissertation is about climate resettlements, and the challenges to this practice, posed by the housing market in Bogota, Colombia. Specifically, it focuses on the resettlement strategy proposed by Petro’s city administration in its Bogota Humana development plan (2012-2016). Climate resettlements, unlike other types of resettlements, aim to relocate people who live in areas which climate model projections show are potentially at risk of disasters caused by floods, landslides and torrential rains. Implicated in Bogota Humana’s resettlement outcome are two defining features of the city’s housing market, a large and growing housing deficit, and the informal development of housing in the urban periphery. They raise questions of the particular ii housing strategy connected to the resettlements. How did the Petro administration negotiate the city’s housing deficit? How did it intervene in the city’s informal housing markets? Borrowing from political ecology and the emerging critiques of social-ecological systems theory (Adger 2006, Pelling 2011, Hodson &Marvin 2010) this dissertation relies on a political and economic frame to examine the role played by the housing market in this case of climate resettlements. It argues that by considering the role of markets we can not only bring into view how social-ecological contradictions are generated, namely through the existing patterns in the spatial distribution of housing, but also how they might be resolved. The aim of the dissertation is to contribute to a deeper understanding of the political economy of climate resettlements by examining the case represented in Bogota Humana’s resettlement strategy. iii The dissertation of Hugo Sarmiento is approved. Susanna B. Hecht Paavo Monkonnen Helga M. Leitner Christopher C. Tilly, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2018 iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my adviser Chris Tilly for his patience and steadfast support in supervising this project, and my committee members: Susanna Hecht, Paavo Monkonnen and, Helga Leitner. Beyond my dissertation committee I had insightful conversations with Leo Estrada and Vinit Mukhija. In Colombia, I found invaluable support for my dissertation fieldwork from Andrea Lampis, at La Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota (UNAL), Jaime Hernandez and Olga Ceballos at La Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (PUJ). At Vidas Moviles in Ciudad Bolivar, Alejandra Miranda Menes helped me organize a survey team, without her support and guidance, my dissertation would just not have been possible. I would also like to acknowledge the staff at IDIGER, especially Diana Arias Tovar and Jesus Enrique Rojas Ochoa, the staff at Caja de Vivienda Popular and Sergio Andres Laiton at Secretaria de Planeacion, Alcaldia de Bogota for his support with navigating the city’s databases. I would also like to acknowledge my fellow doctoral students and friends in the department and across UCLA, including Lisa Berglund, Trevor Thomas, C.J. Gabbe, Paloma Giottonini Badilla, Emily Erickson, Patrick Adler, and so many more. Most of all, I thank my family, beginning with my mother, Rosa Sarmiento, my father, Hugo Orlando Sarmiento, my sisters, Alba Sarmiento and Susana Sarmiento, and my brother Liber Sarmiento. I have made it this far because of them. v Table of Contents List of Acronyms / Glossary .................................................................................................... ix Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………......... 1 Literature Review …………………………………………………………………………… 8 Chapter 1 The Politics of Bogota Humana’s climate resettlements …………………………. 20 Chapter 2 Housing crisis and the geography of climate risk in Bogota ..…………………..... 49 Chapter 3 Risk zones and the spatial determinants of new social housing construction in Bogota (2008-2016) …………………………........................................................................................ 78 Chapter 4 Household responses to Bogota Humana’s resettlements ………………………..... 108 vi Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………… 159 Appendix ................................................................................................................................... 175 References ................................................................................................................................. 199 vii Acronyms / Glossary API-GR Areas Prioritarias de Intervencion Gestion de Riesgos. Zones identified by IDIGER which are prioritized for risk mitigation interventions. These are integrated into the POT. Bogota Humana The Petro administration’s four-year development plan for Bogota. CAMACOL Camara Colombiana de la Construccion. The Colombian chamber of construction. Represents the interests of the Colombian construction industry. CVP Caja de Vivienda Popular. Bogota’s social housing agency. Decree 255 of 2013 Defined the financial compensation that could be offered to families targeted for relocation. Decree 364 of 2013 The special modification proposed by the Gustavo administration for Bogota’s twelve-year territorial development plan known as the POT. Decree 190 of 2004 The current twelve-year POT for Bogota. DRM Disaster Risk Management. DFDR Development-Forced Displacement and Resettlement. FOPAE Fondo Operativo de Prevencion y Atencion a Emergencias. Bogota’s risk management agency and predecessor to IDIGER. IDEAM Instituto de Hidrologia, Meteroligia y Estudios Ambientales. Colombia’s national meterology institute. Responsible for producing technical and scientific knowledge such as climate model projections. IDIGER Insituto Distrital de Gestion de Riesgo y para los Cambios Climaticos. The successor agency to FOPAE created by the Petro administration and approved by Bogota’s district council. POT Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial. Bogota’s twelve-year territorial developmement plan which determines the city’s risk zoning code. SDVE Subsidio de Vivienda en Especie. A financial instrument created by the Petro administration to finance housing developments for families participating in the climate resettlement program. viii VIS Vivienda de Interes Social. Social housing with a maximum value of 135 times the monthly minimum wage. VIP Vivienda de Interes Prioritario. Social housing with a maximum value of 70 times the monthly minimum wage. New social housing built for families in the resettlement program is found in this category. VUR Valor Unico de Reconocimiento. The main financial instrument used to compensate families relocated by FOPAE / IDIGER. Only families from strata 1 and 2 qualify for this form of compensation. ix Biography Hugo Sarmiento studied history as an undergrad and urban planning as a master’s student at UCLA. He is interested in applying a critical perspective to the study of housing and economic development especially as it relates to environmental policy such as climate change and risk management. His work is guided by a political and economic frame, and the central notion people and their cultural practices are the basis for building more socially and environmentally just cities. Hugo has a special interest in Latin American urban geographies having completed projects in Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil. x Introduction In the fall of 2016 I visited Caracoli, located in Bogota’s southern locality of Ciudad Bolivar, to meet two local leaders who were negotiating the city’s climate resettlements in their neighborhood. One of the pressing issues on their agenda was the new land “invasion” which had reoccupied the space cleared by the city, a space now legally identified as a high risk zone. In a previous visit to Bogota I had learned of the Petro administration’s experiment with climate resettlements in the informal settlements, like Caracoli, found across the city’s southern periphery. I had participated in a two-day conference organized by the city’s risk management agency, the District Institute for Risk Management and Climate Change (IDIGER) where hundreds of residents impacted by the city’s resettlements were assembled for a series of workshops and panels on the effects of climate change in Bogota. City officials were frequently interrupted by residents with complaints about the resettlement process. Given this experience I arrived in Caracoli with the intuition a large part of the conflict between the city and residents had to do with a lack of understanding of the magnitude climate change-related risks posed to their communities. I also understood the relationship between the city and residents was complicated by a historical distrust, a lack of confidence in the state and its institutions, shaped by decades of civil conflict. In fact, many of the residents of Caracoli had come to the city as part of the wave of desplazados, or as Colombia’s internally displaced population is known locally, which contributed to the growth of informal settlements in Bogota in the 1990s. The interview began with one of the leaders explaining