Urbanism As Warfare

Planning, Insecurity, and the Remaking of Downtown Bogotá

Federico Pérez Fernández

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English

Cornell University Press
15 December 2025

Urban communities; Social theory; Social & cultural anthropology

Series: Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge

Urbanism as Warfare explores connections between regimes of (in)security and projects of urban modernity, bureaucratic control, and propertied citizenship in downtown Bogotá. Federico Pérez Fernández reveals how militarism, class warfare, and violence have infused urban visions and struggles in Colombia's capital. Repertoires of insecurity become modes of technocratic warfare encoded in expert diagnostics and bureaucratic procedures. They also form the basis of insurgent knowledges that contest the violence of property and planning.

Battles over Bogota's renewal illuminate the afterlives of warfare central to planning practices and urban materialities. Pérez Fernández shows how such processes are historically sedimented in urban spaces, transforming buildings into battlefields, eviction notices into artifacts of destruction, and urban property into a threatening weapon. Urbanism as Warfare excavates these residues of violence to illuminate the enduring role of local and global security discourses in the making and remaking of urban worlds. Ultimately, the book considers the promise and limits of emergent urban epistemologies that move beyond the logics of security and territorial control and re-envision city-making as a collective practice of post-conflict reconstruction.

By: Federico Pérez Fernández
Imprint: Cornell University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781501784774
ISBN 10: 1501784773
Series: Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge
Pages: 306
Publication Date: 15 December 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Introduction 1. Downtown Ground Zero 2. The City as Terrain 3. The Violence of Bureaucracy 4. Ruinous Knowledge 5. Territory by Design 6. Progressive Fictions Epilogue

Federico Pérez Fernández is Associate Professor of Urban Anthropology at the University Honors College, Portland State University. His research interests include city planning and design, engineering and infrastructure, space and power, urban property and politics, and militarism and security.