Paper short abstract:

We bring a contrast between community-based knowledge and top-down technocratic discourses of risk, to show how structuring a knowledge framework may benefit coordinated resistance and open realistic options to orient community-academic-municipal-international coordination efforts

Paper long abstract:

In the peri-urban communities of Bogotá, a technocratic logic administered through municipal authorities is threatening to displace residents from lands deemed "non-mitigable high-risk zones." Since 1998, approximately 48,000 people have been enlisted in the government’s relocation process, and yet by 2015, more than half were still waiting for a relocation option, while new families continue to move into the vacated plots. Community resistance to this situation reveals not only a skepticism about the government’s technocratic assessment of risk and its inability to implement its own policy, but also a deeper analysis of the failure to understand the historical and social drivers of risk, which remain concealed at the root of the problem.

In coordination with the NATURA Network (Nature-Based Solutions for Urban Resilience in the Anthropocene) and the Thematic Working Group on Urban Informality and Innovation for Resilience, we have been developing a "Local Labs strategy" based on converging citizen activism, research, and international cooperation to support the development of coalitions and counter-hegemonic narratives challenging the contradictions and violence of dominant technocratic approaches.

As our contribution to the panel, we present a theoretical framework incorporating community claims and knowledge about the production, distribution, and attribution of risk, offering an epistemology of risk capable of opening new pathways towards epistemic justice, adaptation trends, and alternative resilient urban futures.