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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper examines housing policy for victims of the war in Colombia, asking how the imagination of better futures encounters the limits of structural violence, and how quotidian acts of living on can undermine official visions of the good, opting for emergent strategies of the good for now.

Paper Abstract:

Among Colombian urbanists the city of Soacha is such a model of dysfunction that its name has been turned into a benchmark of unplanning. Soacha-ization means to decay due to improper planning, fecklessness, or disinterest. The city’s famed disorder is often attributed to its exponential growth, fed largely by those seeking safety from the country’s war. In 2010, the government launched an ambitious program to build 100,000 free homes for Colombia’s neediest, especially those displaced by the war. 2000 of these homes were built in Soacha. The projects were built in previously discarded lots, in sites with few basic services, and without consultation from local leadership. The focus on housing illuminates official understandings of the ravages of war, the sorts of victims produced in its wake, and the kinds of action that could delineate novel futures for the country. I explore how home ownership came to be associated with reparation, closure, and the end of war. Thinking alongside families who have become disenchanted with their new homes invites a different understanding of the effects the war in Colombia and how relations of survival, care, and responsibility can be reconfigured around ideas of the home. The Soacha-ization of repair born from the disconnect between expectations of closure and the precarity of everyday lives, queries how the imagination of better futures encounters the hard limits of structural violence, and how quotidian acts of living on can undermine official visions of the good, opting instead for emergent strategies of the good for now.