From Hygienism to Urban Acupuncture. Medical Metaphors and Exclusionary Urbanism in Bogotá

Abstract

Most of the literature about urban policy in Bogotá at the turn of the century has focused on the city's transformation. Both critical and celebratory approaches have highlighted the departures from previous ways of planning and conceiving the city around that time. This article focuses instead on the continuities in Bogotá's planning as they have continued to produce exclusionary urban policy. The article focuses on medical metaphors for urban intervention, highlighting the continuity of exclusionary urbanism from early twentieth-century hygiene planning, mid-century modernism, and through contemporary urban revitalization. The article documents how the exclusion of people deemed as sources of urban malaise or deterioration in recent urban revitalization efforts harkens back to past urban interventions, which also used medical metaphors to justify such exclusions. The article suggests that despite repeated failures in producing the planned city, various planning paradigms have perpetuated a discourse that sets apart certain places and people as sources of infection and justifies their active exclusion in the name of protecting the health and wellbeing of the 'healthy' city.