Cazucá
The State has the responsibility to provide an ubiquitous coverage of infrastructure and connectivity, which aligns with the idea of the ‘modern infrastructure ideal’ in the SU Theory. In the Global South, transport infrastructure and services are still largely within the remit of government, with the responsibility of design, planning, and -to a large extent- delivering, infrastructure. In the Colombian Political Constitution, it is consigned as a primary duty of the State to guarantee equal access to the opportunities and services necessary to live a full life, providing the necessary mechanisms required to attain and maintain this access (Government of Colombia, 1991). As it has the responsibility of steering and sustaining development, it is the State who ultimately determines the distribution of (basic) networks of connectivity. Graham and Marvin (2001) also refer to a
set of powerful factors that challenge this ‘modern infrastructure ideal’, which include changes in the political economies of urban infrastructure development and its governance; neoliberalism; economic integration, open competition and imperatives of global-local connectivity; the development of infrastructural consumerism; the collapse of the comprehensive ideal number planning; new urban landscapes; and new structures of feeling (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Coutard, 2008). It ought to be recognised that not all these changes are applicable to cities in the Global South, where some authors have challenged the idea of this universalisation of infrastructure provision (Coutard, 2008; Jain, 2008; Parnell, 2014; Furlong, 2014). However, one of the main governance and political economy challenges in many contexts in the global South was the decentralisation of power and transference of responsibilities for urban infrastructure development, including transport, to the local government (Prud’homme, 1995; Barter, 1998). What splintering urbanism refers to as the ‘unbundling’ of infrastructure that results from the influence of powerful actors and structural drivers such as privatisation and the concentration of wealth (Graham and Marvin, 2001) is clearly observed in the context of transport infrastructure and services. Both the ‘bypassing strategies’ and production of ‘premium networked spaces’ in the SU theory is a result not only of the unequal distribution of wealth and power and space, but of a traditional planning process that prioritises the connectivity of areas with higher attractiveness as a result of the deeply rooted principles of utilitarianism, efficiency and economic growth in mainstream planning approaches such as the UTP (Levy, 2013). The combination of cumulative and self-reinforcing social, economic, and spatial inequalities with a planning system underpinned by “neoclassical economic concepts, focusing upon the representation of people as rational choice makers” (Avineri, 2012, p. 513) creates a self-reinforcing cycle of accumulation of attractiveness and improvements in connectivity, while simultaneously -if not entirely-, bypassing or giving less priority to areas of low-power and attractiveness.
This is probably the part of the splintering urbanism theory that seems to fit best with the Bogotá-Soacha conurbation. As it will be shown in chapter 3 and it was introduced in chapter 1, explicit social and spatial inequalities between Bogotá and Soacha are partly a consequence of a traditional approach to transport infrastructure planning, concentration of attractiveness at the city centre and other areas of concentration of high- income population, and the clash of jurisdictions and mismatches in governance between the two municipalities that constrained the seamless integration of infrastructure networks. Splintering urbanism also introduces a relevant discussion regarding power and influence, and the emergence of forms of resistance from communities and public authorities confronted with these splintering processes (Graham and Marvin, 2001). However, the theory is limited in its interpretation of such forms of resistance. In this regard, when the idea of resistance is linked with long-standing theories in urban and available studies about informality (See Chambers, 2002; Roy, 2005) then splintering urbanism can also become a theoretical lens through which understand the emergence of informal ways of connectivity in bypassed nodes such as Cazucá. Figure 2.3 shows the main elements involved in the interpretation of splintering urbanism adopted in this research. The framework reads SU as a self-reinforcing process of differentiated provision of transport networks influenced by structures of government and systems of planning in place, as well as the configuration of the city simplified in terms of centralisation of opportunities and localisation of power and wealth. The framework presented in Figure 2.3 also connects social exclusion as both a product and a contributing factor to splintering urbanism related to transport, which supports the selection of a framework for social exclusion that interprets it as a set of consequences of larger transport and social disadvantages.
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2.6 Making the links between splintering urbanism and social
exclusion
The processes of delivery of transport infrastructure and services and their social consequences are closely connected with the discussions about the limitations of mainstream Western transport planning. It has been discussed that social exclusion can either be interpreted from the literature as the process that leads to people not being able to fully participate in society or as the resulting constraints to interact with the opportunities and connections in an urban space (Lucas, 2012). This is the entry point to link the theory of splintering urbanism with the interpretation of social exclusion provided by Church, Frost and Sullivan (2001). In their study in London, Church, Frost, and Sullivan, 2000, construct a framework that identifies the structuring factors behind potential exclusion stemming for transport, while discussing some of the consequences associated with such factors. This
framework has been reinterpreted in subsequent studies as shown in section 2.3.1 and sparked research focusing on one or more specific dimensions. However, similarly to splintering urbanism, the literature has consistently maintained most general principles of the framework unchallenged. This is one of the strongest appeals of both frameworks as it becomes an opportunity to test the ‘universality’ of such frameworks, while pushing forward existing knowledge on how they can be used for understanding transport-related inequities and weaknesses in its delivery and planning.
I utilised Church, Frost and Sullivan’s (2001) framework for transport- related social exclusion to deconstruct the links between the dynamics of the splintering of networks of connectivity and the different dimensions in which people at bypassed nodes experience and confront social exclusion. To truly test and reinterpret this framework, as well as making it consistent with standard case study approaches used in the literature for exploring splintering urbanism, the research adopts a qualitative method for producing and analysing the evidence. As argued in section 2.4, most contemporary research on social exclusion related to transport adopt a quantitative approach to explore travel patterns and link them with indicators of participation in society or other relevant socioeconomic and geographical data. The tendency from transport studies to the analysis of social issues such as equity, exclusion and disadvantage related to transport have concentrated mainly on the production of evidence and the statistical representativeness of the evidence, partly to fit with the technocratic nature of transport planning. Qualitative analysis becomes important this context as the principles of planning and research of structural issues related to transport have not been examined in detail. By analysing a smaller sample but the rather richer information obtainable from in-depth interviews, it is possible to provide valuable material related to the critical interpretation of concepts such as splintering urbanism and social exclusion and their translation in cases such as Soacha.
As shown earlier in this chapter, the various dimensions of social exclusion in the work of Church, Frost, and Sullivan (2000) engage with transport- related constraints for participation in society that span from location to social identities and positions. When linked with the patterns of urban development of cities in Latin America in other similar contexts in the developing world, it can be argued that social exclusion related to transport being largely a consequence from, and reinforces the main drivers of, the localisation of splintering urbanism. Figure 2.3 summarises some of the links between the two frameworks building on the previously discussed literature.
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This thesis argues that there is a strong interrelation between splintering urbanism and social exclusion. As shown in figure 2.3 some of the dimensions of social exclusion identified by Church, Frost, and Sullivan, have a direct bidirectional relationship with the practices of splintering urbanism related to transport, while others have either a unidirectional or indirect relationship with it. On the one hand, dimensions such as the geographical, cite explicitly peripherality, poor transport provision, and the resulting inaccessibility as one primary factor of transport-related social exclusion (Church, Frost & Sullivan, 2001). From a splintering urbanism perspective, it can be argued that this dimension is a direct consequence of both the concentration of wealth in attractiveness in specific areas that make unaffordable for the poor to locate near employment centres, and the technocratic approach of mainstream transport planning that gives precedence to the connectivity of this high-value areas while bypassing peripheral neighbourhoods such as Cazucá. The reinforcing cycle of spatial concentration of wealth and attractiveness and the development of high- quality transport networks and services supplying these areas produces barriers for affordability for low-income groups that we sought to informal dwellings in the periphery to have access to the opportunities in the city. In this regard, splintering becomes an explanatory factor of geographical exclusion and the peripheral location of socially and transport disadvantage populations in the periphery reinforces its position as a low-power and influential node in the network leading to further bypassing. Other dimensions that can be interrelated with splintering urbanism in the framework of Church, Frost, and Sullivan (2000) are exclusion from facilities, economic, physical, and space exclusion. The above dimensions can be argued to be either a by-product of the larger dynamics that involve splintering urbanism, or a direct consequence of the disconnection from the networks of connectivity that come out of it.
On the one hand, it can be argued that bypassed areas by infrastructure provision be also bypassed by investment in urban amenities, facilities, and services. This is particularly the case for informal settlements, which is an
area often forgotten from mainstream planning perspectives. One the other hand, despite being also a responsibility of the State, privatisation of services such as health and education can lead to limited local provision of the services in low-income informal neighbourhoods. The connection between splintering urbanism and most dimensions of social exclusion is accessibility or the lack thereof. In the case of economic and physical exclusion, the combined effect of social and spatial segregation and the bypassing and lack of integration with the rest of the transport network increases costs of travel and reduces available alternatives to travel for people with physical or cognitive disabilities via an increasing number of transfers to reach the core city due to poor supply, coverage, and integration of transport services. In this regard, another connection between the two frameworks is the notion of informality as a strategy of resistance to splintering, where self-help provision of informal transport and community-based initiatives for building infrastructure help bypassed population overcoming physical obstacles for local mobility.
The fear and spatial dimensions of transport-related social exclusion have a reciprocal relation with splintering urbanism. First, segregation and disconnection facilitate the localisation and concentration of crime and insecurity. These social tensions and vulnerabilities in turn reinforce social stigmas and negative external perceptions that decrease further the attractiveness of bypassed areas. This has direct implications for exclusion related to the fear to crime. It also facilitates the devolution of power and control of spaces. The limited State presence materialised in lack of investment, connectivity, and availability of government facilities in peripheral neighbourhoods lead to the reconfiguration of structures of power to local leaders, civil society organisations, but also criminal groups, which may produce exclusion from spaces of the local scale. These elements are usually overlooked by standard quantitative approaches to the analysis of accessibility and transport disadvantage for which it is an added justification to the adoption of a qualitative approach. Finally, dimensions such as time deprivation and physical exclusion which tend to
manifest on the most socially vulnerable, become a cumulative consequence of all the direct products and by-products of splintering urbanism and its interaction with other dimensions of social exclusion. Exclusion experienced by single-parent households, women not at work, the elderly and people with disabilities as suggested by Church, frost, and Sullivan (2001), are expected to be more severe in contexts where social tensions, informality, adverse topography and geographies compound levels of exclusion for different social groups and individuals.
The objective of this proposed integrated framework to link splintering urbanism and social exclusion aims at demonstrating, with support of qualitative empirical evidence, that these two issues are mutually reinforcing processes. Furthermore, the translation of both frameworks from western planning and transport studies into a case such as the Bogotá-Soacha conurbation seeks to test their effectiveness in the global South.
3. Placing urban transport in the local context:
Rationale behind the selection of the Bogotá region
When approaching human affairs, predictive theories and universals are difficult to find, giving value to context-dependent knowledge (Flyvbjerg, 2006). The analysis of specific cases “…is important for the development of a nuanced view of reality, including the view that human behaviour cannot be meaningfully understood as simply the rule governed acts found at the lowest levels of the learning process and in much theory” Flyvbjerg (2006, p. 223).
This thesis is structured around the objective of testing ‘universal’ frameworks from Western realities for understanding urban fragmentation and social exclusion related to transport in a context where underlying fragmentation, social and spatial inequalities, and frameworks for governance and planning may reinforce the materialisation of some of the principles in the general postulates showcased in sections 2.4. to 2.6. A case study methodology responds well to this type of objective and therefore the selection of the case is a central part of the methodology. To explore the links between transport planning, splintering urbanism, and social exclusion, the research applies the frameworks described in the previous chapter to the cases of Bogotá and Soacha, Colombia. This is an information-oriented selection of case study (Ragin & Becker, 1992), where pre-existing knowledge regarding the features of the Bogotá-Soacha informed their selection for the analysis of urban fragmentation and transport-related social exclusion. This type of case choice allows to achieve information that permits characterising a specially challenging situation related to the characteristics of governance in the city-region, while also allowing to analyse the significance of various circumstances for case process and outcome. In turn, it could also be argued that Cazucá has the potential to become a paradigmatic case that provides information to
establish a domain of what social exclusion and splintering urbanism mean for similar contexts in the Global South. These ideas will be reflected upon in the conclusion of the thesis.
In this regard, it is relevant to examine the characteristics of the case study before dwelling into the specific methods for data collection and analysis selected. The research undertakes analyses at the metropolitan and municipal level, and in the form of case studies of selected informal neighbourhoods that are physically peripheral to both Soacha and Bogotá. Cazucá and the complex social, political and institutional interplay between Bogotá and Soacha involve governance, spatial, societal and technical issues at different scales that underpin the development of mobility strategies to and from Soacha and the localisation of splintering urbanism. A conventional analysis of travel patterns and demand/supply balances that builds on the kind of mainstream engineering techniques outlined in the previous chapter would require a considerable degree of simplification of these dimensions of the object of analysis, while limiting the depth of the analysis of local dynamics in relation to the selected conceptual frameworks outlined in the previous chapter. The objectives proposed for this research thus require a combination of transport information with documentary analysis and qualitative information may provide additional depth and detail to the understanding of localised dynamics of splintering and social exclusion.
Different elements played a role in the selection of the case study. The issue of transport has claimed a preferential position in the agenda of urban development both in Colombia and elsewhere, often focusing on technology and policy innovations in the provision of public transport services. Researching urban transport in the Colombian context is then pertinent insofar as the country has become an attractive cluster of ‘best- practices’ of top-down investments in infrastructure and transport management in the developing world.
However, as outlined in the previous chapters, the role of urban transport as a catalyser of social and economic development, as well as a potential source of social inequalities, has been much less researched than operational aspects governed by mainstream approaches. Given the particular characteristics of the case study, the research is also rooted on conditions of poverty and vulnerability in urban areas, on the processes of urban development and expansion, and informal urbanisation in the peripheries of large cities. In order to better understand the rationale behind, and pertinence of, the selection of the case study, it is necessary to place the issue of urban transport in the regional and local dynamics of urban development. This chapter expands on some of the issues introduced in Chapter 1 regarding urban development in Latin America and Colombia, as well as presents information on the Bogotá’s capital region, the Bogotá-Soacha conurbation, and Soacha as a research setting. This information becomes relevant for the reader to become familiarized with the specificities of the case study, as the selection of the methodology incorporates specific considerations regarding such features.