Discourses of land allocation and natural property rights: Land entrepreneurialism and informal settlements in Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

In planning theory, four discourses frame collective decisions about land allocation: market, rational-comprehensive, participation, and resistance. Ideally, these discourses should function as a system of checks and balances in which each one limits the potential failings of the others. The case of Bogotá, Colombia shows that instead of balancing each other, these discourses collude into ‘land entrepreneurialism’, a dynamic that privatizes the benefits of city growth and socializes its costs creating a pattern of scarcity of urban services and incentivizing informal settlements. In this framework, informality is a system of co-optation that neutralizes the resistance of the poor through ‘pirate subdivisions’, which are, in fact, ‘the privatization of squatting’. Because land entrepreneurialism is engendered in the institution of property as a natural right and the power relations that it produces, addressing informality entails more than its ‘formalization’. It entails the creation of a new type of formality based on a broader notion of property rights.