Constructions, legalizations and peripheral territorial governability in the south of Bogotá, Colombia

Abstract

This article investigates, from a socio- historical and testimonial perspective, how the peripheral neighborhoods were built in the south of the city of Bogotá and how their forms of community action and territorial governance were configured in the process. Through the methodological strategy of testimonial dialogues; it is established that the territorial and communal constitution of the peripheral neighborhoods in the south of Bogotá responded to dimensions of physical intervention of the space (neighborhood infrastructure) and community symbolic recreation (community construction). The article concludes that in this framework of the physical and symbolic constitution of territory, the struggles for the legalization of the neighborhoods became the central axis of the popular territorial processes.  In addition, this process generated a governance system that, in a strategic, instrumental, and creative way, has allowed these communities to face the processes of social, economic, and cultural exclusion imposed on them by urban institutions.