Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Risk and Urban Governance

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Stanford University graduate student Austin G. Zeiderman, working under the direction of Dr. James G. Ferguson, will undertake cultural anthropological research on the role of risk within emergent forms of urban governance. Alongside security, risk has recently surfaced as a political rationality and technical framework with which to understand, order, and manage the complexity and uncertainty of cities and urban life in the twenty-first century. To explore this phenomenon, this study poses the following overarching research question: Why, how, and to what effect are cities governing the problem of risk? The research will be carried out during 18 months of fieldwork in Bogotá, Colombia. In the mid-1990s, the municipal government of Bogotá began mapping the uneven distribution of environmental hazards across its urban space. In 2003, a governmental agency initiated a resettlement program aimed at relocating thousands of low-income populations living in areas defined as zones of high risk. To understand how these new forms of risk management work in practice, the researcher will investigate: 1) how the Bogotá program shapes the conduct and outlook of the people at risk; 2) how program officials conceive of their own work; 3) how the resettlement process affects the relation between government and citizens; and, 4) how and why risk emerged historically as a political problem. Research methods will combine institutional ethnography, case studies, and historical genealogy. The researcher will conduct his research in a relocation field office, in an at-risk neighborhood, and among the relocatees who have been dispersed throughout the city. He will do participant observation and conduct semi-structured in-depth interviews with a stratified sample at each study site. He also will collect and analyze official documents guiding the resettlement program. This research is important because the process to be studied in Colombia is becoming increasingly common world wide, as urban governments adopt the new imperative of protecting vulnerable populations from potential threats such as global warming, disease epidemics, and national security emergencies. This this research will contribute to a scientific understanding of changing ways in which cities and societies are being governed in times of heightened uncertainty. The project also contributes to the education of a graduate student.