ABOUT THIS BOOK

Security and risk have become central to how cities are planned, built, governed, and inhabited in the twenty-first century. In Endangered City, Austin Zeiderman focuses on this new political imperative to govern the present in anticipation of future harm. Through ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Bogotá, Colombia, he examines how state actors work to protect the lives of poor and vulnerable citizens from a range of threats, including environmental hazards and urban violence. By following both the governmental agencies charged with this mandate and the subjects governed by it, Endangered City reveals what happens when logics of endangerment shape the terrain of political engagement between citizens and the state. The self-built settlements of Bogotá’s urban periphery prove a critical site from which to examine the rising effect of security and risk on contemporary cities and urban life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Austin Zeiderman is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

REVIEWS

"Endangered City offers crucial insights into the contingent and localized assemblage and deployment of security frameworks both as technologies of governance and as platforms for citizen claims. By exploring environmental risk, the book persuasively shows how security logics mutate and are hybridized, continually opening new fields for intervention and mobilization, but also reinscribing securitized conceptions of authority and citizenship."

-- Federico Pérez Anthropological Quarterly

"A comprehensive book we have long owed Bogotá, Endangered City provides an interdisciplinary perspective that is historical, ethnographic, and spatially rich. Appealing to different audiences, including urban planners, risk experts, policy makers, students, and urban geographers, the book offers a de-centered view of urban theory and constitutes an important contribution to critical understandings of security. Moreover, I think this is a recommended reading in uncertain and frustrating times."

-- Diana Ojeda Society & Space

"Zeiderman provides a vivid portrayal of everyday life in Bogota.... The depth of empirical detail is the strength of the book, which convincingly makes the case that more urban ethnographies are needed, especially in geography. Yet, this empirical specificity is also effortlessly interwoven with more general theoretical discussions, questions, and implications in critical urban studies and beyond."

-- Matthew B. Anderson Social & Cultural Geography

"Endangered City is an important contribution to contemporary urban studies and risk management via its nuanced unpacking of critical theory and as a well‐crafted ethnography of endangerment.... The text is well organized, eschewing excessive jargon and thus suitable for both undergraduates and graduates, as well as critical social theorists, Latin Americanists, and those concerned with urban policy, planning, and practice in the new millennium where the dominance of first world models can no longer be assumed for the global South."

-- Marilyn Gates Population, Space and Place

"Endangered City is an original and valuable contribution to scholarship and should be consulted by all students of politics and security in Latin America."

-- Eugene Carey Latin American Review of Books

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction. The Politics of Security and Risk 1

1. Apocalypse Foretold 33

2. On Shaky Ground 63

3. Genealogies of Endangerment 93

4. Living Dangerously 131

5. Securing the Future 161

Conclusion. Millennial Cities 193

Coda 209

Notes 213

Bibliography 247

Index 269

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