MARGINALITY AND RESILIENCE OF COMMUNITIES AT RISK. Visibility and disobedience as assumptions of decent housing for the displaced in Colombia.

Abstract

In Colombia, the phenomenon of forced displacement from the territory of origin by ethnic minorities and inhabitants of rural areas is macroscopic; pressure by armed and economic actors, abandonment by institutional entities induces them to find refuge in no man's land. In the anonymity and informality of the extreme margins of large cities, this vulnerable population builds a primary refuge and seeks life opportunities on land without infrastructure or public services (DANE, 2015; UN_Habitat, 2016; UNHCR, 2019). In these slums there are precarious health conditions, low temperatures associated with cold winds, which generate different pathologies in their occupants. The settlement typology, based on terraces and vertical slopes, constitutes a further factor of seismic vulnerability and due to mass removal. The Tocaimita Oriental settlement (2900 m.a.s.l.) shows a complex reality of lucid awareness and determination, of community cohesion where the aims of having a “decent” home underlie the legalization of the settlements and their individual and group recognition. Forced displacement is necessary and always painful (Hannigan, O'Donnell, & O'Keeffe, 2016). In the last three decades, 36.2% of the Colombian population has left their identity territory for the largest cities in the country; in Bogotá alone there are approximately 1,393,140 people who live in the extreme urban periphery, in full illegality (UNHCR, 2017). The sad dream of this form of freedom implies leaving threats behind and satisfying needs that the very fact of staying alive demands (Shedlin, Decena, & Noboa H. & Betancourt, 2014). This is an extreme exercise of self-determination that entails abandonment, escape from conditions of hunger, pain, fear, need (Türk, 2017) in the face of death threats and extreme poverty (Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, 2015); the need to exist, the possibility of being able to decide in a constrained framework implies the loss of the social support base (Bobada, 2010), social, physical and economic vulnerability. Resettlement represents a new beginning with the expectation of finding housing, employment, health, education, public services (Braubach, 2011) however, the displaced, left to themselves, in turn abandon institutional rules; count on their own means and found extremely precarious illegal settlements waiting for institutional responses. Bogotá is chosen as a destination because it presents multidimensional poverty levels that are clearly lower than the rest of the country (DANE, 2017) and provides greater opportunities even in informality.