Divided Together: Traffic and Democratic Life in Bogotá

Abstract

The dissertation is based on 12 months of mixed-methods, qualitative research into the traffic problem in Bogotá, Colombia, and the ways that citizens and the local government have responded to it. It proposes an alternative—and more specifically, a philosophically pragmatic—reading of urban democracy that highlights different aspects of the ‘democratic question’ than do the political theories typically forwarded in critical urban geography: liberal and radical democratic theory. The dissertation argues that the ‘failure’ of political institutions to remedy traffic in Bogotá has left the problem to linger and nurture democratic life in the form of collaborative and contestatory public practice. Traffic’s hyper-presence as an engulfing, ‘lived’ environmental situation means that it is readily available to emergent subjects, publics and counter-publics as a living laboratory in which possibilities for engagement and activism are sustained. Moreover, because the mobility problem is an inescapable everyday reality even for elites, it forces Bogotanos into an antagonistic political situation that makes them grapple productively with their troubled togetherness. Although the ability to influence the mobility situation is by no means equal, I further argue that there is a notably accessible quality to traffic: it is an ‘issue’ that Bogotanos from all classes literally walk out into everyday and ‘make their voices heard’ in, in the sense that they can transform the common condition through deliberate action—and often to the frustration of elites who are trying to manage behavior in traffic in the service of their own interests. These arguments are inspired by the work of the American pragmatist John Dewey (1859-1952), the dissertation’s central philosophical interlocutor. Political democracy, for Dewey, is an inventive practice of taking care of the serious trouble in which strangers who do not share a way of life find themselves collectively implicated.