Arraigo: A Platform of People Affected by Risk and Resettlement of Bogota that demands new approaches to understand and manage risk

Abstract

Abstract: In Bogota as in many Latin American cities, an important amount of human settlements were originally occupied by non-formal and non-planned ways, because of the high demographic growth, the internal conflict and the low capacity of the government to provide housing, among others. Non-formal settlements in Bogotá represent nowadays a permanent housing and living solution for milliards of citizens and the government has been forced to recognize them as legal, so these have become valuable in terms of urban land tenure. However in Colombia, with a geographically complex environment, the precarious origins of these settlements and the historical absence of governance have resulted in setting up several risks. Faced with this type of conflicts, public administration promotes the execution of engineering solutions or the imposition of restrictive measures on land use, which includes the resettlement of the people. Different social organizations from these zones impacted by resettlement, have been joining forces into what is being shaped as a Platform of People Affected by Risk and Resettlement, called ARRAIGO (term in Spanish for Rooting). The purposes of the Platform are to promote discussions that impact public policies related with resettlement, to join efforts required to restore the rights of population, to share knowledge of all the actors involved and to find innovative solutions to be implemented in this zones. The present paper examines the social conflict underlying the emergence of ARRAIGO as social phenomena, the significance of the initiative and the theoretical fundamentals that may explain the mismatching with the public policies for risk resettlement of population. It fosters to open new approaches to understand and manage risk, putting the people in the centre, understanding ARRAIGO as a social movement that must be considered to enrich discussions on risk management, governance, resilience, adaptation and their implications in a context of urban policy