Environmental strategies, governmental legitimation and social regulation: explorations in four Colombian cities

Abstract

This paper explores the political meaning of environmental urban management. It argues that the environment only becomes important as values are added to it, making possible its extraction from the realm of the natural sciences, and attach a social meaning to it. In the urban field, this potential meaning lays on the urban administrations, and it is achieved through discursive constructions and spatial representations framed by a “project of the city”, or by the way in which each city “talks about itself”. In the cities of the neoliberal globalisation, the environment acquires a special importance in order to build meanings of collective welfare and thus legitimise the local governments, as well as regulate social behaviour. However, the way in which this is done depends on urban trajectories, political traditions, institutional capacity and regional cultures. These processes are investigated in the four most important cities in Colombia: Bogota, Medellin, Cali and Barranquilla.