Invisible Territories: The Visibility of an Urban Crisis in Medellín

Displacement is the ‘humanitarian challenge of the 21st century’ (Serrano, 2005). Moreover, ‘new spatial consciousness is entering into public debates on such key issue as human rights, social inclusion-exclusion’ (Soja, 2010, p.15). The accelerated rates of forced displacement [worldwide] has also, forcibly exacerbated the urban growth of marginal settlements in the periphery of the cities of the Global South. This has been creating ‘mutant territories’ (CNMH, 2015) to which municipalities do not have the infrastructure and capacity to respond due to the unpredictable nature and complex character of these socio-environmental-political conflicts. It has contributed to the hypertrophy of cities through new forms of ‘forced urbanisation’ that often are not officially recognised due to their lack of ‘formality’. In Medellín, the lack of territorial and legal recognition of new marginal settlements -‘invisible territories’- has generated an argumentative dichotomy of the advantages between being visible or invisible.
Furthermore, the endurance of specific (in)visibility depends on the command of dominating class(es), making visibility, a strategy of domination. Merrifield argues the impact of this domination in day-to-day life since “[e]veryday life had become at once colonized, fragmented, and politicized.” (2006, p.62). Likewise, “Invisibility is a relationship between those who have the power to see or to choose not to see, and, on the other hand, those who lack the power to demand to be seen or to protect themselves from the negative effects of imposed visibility” (Polzer and Hammond, 2008, p.421). Therefore, “invisible territories” could be described as the result of political and socio-economic forces, materialised through unjust urbanisation patterns.
The formation of these ‘invisible territories’ brings to the foreground the relevance of “(in)visibility” as a concept in informal urbanisation discourses worldwide. Thus, in this chapter, a reflection on the etymological “use-value” of the concept in context of marginality and conflict is presented, drawing on empirical and theoretical research in Colombia, forming a critical analysis of the concept in emerging urbanisms in the Global South. One of the central inquiries of this chapter is to understand the systematic formation of marginal settlements resulting from forcibly displacement-resettlement. For this, Henri Lefebvre’s work, The Production of Space, makes a strong case due to its profound influence on contemporary socio-spatial analysis.
For Lefebvre, society is defined by its mode of production (1991, p.39), therefore, spatial production plays a structural role in the morphology of “forced” urbanisation processes. Lefebvre’s ‘spatial triad’ elaboration; Representations of space (how space is conceived), spaces of representation (how space is lived), and spatial practices (how space is perceived) (1991, p39), provides a substantial method of analysis for the formation of marginal settlements within displacement-resettling processes.
This chapter will provide new insights about the contemporary relevance of Lefebvrian spatial triad in relation to the production of “invisible” space during displacement-resettling processes, as part of the complexity of current informal urbanisation patterns, in the Global South. Thus, this chapter will invite reflection and public debate over questions such as urbanisation for whom/against whom and who decides?