Dephysicalization and Territorialized Flexibility in Protected Areas: (De)Regulating the Informal Constructions in the Swamp Ecosystem in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia)

Keywords: Property, urban informality, land use, environment, dephysicalization, territorialized flexibility, legal geography, diffeentiated informalities, South America and Caribbean
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Environmental protection and rapid urbanization are major challenges in today’s world. A current example are the informal settlements in the swamp ecosystem in the Caribbean metropolis Cartagena, Colombia. With qualitative interviews and (legal) text analysis the author addresses the following research questions:
1. How does the administration use dephysicalization and urban informality to evade the implementation and enforcement of land use regulations and court decisions concerning the swamp?
2. Which role do dephysicalization and urban informality play in the conversion of inalienable land property of the Nation into private property?
Public use goods like the swamp area in Cartagena are an attempt to reintegrate property into its socio-ecological supporting context. In contrast, dephysicalization as a mechanism of the conventional property law serves the administration as a legally weak yet efficient argument to justify the disregard of the norms protecting the public use goods. The author demonstrated that the city administration uses inaction to maintain its ability to freely change the land use and to evade its legal obligations to protect the environment and to provide decent housing. Thereby it creates new lawscapes. Moreover, the research found five factors that enable the administration’s inaction: Ineffective interinstitutional coordination, inefficient distribution of competences, delaying tactics, abusive use of the administration’s discretion, and abusive legal interpretation by the administration. The results from Cartagena are compared to the literature concerning Bogotá, Brazil, India, and Israel/Palestine.