The governmentality of multiculturalism: from national pluri-ethnicity to urban cosmopolitanism in Bogotá

Abstract

Using a combination of discourse analysis in policy documents and ethnographic fieldwork, this paper interrogates the relation between Colombia’s pluri-ethnic turn and the governance of cosmopolitan multiculturalism in the capital city, Bogotá. Focussing on the city’s most important development framework, the POT (Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial), it reveals the controversy that exists between the multicultural discourses of the public administration (rooted in claims of ethno-racial equality and Affirmative Action) and their operationalisation in urban planning. In doing so, the paper conceptualises the urban governmentality of multiculturalism as the apparatus through which the municipality has been removing anti-racism and a race-informed understanding of socio-spatial dynamics from Bogotá’s official agenda of ‘cosmopolitan multiculturalism.’ By drawing on Latin American racial theories of mestizaje, the paper thus extends the understanding of how neoliberal urban governance, while celebrating cultural diversity, denies the racialization of space in the city