“Hay que cambiarle el chip a la gente” (“We need to change people’s mindset”) is a ubiquitous phrase heard in meetings between NGOs, state authorities, and international donors in Bogotá and Cartagena.1 Implying that the socio-spatial practices of informal settlements are a defect to be corrected, a “bug” in the system of the formal city, this phrase reveals the paternalistic core of many humanitarian interventions in Colombia today.2 Beneath the benevolent desire to “improve” lives rests the neocolonial assumption that expertise is an external commodity and that the inhabitants of informal settlements lack the rationality to manage their own environment.3
In recent decades, humanitarian design has sought to address urban inequality through architectural, urban, and social interventions in marginalized neighborhoods.4 Across Latin America, where cities such as Bogotá and Cartagena have been shaped by informal urbanization as a paradigmatic mode of spatial production, these interventions arrive in places where residents have spent decades collectively building homes, stairways, drainage systems, and social networks in the absence of sustained state support.5 Dwelling here exceeds the provision of shelter: it is the continuous production of home, neighborhood, belonging, and collective life.6
While humanitarian initiatives can bring tangible benefits, they often threaten to reproduce a form of neocolonial urban practice when they impose externally defined solutions, foreground expert knowledge over lived experience, and treat informal settlements primarily as spaces of deficiency.7 At the same time, informal settlements offer profound lessons about urban life, collective agency, and spatial intelligence. In Bogotá, for example, communities in hillside informal settlements such as Ciudad Bolívar district have collectively adapted homes, paths, drainage systems, and public spaces to challenging topographies, while initiatives such as Alto Fucha demonstrate how ecological restoration and territorial defense can become forms of collective urban resilience. Similarly, in Cartagena, communities living around the Ciénaga de la Virgen, an urban wetland, have developed situated knowledge and everyday practices for living with flooding and an unstable waterlogged terrain.
The risk of neocolonialism emerges most clearly when humanitarian design universalizes standards derived from Euro-American planning traditions. Formal housing models, public space typologies, or security infrastructures are often transferred into contexts whose social, economic, and spatial logics differ profoundly. In doing so, interventions may erase existing networks of sociality and local spatial practices, precisely by way of trying to “change people’s mindsets.” Informal settlements must be approached as sites of situated knowledge, their strengths and limitations read from within their own contexts rather than measured against an external model. What, then, would humanitarian design have to give up in order to learn from these settlements rather than correct them?
Incremental Urbanism
In Bogotá, incremental urbanism is particularly visible in the self-built districts of Ciudad Bolívar, Usme, and other peripheral areas, where urbanization has often occurred gradually through the combined efforts of households, community organizations, and public institutions.8 A house may begin as a modest structure built with locally available or affordable materials and progressively expand as household resources change. Streets and stairways are similarly improved incrementally, sometimes first through informal construction and later through public investment. The result is an urban landscape that is constantly being completed and adapted rather than designed and delivered as a finished product.
Incremental urbanism therefore represents a shift from urban design as a fixed end goal to urbanism as process. Colombian cities’ self-built neighborhoods, which constitute a significant part of their urban fabric, have developed through successive processes of occupation, construction, improvement, and formalization, rather than through a single act of planned development. In areas such as Ciudad Bolívar, this can be observed not only in the transformation of individual dwellings but also in the gradual consolidation of collective spaces and infrastructure, as paths, streets, stairways, parks, and community facilities are initiated and evolving through successive interventions involving residents, followed later by public programs for neighborhood improvement. Similarly, Nuevo Usme, the planning framework for Bogotá’s southern area of Usme, explicitly recognized a progressive model of housing development, and was accompanied by the provision of infrastructure and complementary productive uses.9 Bogotá therefore illustrates an urbanism in which the relationship between planned intervention and everyday transformation is not necessarily oppositional: formal planning, community action, self-construction, and public investment can become successive layers in the continuing production of the city.
Amphibious Urbanism
In Cartagena’s Comuna 6, in the settlements surrounding the Ciénaga de la Virgen, dwelling takes place within a permanently fluctuating hydrological condition.10 Water here is an infrastructuring force of everyday urban life, with residents producing habitable terrain through relleno, the gradual accumulation of earth, rubble, and construction debris to raise and stabilize wet soils. This process of land-making runs across scales. At the level of the household, a plot is claimed through what residents call the ley de los cuatro palos: four sticks pushed into the shallows. There is initially no document behind it, but everyone in the neighborhood knows whose sticks they are. Papers appear only later, once years of relleno have turned the claim into something that counts as possession. At the scale of the state, sediment dredged from the silted mouths of the Matute and Calicanto canals is hardened with lime and trucked away as fill for new urban developments, so that the material of the deteriorating wetland becomes the ground on which its urban replacement is raised.11 Ground, in this sense, is not pre-given but made, socially and materially, over time.
The Ciénaga is not an external wetland at the edge of the city, but part of an urban system in which wetness structures everyday life, infrastructure, and survival. Forms of urbanization are inseparable from longer colonial histories of spatial and environmental ordering, in which wetlands and mangroves were rendered as degraded or dangerous landscapes and the separation of land from water became a project of urban government.12 In the Ciénaga, these histories are materially reworked in everyday practices of self-built construction, where housing is raised and adapted to shifting water levels through constant, incremental modification of foundations and structures.13 The same economy of reuse extends to collective infrastructure: walkways are assembled from recycled plastic timber donated through corporate volunteering schemes, discarded tires are lined along the water’s edge to hold back further occupation, and fiberglass boats first built to clear the canals of waste are now maintained in the hope of ecotourism. EcoVida, the environmental platform in Comuna 6, does much of this work: its members maintain the canals, run the mangrove nursery, and organize visits to the Ciénaga by boat.
Here urban form is organized through adjustment, to water levels, soil instability, humidity, and the intermittency of services. Structures are raised, modified, and reassembled; pathways move with the seasons; domestic and collective spaces expand and contract with the rhythms of the water. The infrastructural character of water becomes legible in how flooding is produced. Residents point out that the lagoon itself does not flood; the canals do. Their silted mouths no longer release water, so incoming tides back up and spill over as they try to recede. A tidal regulator built at the sea mouth decades ago and long left without maintenance no longer governs this exchange, and the water now enters and leaves the settlement without restraint.
Urban life in the Ciénaga is held together by the continuous reconfiguration of land, water, and scarce material. These are situated modes of inhabitation carrying a distinct urban rationality, one that works with uncertainty instead of promising to remove it. Humanitarian design struggles with such territory. Its default is stabilization: drainage to dry the ground, cadasters to fix property, standard typologies to replace self-built housing. Such interventions assume that legibility and control are prerequisites for improvement, an improvement that typically comes poured in concrete.14 In amphibious territory, humanitarian interventions risk disrupting the very socio-ecological relations through which life is sustained. Light timber miradores (lookouts), imagined by neighborhood organizations as places from which to see and value the wetland, remain suspended in the permitting process due to the cadastral classification of tidal land, which blocks exactly the situated, low-impact design the setting invites. Amphibious urbanism thus reframes informal settlements as ecological and political formations in which water, infrastructure, and social life are inseparable.
Collectively Provisioning Public Space
In many informal settlements in Latin America, public space is not a product delivered through formal planning but an ongoing process of collective production and appropriation. Streets, stairways, corners, thresholds, courtyards, and sports fields (canchas), often become essential spaces of social reproduction, where everyday life extends beyond the boundaries of the individual dwelling.15 In Bogotá’s hillside informal neighborhoods, for example, streets frequently evolve into stairways and pedestrian paths adapted to steep topographies, while residents progressively transform residual or underused spaces into playgrounds, community meeting areas, gardens, or sports facilities. Furthermore, a single street may simultaneously serve as a transit route, a marketplace, a playground, and a hub for social encounters. Similarly, a cancha accommodates sports, community meetings, cultural events, and everyday recreation, while occasionally becoming a site for youth substance use. At the Ecoparque Playa Blanca in Cartagena’s Comuna 6, for instance, a fenced and leveled cancha built and kept up through neighborhood labor anchors collective life, hosting football, community meetings, and celebrations at the edge of a settlement that formal provision has barely reached.
Collectively produced public spaces also play a crucial role in shaping relationships of belonging, visibility, and security. In many informal settlements in Colombia, safety is not generated exclusively through formal surveillance or policing but through everyday forms of social presence and mutual recognition. Neighbors know who belongs to the area, children play within visible spaces, local businesses generate activity, and residents collectively monitor and care for their surroundings. These practices do not eliminate violence or insecurity, and public spaces may also become arenas of conflict, exclusion, or territorial struggle.16 In these contexts, actual humanitarian design would strengthen the social infrastructures already embedded in streets, canchas, and other collectively appropriated spaces. Improving lighting, drainage, accessibility, or vegetation is valuable where it builds on existing patterns of use and local forms of collective management.
Climate adaptation follows the same grammar. Residents adapt incrementally to flooding, landslides, extreme heat, and water scarcity through everyday interventions rarely recognized as formal adaptation strategies: drainage channels and reinforced paths on Bogotá’s hillsides, raised floors and collectively managed waterways in Cartagena’s flood-prone lowlands, and community mangrove nurseries where groups of young residents replant the shoreline in lines of red and black mangroves. Humanitarian design has the potential to combine residents’ detailed understanding of water flows with hydrological assessment and nature-based measures, co-producing strategies that are technically robust and socially situated.
Informal Urban Epistemologies
Informal settlements offer humanitarian design an important epistemological perspective by challenging conventional hierarchies of knowledge production. Drawing on Ananya Roy’s call for “new geographies of theory,” cities and communities in the Global South should be recognized not merely as places where theories developed elsewhere are applied, but as producers of situated knowledge and theory in their own right.17 In doing so, humanitarian design can challenge the coloniality of knowledge by valuing local, experiential, and professional forms of expertise as complementary rather than hierarchical.18
In the mangrove reserve of Fredonia, on the Ciénaga’s inner shore, this expertise has a face. The young men who replant the shoreline call themselves los monstruos del manglar, the monsters of the mangrove. They tell apart the four local mangrove species by leaf, seed, and root, know which one binds the soil and which one holds the water’s edge, and organize themselves into a playful hierarchy of coordinators for the nursery, the planting, and the birds. One of them, trained in accounting, is precise about where his knowledge comes from. Nobody sat down with him to talk about mangroves, he says; he compared, observed, and worked it out himself.19 The expertise humanitarian design goes looking for is already walking the shoreline.
Conventional upgrading projects may identify stairways, pathways, and self-built drainage primarily as deficiencies to be replaced by standardized infrastructure. A pluriversal approach, by contrast, recognizes the forms of knowledge and social organization already embedded in these spaces. A resident knows which stairway becomes unsafe during heavy rain, which vacant lot serves as an emergency gathering point, which corner holds the neighborhood’s social life. In this sense, instead of saying “We need to bring knowledge to this community,” the question becomes: “What knowledge already exists here, and how can different forms of knowledge interact?”
Such an approach also challenges conventional measures of success, measuring outcomes through local capacity development, social networks, collective autonomy, and long-term resilience alongside physical outputs. Engaging with the “pluriverse” means recognizing informal settlements as territories rich in knowledge, innovation, and lived experience, where design supports the diverse ways communities already inhabit and transform their environments.
Limits of Humanitarian Design?
At its most problematic, humanitarian design can become a spectacle of benevolence: highly visible projects that generate institutional prestige while producing limited structural change.20 Success is often measured through awards, media attention, or the delivery of physical interventions rather than through long-term improvements in residents’ lives. As a result, design efforts may privilege symbolic transformation like iconic architecture, photogenic public spaces, or innovation narratives over less visible but fundamental issues such as land tenure, housing insecurity, labor precarity, and socio-spatial exclusion.
This tension reflects a broader challenge: projects that are attractive to funders and governments are often easier to finance and showcase than long-term processes such as securing land rights, strengthening community organizations, or supporting local livelihoods. In this sense, design can become complicit with the inequalities it seeks to address, treating urban problems as matters of spatial intervention rather than as outcomes of deeper social, political, and economic structures.
The challenge, then, is not simply to “include” informal settlements within humanitarian design frameworks, but to question the very epistemological assumptions through which design defines improvement. Humanitarian design remains relevant precisely because it intervenes in unequal urban conditions. Its legitimacy depends on whether it is capable of being transformed by the urban logics it seeks to address.
Informal settlements operate through alternative infrastructural rationalities: incremental in Bogotá and amphibious in Cartagena. These rationalities are not external to design; they challenge its foundational categories of stability, completion, and standardization. A decolonial rethinking of humanitarian design therefore does not begin with the question of how to improve informal settlements, but with how design itself must be reconfigured in response to the urban techniques already at work within them. This shifts humanitarian design from a logic of intervention toward a practice of translation: one that must remain accountable to existing forms of spatial intelligence without reducing them to formal design templates.
Incremental and amphibious urbanism are two versions of a single operation: both produce ground where the formal category of the city sees none, either by building it up over time or by holding it against the water. What humanitarian design stands to learn from them is their shared insistence that urban life exceeds the finished, stable plot, and that its measure lies in the capacity to keep making ground. What informal settlements ultimately make visible is not a deficit of design, but the coexistence of multiple urban design rationalities that humanitarian design cannot ignore without reproducing the very asymmetries it seeks to address.
Fieldnotes, Silke Oldenburg, Cartagena, 2023.
Informal settlements are urban areas that often develop outside formal planning and regulatory frameworks and may lack adequate infrastructure and basic services. While traditionally viewed as expressions of poverty and urban deficiency, they are increasingly recognized as important forms of city-making, where residents actively contribute to the production of housing, social networks, and urban life. The terminology used to describe these areas remains contested, with terms such as self-built settlements, self-managed neighborhoods, peripheral urbanization, and popular habitat commonly employed to emphasize different social, political, and spatial dimensions. No single term has achieved universal acceptance. In this article, the term informal settlements is adopted because it remains the most widely used in the international literature, while acknowledging the conceptual tensions and debates surrounding its use. See Ananya Roy, “Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 71, no. 2 (2005): 147–58; Priscilla Connolly, “La ciudad y el hábitat popular: paradigma latinoamericano,” in Teorías sobre la ciudad en América Latina, ed. Bianca Ramírez Velásquez and Emilio Pradilla Cobos (México: UAM, 2013); and Jaime Hernández-Garcia, “Hábitat popular, un modo alternativo de producción de espacio para América Latina?” In Iliana Hernández García, ed., Estética de los mundos posibles: inmersión en la vida artificial, las artes y las practicas urbanas (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2016).
On how expertise, though enacted in practice, comes to be naturalized as a body of knowledge that can be possessed and transferred, see E. Summerson Carr, “Enactments of Expertise,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 17–32. On expert knowledge as an instrument of external intervention, see Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). On the “will to improve” and its construction of deficient subjects, see Tania Murray Li, The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
A.N. Martins et al., “Women-led Humanitarian Architecture in Disaster-prone Environments: Learning from the Marielle Franco Community-Design Award,” International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 59 (2021); Bryan Bell and Katie Wakeford, eds., Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (New York: Metropolis Books, 2008).
Jaime Hernández-Garcia, “Hábitat popular, un modo alternativo de producción de espacio para América Latina?,” in Estética de los mundos posibles: inmersión en la vida artificial, las artes y las prácticas urbanas, ed. Iliana Hernández García (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2016); Priscilla Connolly, “La ciudad y el hábitat popular: paradigma latinoamericano”; James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton University Press, 2008); Teresa Caldeira “Peripheral Urbanization: Autoconstruction, Transversal Logics, and Politics of Cities of the Global South” EPD: Society and Space 35, no. 1 (2017).
Francisco J. Escobedo et al., “Socio-ecological Dynamics and Inequality in Bogotá, Colombia’s Public Urban Forests and Their Ecosystem Services,” Urban Forestry & Urban Greening 14 (2015): 1040–53.
Alan Gilbert, “The Return of the Slum: Does Language Matter?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 4 (2007): 697–713; and Ananya Roy, “Urban Informality: Toward an Epistemology of Planning.”
Peter Redfield, “Shacktopia: The Meantime Future of Humanitarian Design,” Social Anthropology 30, no. 2 (2022): 16–33; Laurin Baumgardt, “Occupied Futures: Co-Design, Repair, and the Struggle for Housing in Cape Town,” City & Society 37, no. 3 (2025).
See more information and some images in here: Angie Ruíz Rojas, “RenoBo abre subasta pública del Plan Parcial Tres Quebradas en Usme,” Mayor's Office of Bogotá, October 14, 2025, ➝.
Laura Neville, “Disappearance, Emergence, and Appearance: Garbage and the Politics of Placemaking in Cartagena, Colombia,” Social & Cultural Geography 25, no. 10 (2024): 1554–74; Silke Oldenburg and Laura Neville, “Navigating the Archipelago City: Everyday Experiences and Socio-political Imaginaries of Urban Floods in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia,” Cahiers des Amériques latines 97 (2021): 139–63; Laura Neville and Silke Oldenburg, “Fluid Toxicities: Violent Affective Ecologies in Cartagena, Colombia,” Antipode (2026).
Silke Oldenburg, “Thinking with the Archipelago: Mangroves, Marginalization, and the Making of Alternative Environmental Futures in Cartagena, Colombia,” Environment and Planning F (2025), 12.
Archie Davies traces how land-making in Recife, Brazil, proceeded “not only through a racial division of space, but through a racial division of nature.” Archie Davies, “The Racial Division of Nature: Making Land in Recife,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 46, no. 2 (2021): 271. Similarly, Nikhil Anand traces how the production of stable, dry ground was historically central to colonial urban projects, which required the systematic suppression of amphibious modes of dwelling in favor of legible and governable surfaces. Nikhil Anand, “After Coasts: Cartography, Desiccation, and Dwelling in Amphibious Worlds,” Annual Review of Anthropology 54 (2025). Dominic Boyer argues that coastal and low-lying cities are entering an urban future in which water is no longer an exceptional disturbance but a persistent presence that demands forms of cohabitation rather than control. Dominic Boyer, “Amphibious Cities,” in Climate, Science and Society: A Primer, ed. Zeke Baker et al. (London: Routledge, 2023), 231–37.
Silke Oldenburg and María Buelvas, “Estoy llenita de agua: Caring for Infrastructural Belonging in Cartagena,” Roadsides 9 (2023): 8–16.
James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Jaime Hernández-García, Public Space in Informal Settlements: The Barrios of Bogotá (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).
Anton Rosenthal, “Spectacle, Fear and Protest: A Guide to the History of Urban Public Space in Latin America,” Social Science History 24, no. 1 (2000): 34–73.
Ananya Roy, “The 21st-Century Metropolis: New Geographies of Theory,” Regional Studies 43, no. 6 (2009): 819–30.
Here the contribution of Arturo Escobar is especially relevant for rethinking design interventions in informal settlements. His notion of design for the “pluriverse” challenges the assumption that there is a single model of urban development to which all communities should aspire. Instead, Escobar advocates forms of design grounded in relationality, autonomy, and the recognition of multiple ways of knowing and inhabiting the world. Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
Fieldnotes, Silke Oldenburg, Cartagena, June 2026.
Cedric Johnson, “The Urban Precariat, Neoliberalization, and the Soft Power of Humanitarian Design,” Journal of Developing Societies 27, nos. 3–4 (2011): 445–75.
