Territorializing the Urban-Rural Border in Medellin, Colombia: Socio-Ecological Assemblages and Disruptions

The local government in Medellin, Colombia, has constructed several large infrastructure projects in the past decades as part of a strategy to transform itself into a world-class city. These projects"such as gondola-style mass transit, architecturally striking libraries, and eco-parks"contribute to a neoliberal sustainability agenda that seeks to entice wealthy investors, residents, and tourists into the city. The large-scale urban development projects also exclude marginalized residents and their everyday urban projects from newly valued "natural" commons. This paper argues that the local government uses these large infrastructure projects as a strategy of territorialization, which seeks to control space in the periphery of the city by assembling certain approved actors inside its urban borders while excluding other, less powerful residents as rural, at-risk, or invisible. Relying on data created in community meetings from 2015 to 2017 with displaced people engaged in subsistence urban agriculture, this article provides an empirical example of a territorial amarginalized residents from their right to the city. This paper contributes to literature in critical urban theory by drawing attention to the fissures and contradictions embedded in such neoliberal urbanism projects.ssemblage that makes tangible the city's rural-urban border while also dispossessing