Given that Ecobarrios is understood as a place-based discursive practice, discourse analysis (DA), spatial analysis (SA) and a process of triangulation were required to analyse and interpret information collected. This implies that as a discourse - through narratives - it transforms into concrete place-based practices of thought and action that lead to new subjects and subjectivities derived from institutional or local projects; subjects and subjectivities that may even act and be part of resistance processes and create new identities. It is important to note that even if there is no separation but a constant and direct relationship between discourse and practice, here the analysis is developed ‘separately’ as a way to facilitate understanding34.
Throughout the analysis discourses, representations and narratives will be understood as:
"...Tales of a sequence of events that are important to the narrator ... [...] ... forms of speech known and used in daily interaction ... these have a beginning, a middle and an end, as well as a logic that at least makes sense to the narrator... so, they are temporary and logical "(Coffey and Atkinson 2003).
Narratives reflect language and discursive practices. This universe of narratives is contextual, historical and cultural and allows us to realise that changes may occur at a social and cultural level. They are also used to understand the historicity of identities and subjectivities and their construction processes. This is done in order to understand the subjects by their way of speaking and acting in their everyday life (Herlinghaus 2002; Tuider 2007). Narratives also are analysed to understand the production of place since they focus on details of how local populations construct perceptions, places, experiences and cultural values (Low and Lawrence 2003). Hence, their study implies a process of de-construction, interpretation and analysis. This will be addressed in the following chapters, for instance, when I refer to documents, interviews and life stories in particular. Thus, bearing in mind these narratives will allow me to de-construct place-based discursive practices associated to Ecobarrios in each case.
Regarding the DA, there does not exist an only explanation since different disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, sociology, political science and communication have attempted to provide one. In addition, researcher’s qualitative and/or quantitative interests as well as
34 Based on Foucault (1986), Escobar (1998a), Rojas (2001), Haidar (2000) and Tuider (2007).
61 depth of analysis influence this explanation (Jociles 2005; Sayago 2014). In this case, in order to understand how projects aiming to build eco-political subjects under the notion of Ecobarrios were conceived and developed, DA was implemented from a critical and post-structuralist anthropological perspective.
From this standpoint, discourses are considered relevant as strategic instruments in the development of power relations and as instruments of passive or active struggle (organised as social movements or passive in daily life), recognising the real power of the word in action (Escobar, Álvarez and Dagnino 2001). Hence, when discourses and discursive practices are going to be analysed, what is said, what is not said, how it is said, when it is said, who is saying it and who they said it must be taken into account (Haidar 2000).
Likewise, considering the historical context is essential to understand discourse dynamics and the power relations framing for each particular case since from this perspective: “…
language is a form of social practice that is historically situated and dialectical to the social context, that is, language is both socially shaped and socially shaping...” (Low and Lawrence 2003: 395, 396) Besides: “…it is through texts that social control and social domination are exercised – through the everyday social action of language. Thus it is necessary to establish a critical language awareness to uncover the social and political goals of everyday discourse.” (Low and Lawrence 2003: 396)
De-construction, classification, re-construction and interpretation are all part of post-structuralist methods for this type of DA because they permit to critically and reflectively unpack and understand these politically loaded discursive practices in context (Reynoso 1991; Sayago 2014). The ethnographic exercise complements this process perfectly as it provides a better understanding of the context, the relations and discourse in action (Jociles 2005).
Within this framework, the DA must focus on:
“...knowledge about language beyond the word, clause, phrase and sentence that is needed for successful communication. It looks at patterns of language across texts and considers the relationship between language and the social and cultural contexts in which it is used. Discourse analysis also considers the ways that the use of language presents different views of the world and different understandings.
It examines how the use of language is influenced by relationships between participants as well as the effects the use of language has upon social identities, relations and practices. It also considers how world views, subjects, identities and practices are constructed through the use of discourse.” (Paltridge 2012:14)
62 In this research the aim of DA is to understand the ways in which discourse through oral and written sources is mediated, reiterated and transmitted (the rhetoric effects) in social and institutional interactions and how it is assessed and given new meanings over time through every day practices and administrative routines (Schatz 2009:82). In order to analyse what I observed in the field, and more specifically, what each of the actors interviewed had to say through a process of de-construction, classification, re-construction and interpretation of Ecobarrios narratives, I went through the following phases:
Firstly, I collated a description of the historical circumstances where these narratives were developed and employed, highlighting by whom. Secondly, I continued with identification of discourses which depend on the actors (institutional employees, local leaders and inhabitants of these neighbourhoods). For this I had to take into account that in their expression dimension, discourses feature the following elements: discursive objects that refer to issues to which actors frequently refer to in their statements (i.e. agricultural practices, climate change etc); discursive categories35 that refer to key concepts or categories used frequently by the actors (poverty, sustainability etc.); and finally, discursive strategies that refer to techniques, mechanisms and practices referenced (urban agriculture, recycling etc) (Escobar 1998a; Jociles 2005).
This approach to discourse analysis as a discursive practice of representation is not merely based on texts; it also takes the interaction of environment components into account (institutions, actors and social, cultural, economic, local and traditional skills). This showed those places from where reality was represented through the use of representation regimes.
These regimes are understood to be meeting places of languages in this case institutional, local, traditional, including of resistance, about others and oneself; where subjects, subjectivities and identities are constructed in the middle of power relations 36(Escobar 1998a).
This analysis took into account texts and narrative patterns linked to the behaviour of discursive categories, as follows: repetition (saturation); hesitation; redundancy; and silence (what is not said or implied) (Oslender 1999). These patterns also allowed to delve into these discursive formations, understanding the person that speaks or writes and the person
35 Authors like Foucault, Derrida and Bourdieu say that these categories are social derivations and symbolic power instruments with significant political involvement (Tuider 2007).
36 Social actions carried out as part of these representation regimes are framed in the rationality that: “…world visions, social practices, moral values and legal regulations in society are interwoven. Social rationality is defined through thinking forms and social action rules established within economic, political and ideological spheres and expressed in social imaginaries, moral norms, institutional arrangements, production methods and consumption patterns, giving meaning to social organisation, legitimising certain actions and guiding social practices towards certain goals through socially constructed means” (Leff 2011:33)
63 that does not, for whom, from where (institution, civil society, academic field), what is said about what is thought, (which is then contrasted in spatial analysis with what it does) and what can be said and what cannot (taboos, the forbidden) (Paltridge 2012; Haidar 2000).
The following considerations were also taken into account in order to understand construction of identifications (individual and collective) at the level of discourse and verbal traces. Identities are constructed in inter-action and they are produced and reflexively embedded in language. It was important to look at how experiences were described (through meanings and cultural values, etc.) and explained (then oriented through action). I considered (Tate 2007): discursive identity positioning, for example, a black woman says
"especially elderly white people they will first ask you what you are" and places her identity as ambiguous to the gaze of Whiteness because of her light skin colour. Translation as reflexivity, the woman says "So the mere fact that they ask what you are means that they can see that you're different and that you're not like them", so as to translate and reflexively apply the meaning of her discursive identity positioning. Identity re-positioning, the woman identifies and therefore repositions herself as black during the rest of the interview.
Primary and secondary sources were considered in both cases for the analysis of documents and life histories, and ethnographic interviews, the information gathered through participant observation and exercises of participatory cartography were consider in order to analyse government officials’, community leaders’ and neighbourhood dwellers’ narratives.
With regard to spatial and place-making analysis, it was undertaken in conjunction with the analysis of discourses. Speech is historically and spatially embedded which means that we can talk about discursive practices and analyse the interaction between language and practices (Bauriedl 2007). As explained in chapter 1, my intention is to understand how these eco-political subjects and (discursive and practical) subjectivity projects travelled and manifested in practice and in those places where actions are implemented and also form the basis for action by the subject. A further objective was to understand whether any resonance existed between what people said and did (their daily practices and behaviours) and this way of defining the subject and identity (as eco-political). This aimed to investigate interactions between social action, place-based discourses and practices in the social production of space (Richardson and Jensen 2003; Agnes 2012). Therefore, interaction between discourse and place-making was observed throughout: “…in how one informed or prefigured the other’s development, how action-guiding narratives were recounted in spatial terms and how people enacted the agency of the narratives in and through the places”
(Shuk-mei 2012:1)
64 Therefore, for SA I looked into how people used and gave meaning to places through dialectical relationships between actions – material (institutional and every day) practices37 and symbolic – (institutional and cultural) meanings (which imply re-presentations). Adopting this approach helped me to understand if social agents gave meaning and appropriated places through socio-spatial practices derived from these eco-political subjects construction projects and if these subject construction processes derived processes of identification, of identities construction (Richardson and Jensen 2003; Agnes 2012). Thus, I took into account not just the actions but also what kind of values (cultural, symbolic, institutional - derived from Ecobarrios) people placed on their daily activities, and the way they described, defined and identified in relation to their surroundings (environment / nature). For this part of the analysis, I took into account, for example, information gathered through participant observation and participatory mapping and maps sketch exercises that allowed me to be closer to what I have described.
Through the SA, I tried to understand the interaction between what is said (discourse) and what is done (practice) by considering the stories I selected for each Ecobarrios trajectory (institutional and local), paying particular attention to information collected from participatory cartographies. As seen in the forthcoming analytical chapters, both selected stories and cartography activities enabled me to analyse this dynamic related to the construction of place-based eco-political subjects, subjectivities and identities from the perspective of space, place-making processes and the ways of being in place. Those stories and cartographic exercises allowed me to access eco-political discursive practices of the different actors (residents, leaders and government officials) developed at diverse scales (individual, collective, neighbourhoods, city, country and planet), taking into account the multi-scale relationship that exists among them (Salazar 2007). The multi-scale monitoring was done taking into consideration interaction dynamics between discourses, institutional and everyday practices and their occurrence amongst power relations and places (tension and/or negotiation) and in a scenario where projects of subject construction are implemented by structures such as institutions and subjects resist through action or generate alternatives to them (as part of politics of/from place). I will delve into this in my analytical chapters.
It is worth noting that for the discursive and spatial study of these Ecobarrios trajectories and their contextualisation, the information collected through sources review and
37 It is important to say that material culture and objects are not seen as a reflection of social relations. But instead they are understood as active elements in their structuration, as a network of meanings, and as an active communication system that is meaningfully constituted. (Hodder 1992:83)
65 ethnographic work described in the methodology was taken into account. In order to avoid bias and to build confidence in the trustworthiness of the research, UEA uses triangulation as a strategy to combine different but complementary sources or lines of evidence (for example interviewees, historical documents such as newspapers and others) and methods (such as historical, quantitative and ethnographic)38. In this research, for example, information gathered from historical sources helped to contextualise the ethnographic exercise while cartographic activities helped to complement and strengthen field observations. The following chapters contain this discursive, practical and spatial analysis combined with triangulation of said information.
I now turn to tell the story of these stories that helped me to understand the trajectories of two eco-political subject projects called Ecobarrio.
38 For social studies this triangulation enables better understanding of the entire context for analysis and interpretation (Laws, Harper and Marcus 2003).
66 Chapter 3. Writing about Ecobarrios: Institutional Documents of Eco-political
Subjects and Subjectivities
In the following analytical chapters (3 and 4), I will discuss why Ecobarrios as a municipal programme can be interpreted as the outcome of planning hybrid. In doing so, Ecobarrios’
public history will be reconstruct not just from public documents available but mainly taking into account the cultural representations, meanings and narratives of the institutional actors that were involved in the design and implementation of this programme. My aim is to examine how and why this programme dealt with the construction of eco-political subjects and subjectivities in Bogotá.
I claim that Ecobarrios can be understood as a typical outcome of 'planning hybrid'. In using this term, I draw on Said’s (1983) travelling theory that makes reference to the diverse dynamics of displacement and implementation of ideas in diverse historical scenarios. This implies that when urban planning and policy ideas travel they are not simply adopted rather reinterpreted by local agents, resulting in new planning hybrid models and conceptions of what desirable processes of urbanisation might be (Brenner et.al 2010; Robinson and Parnell 2011). From an anthropological approach, examining Ecobarrios in this way opens the possibility of interpreting the tensions and relations between the global and the local, space and place-making process and subjects and identities construction processes (Escobar 2000; Robinson and Parnell 2011).
In order to provide historical contextualisation of Ecobarrios programme, the following discussion explores its institutional trajectory and how space was conceived. I reconstruct the programme’s public history and discourse, examining discursive objects, categories and strategies, place-based practices and social dynamics that government officials involved in Ecobarrios conception and execution adopted to produce eco-political subjects and subjectivities. This historical contextualisation also served to establish a time frame for the programme’s history, mapping places, actors –new key informants - and projects developed in Ecobarrios neighbourhoods.
Primary and secondary sources from March to May 2012 were revised for this historical contextualisation, including widely read newspapers such (according to statistics of general studies of mass media) as ‘El Tiempo’ and ‘El Espectador’ at the National Library (see annex 1), which include a section dedicated to the capital city. Surprisingly, these sources only covered the Ecobarrios programme to a limited extent. Other newspapers such as
‘Hoy’ and ‘Accion Conjunta’, which I was able to access through institutional actors’
67 archives, offered some specific articles about the programme. Most importantly, I had access to unique materials and programme documents and urban planning texts of the time (such as Bogotá development plans between 1998-2001 and 2001-2004) through the life stories of those who designed and implemented Ecobarrios.
On secondary sources I had access to books and documents in libraries at universities in Bogotá such as Los Andes, Javeriana, Nacional and Externado and also at public libraries such as Luis Angel Arango. Furthermore, and again due to the institutional life stories and interviews with officials, I had access to books and documents on urban planning in Bogotá.
Based on this first stage of the methodology and with the aim to understand how and why Ecobarrios emerged as a programme, I could do a historical reconstruction. First, I describe and explain Bogotá’s planning context for the period 2001 – 2003.