Urban Experiments in the Shadow of the Violencia: Transnational Expertise and Social Reform in Colombia, 1951–61

This paper examines the rural and national trajectory of the urban and transnational planning ideas of experts at the Interamerican Center for Housing and Planning (CINVA). Founded in Bogotá in 1951 as an agency of the Organization of American States, the CINVA was supposed to offer a new model of Panamerican cooperation, though its early proposals largely mimicked the state-led, city-focused, top-down approaches to housing then dominant across the hemisphere.  This approach was also consistent with the faltering attempts by the Colombian state to reestablish its authority, beginning with the cities, in the last years of the Violencia. But as this paper shows, the focus on housing soon led CINVA to turn its attentions to the countryside, and to a series of innovative projects that rethought the relationship between community mobilization and technical expertise. Looking more closely at CINVA projects, therefore, offers a new angle on the connections between city and countryside, between state and community, and between expertise and politics at a decisive moment in Latin American urbanization. Drawing on archival research in the papers of leading planners and the CINVA itself, this paper is a first attempt to explore the actions of this important but forgotten institution in the context of a vigorous new body of work on Latin American urban history.