Key Concepts in Cali

In Colombia, transition means the opportunity to rebuild a country marked by an armed conflict that, for more than 60 years, has brought exile, dispossession, and marginality to more than eight million people.

This long-standing conflict has mainly affected the rural population, and poor displaced peasants currently living in the large cities, such as Cali, started to experience poverty, stigmatisation, and uprooting since the moment they were forced to leave their territories.

Since the late 1980s, the internal forced displacement has exacerbated in Colombia, and local governments have struggled to counteract the effects of the massive arrival of peasants seeking to start from scratch in urban areas. However, the Pease Agreement signed in 2016 between the government and the FARC guerrillas did not include specific actions for city based victims.

Questions around gender, ethnicity, class and, in the case of Cali, whether or not one has been the victim of Colombia’s armed conflict are key to understanding the communities where GREAT works. What an equitable urban future is and might be depends on the processes that have shaped the communities of places like Brisas de las Palmas

In what ways should the future of the areas where GREAT is based be imagined and who should take part in the process?

Often informal settlements, areas of precarity, or, popular neighbourhoods are seen as deviations from what the formal city should be, which has consequences over what is possible and imaginable, for example, in relation to land tenure, occupancy and ownership.

In the context of GREAT, we think differently about the kinds of imaginaries of the areas where we work to help inform alternative visions by the residents themselves concerning issues such as transport and mobility and zero waste.