Securing the home: Crime, state sovereignty and social housing in Medellín

Abstract

In urban Latin America social housing developments have become a strategy to (re)centre territorial sovereignty with the state, by relocating low-income populations from informal settlements controlled by organized criminal groups. Yet criminal groups wield significant influence in new social housing developments, and states' monopoly on violence continues to be contested. While studies of urban housing in the region have largely disregarded matters of urban security, research on urban security has ignored houses as material agents. Bridging studies of housing and studies of urban security, I promote a broad understanding of security that conceives the cumulative effect of diverse threats to residents' livelihoods. By doing so, I further develop a material approach to state sovereignty in which a house operates both as a material referent and as an affective "object of desire" (Berlant, 2011) in urban security politics. By promising a secure home, social housing developments materialize the state's responsibility to protect its citizens. However, the deficient construction and inadequate design of many new homes expose residents to climatic, health and crime-related threats. I conclude by outlining three interrelated sets of question that arise from conceiving houses as politicized materiality. I base my argument on an ethnographic case study of a social housing development in peripheral Medellín.