Urban Political Podcast · Ross Beveridge, Markus Kip, Mais Jafari, Nitin Bathla, Julio Paulos, Nicolas Goez, Talja Blokland

94 - Urban Racial Politics in Cartagena, Colombia

·1 hr 3 min·5 clips

They want your image, not your presence

Urban Political centers Cartagena as a case study in urban racial politics. The conversation is carried out in Spanish, which fits the podcast's effort to decenter urban knowledge production and make room for distinct urban perspectives and linguistic viewpoints. The city is the subject, but history does most of the work. Cartagena is read through its colonial role in the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, its later reinvention as a tourist destination, and its reception of people displaced by Colombia's armed conflict. Those layers are not treated separately. They are brought together to show how race, development, tourism, displacement, and violence can reinforce one another in the same urban landscape. The episode keeps asking who gets pushed out. It looks at the spatial dynamics that have shaped the city, the power configurations behind urban encounters, and the forms of colonial dispossession that still structure daily life. Patrimony becomes a central problem. The discussion describes how heritage policies can drive a symbolic and physical whitening of the city, including the impulse to connect Cartagena with an imagined southern Spanish model and to repaint the city white. That choice has material effects. It narrows how land can be used, pushes informal street vendors out of historic and tourist zones, and marks many Afro-descendant sellers as incompatible with the aesthetics attached to colonial heritage. Neighborhoods are affected too. The conversation names Chambacu as an emblematic example of a mostly Black neighborhood whose residents were displaced from the edges of the historic center and sent toward the periphery during patrimonial redevelopment. The result is familiar and painful. Segregation hardens, dispossession returns in new forms, and the city's public image is built partly through the erasure of the people who made its central districts work. Resistance remains part of the story. Afro-descendant communities appear as those most affected by these urban processes, and the episode asks how they resist exclusion and insist on a different account of the city. The closing argument is historical. By tying racialization to urban development and then linking both to the wider language of urban polycrisis, the episode offers a grounded way to think about capitalism, coloniality, and contemporary city-making beyond Cartagena.

As heard by us

A serious look at how tourism, patrimony, and race reshape Cartagena's urban life.

Urban racial politics in Cartagena are treated here as a question of city-making: who is allowed to stay in the historic center, who is pushed outward, and how tourism and patrimony can become tools of exclusion.

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Why you'd press play

Hear Cartagena's racial politics traced from colonial history to tourism-driven displacement.

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