Political activism as urban design: political struggle, urban transformation, and the enactment of urban futures in Bogota and West Berlin (1970s-1990s)

Usubillaga Narvaez, Juan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3213-8592 2025. Political activism as urban design: political struggle, urban transformation, and the enactment of urban futures in Bogota and West Berlin (1970s-1990s). PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

Cities today face a context in which traditional politics, policies and design practices struggle to respond to increasing urbanisation rates, deepening inequalities, and rapid cultural change. This has been exacerbated by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, authoritarianism, green transitions, austerity and migration flows, among others. At the same time, social movements and political activists are rising up and reclaiming cities as sites of contestation. Activists do not merely occupy space; they challenge spatial manifestations of power and actively reshape urban life. This thesis investigates the role of activism in transforming urban space, by reconceptualising political activism as a form of urban design practice. It adopts a comparative urbanist methodology to examine activist practices in Potosí-Jerusalén in Bogotá and Kreuzberg in West Berlin between the 1970s and 1990s. Drawing on over 700 archival documents, 10 semi-structured interviews, and site visits, the thesis traces activist practices through three interrelated inquiries. First, it examines how repertoires of political action were built through the deployment of tactics and strategies over time. This included strategic decisions on whether to engage with the state through collaboration, negotiation or confrontation. By deploying tactics, activists inaugurated spaces of insurgency to engage with the state, as well as spaces of rivalry and allyship to engage with other groups. Second, the thesis investigates how these practices triggered processes of urban transformation in both cities. Activists in Potosí and Kreuzberg transformed urban space through the territorialisation of their practice, targeting multiple, interconnected facets of urban life such as housing, infrastructure and education. Their work unfolded through constellations of situated practice, grounded in collective efforts to address urban challenges in their context. In Potosí, the neighbourhood was built around a community-school as the nucleus of broader struggles over services and infrastructure. In Kreuzberg, activists opposed top-down urban renewal projects by occupying buildings and establishing alternative spaces for living and organising. Third, the research examines how these spatial practices responded to clear political visions and an intention to transform urban space. Activism in both cities was driven by political ideologies and framed within tensions between goals and means to get there. In navigating this tension, activists in Potosí and Kreuzberg created spaces of autonomy where organisational and decision-making structures were prefigured. These spaces became arenas for continuous debate, particularly around engagement with the state as both a service provider and a source of oppression. By engaging with and further developing concepts such as insurgency, autonomy, and territory, and by foregrounding theoretical contributions from the global south, the thesis challenges dominant narratives which relegate activism to the margins of urban design, often in the form of tactical, DIY, and guerrilla urbanism. It proposes a shift from design activism, where professionals adopt activist stances within projects, to activist urban design, where design emerges from activist agendas deeply rooted in territorialised struggles and collective praxis.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Architecture
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	14 October 2025
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2025 14:38
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/181648

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