The corrective machine, or how to restore the homeless people to the structure: Two models of transformation

Here I‟ll present two analyses intimately bounded and related with the presence of homeless people in Bogotá city. The homeless people conformed a territory of illegality and crime, in the State point of view. Moreover, this territory was localized in the very political core of the Bogota city; then, in the begin of XXI century this territory disappeared and was replaced by a enormous park:Parque Tercer Milenio. 

The first analyses I present depicts the social representations of the homeless people, based in Erwin Goffman‟s works about the interaction forms. These homeless are socially stigmatized, and at the same time defined and included as well in the category of “extreme social exclusion”. The second analysis I propose begins with the interpretation of this particular exclusion and the conformation of an inner “anti-structure”, following the Victor Turner‟s theoretical path. Both analyses conjoined with the “corrective machine” idea of Turner. In the contemporary development of this idea, the homeless people are “evil beings” that must be transformed or extirpated of the social body, reshaped at the same time as a “pure sign” of an unacceptable behavior in the city landscape.