Planning for Territorial Reparation: The Role of Neighbourhood Upgrading in Dignifying IDPs Lives

Colombia hosts one of the largest internally displaced persons (IDP) worldwide. The Constitutional Court has reiterated the systematic re-victimization of IDP through insufficient state action. State action faces two limitations, despite one of the main tenets of the 2016 Peace Accord demanding victims’ reparation and land restitution. On one hand, most policies and investments have targeted rural municipalities, overlooking the concentration of IDP in the main cities' periphery. On the other hand, processes of reparation and restitution have focused mostly on material, legal and technical issues that overlook social and symbolic dimensions that are central to bring dignity into the core of housing debates and policy. The limited understanding of these dimensions in/when building territorial peace and the mechanisms for reparation in cities results in the reproduction of the multiple violences that policy aims to counteract. Building on the spatial turn to peacebuilding and debates on reparative planning, this article proposes the notion of ‘planning for territorial reparation’ and elaborates on how neighbourhood upgrading can become a tool for reparation in Colombian cities. Based on the cases of Cali and Medellin, our aims are 1) to discuss current multi-scalar responses to IDPs on housing policy and territorial planning based on policy analysis; 2) to explain the spatial pattern of the location of the forced-displaced populations and the intersectional conditions of IDPs vulnerability based on spatial analysis; and 3) to propose co-created set of premises to recalibrate neighbourhood upgrading in the context of protracted conflict centring IDP.