In the 1980s and 1990s, Bogotá was one of the world's most dangerous cities, with stratospheric homicide rates, frequent kidnappings, and bombings perpetrated by narco-traffickers to intimidate or eliminate targets in the judiciary. Tens of thousands of migrants, displaced by civil conflict and land grabs in the interior, settled in the informal neighborhoods on the slopes south of the city, subject to new dangers in the form of landslides and health crises. International observers spoke openly of Bogotá as the capital of a failed state.

Then an amazing thing happened. Beginning in the second half of the 1990s, a series of centrist, technocratic mayors instituted policies designed to upgrade public spaces and services, reduce violence, and expand public housing. They also created a new public transport network to bring together what had been an increasingly fragmenting city. By the early 2000s, levels of violence had dropped dramatically. To the surprise of many, Bogotá was celebrated as a model of good governance. Great story, right?

Not so fast, says Austin Zeiderman. He does not dispute the general outline sketched above; indeed, he opens his book with the observation, “[W]hen I arrived in 2006, Bogotá was safer than it had been for half a century.” But he finds a raft of troubling implications in the way this transformation has been analyzed and branded. Zeiderman argues that Bogotá’s citizens, both rich and poor, now perceive the city entirely in terms of security and risk. Public policy is necessarily formulated as risk mitigation, with its success or failure evaluated on those terms. This focus has opportunity costs, as emphases on development, redistribution, or even the vitality and delight of urban life take a back seat to risk management.

Zeiderman finds that the politics of security are highly malleable, enabling a transition from a focus on the risk of narco-violence to a focus on environmental risk, with little change in the managerial responsibilities arrogated by local government. He connects this to prescriptive neoliberalism, and he ably shows the ways in which local officeholders use risk politics to win support from international lending institutions. Although this strategy has short-term benefits, it ultimately constrains the ability to deliver deeper reform. However, Zeiderman does not simply cast aspersions on neoliberalism: he argues that in Colombia, as in much of the Global South, there was no existing broad-based welfare state for neoliberals to do away with. As a result, even the limited reforms of neoliberalism have provided some benefits for the urban poor.

This nuanced argument is one of the book's strengths, as Zeiderman eschews easy conclusions in terms of balanced analysis. He provides rich ethnographic detail on the ways in which residents of Ciudad Bolívar, on the slopes southwest of downtown Bogotá, pursue strategies not unlike those of the technocratic mayors themselves, using risk politics to gain access to public funding. In contrast to many other parts of the Global South, where displacement from informal housing has almost always meant impoverishment, residents of Ciudad Bolívar have often pursued resettlement deliberately, finding advantages in public housing stipends that appear relatively generous in comparison to those elsewhere in the hemisphere.

Zeiderman, nonetheless, remains keenly aware of the way risk mitigation produces its own forms of endangerment, justifying not only urban evictions, but also other violations of civil rights. Bogotá’s transformation has coincided with massive displacement on a national level, carried out by less centrist politicians who invoked a similar rhetoric of risk management. Zeiderman suggests that this paradigm increasingly defines and constrains our vision of cities more broadly, with largely inegalitarian implications.

This book offers a theoretical reflection on ways of thinking about the city, rather than a history of recent Bogotá: “Whether or not Bogotá has been truly transformed is not my interest, nor is whether its celebrity status among urbanists is in fact deserved. My objective is not to evaluate the changes that have taken place in Bogotá during the past two decades, or to critique the limitations and failures of the ‘Bogotá model’ and the city's supposed rebirth” (196). In this regard, Zeiderman fulfills his goals, concluding with a provocative argument for breaking free of the risk paradigm and reclaiming more expansive ways of imagining an urban future.