I am a sociocultural anthropologist focusing on urban Latin America. My scholarly interests center on city planning, engineering, and bureaucracies; materiality and the built environment; infrastructure, technology, and the environment; and the geographies of urban conflict and violence in Latin America and the Global South.
Visit Federico's website for more information
PUBLICATIONS
Book
2025 Urbanism as Warfare: Planning, (In)security, and the Remaking of Downtown Bogotá. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [In press]
Articles and book chapters
2025 “Retrofit: Aerial Cable Cars and the Reengineering of Urban Worlds.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 43(1): 8-28.
2023 “The Archaeology of Decay: Ruinous Knowledge and the Violence of Urban Planning.” American Anthropologist 125(3): 505-518
2020 “‘The Miracle of Density’: The Socio-material Epistemics of Urban Densification.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 44(4): 617-635.
2020 “Materializing (In)securities: Urban Terrain, Paperwork, and Housing in Downtown Bogotá.” Anthropological Quarterly 93(1): 1491-1522.
2020 “An Anatomy of Failure: Planning After the Fact in Contemporary Bogotá.” In Life Among Urban Planners: Practices, Professionalism, and Expertise in the Making of the City. J. Mack and M. Herzfeld, eds. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2016 “Excavating Legal Landscapes: Juridical Archaeology and the Politics of Bureaucratic Materiality in Bogotá, Colombia.” Cultural Anthropology 31(2): 215-243. OA online version.
*Reprinted as “Excavando paisajes legales: la arqueología jurídica y la política de la materialidad burocrática.” Translated by Claudia Abello and Federico Pérez. In Etnografías burocráticas: una nueva mirada a la construcción del estado en Colombia. I. Jaramillo Sierra and L. Buchely Ibarra, eds. Bogotá: Ediciones Uniandes.
2015 “La Renovación Urbana en Contexto [Urban Renewal in Context].” In De la Renovación a la Revitalización: Desafíos para Bogotá [From Renewal to Revitalization: Challenges for Bogotá]. Bogotá: Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá y Secretaría Distrital de Planeación.
2010 “Laboratorios de Reconstrucción Urbana: Hacia una Antropología de la Política Urbana en Colombia [Laboratories of Urban Reconstruction: Toward an Anthropology of Urban Policy in Colombia].” Antípoda No.10 (Antropología de la Política Pública), Enero – Junio 2010: 51-84. OA online versión.
Essays and reviews
2025 A Tyranny Against Itself: Intimate Partner Violence in the Margins of Bogotá by John I.B. Bhadra-Heintz. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. American Anthropologist, forthcoming.
2020 “Bogotá’s Urban Development Conflicts: Insecurity & Memory in the City,” Items, Layered Metropolis series, Social Science Research Council. Online Version.
2020 For the War Yet to Come: Planning Beirut’s Frontiers by Hiba Bou Akar. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Society and Space. Invited review forum.
2016 Endangered City: the politics of security and risk in Bogotá by Austin Zeiderman. Durham: Duke University Press. Anthropological Quarterly 89(4): 1227-1237.
2015 “Post-Conflict Urbanism and The Logics of Warfare in Colombia.” Fieldsights, Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology, April 30, 2015. Online Version.
2013 “Peopling Space: Contemporary Redevelopment in Bogotá.” openDemocracy (Cities in Conflict), 4 March 2013. Online Version.
2012 “Bogotá: Up Against the City.” The Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture. October 2012. Online Version.