Public Values: The Techno-Politics of Land Value Capture in Bogotá, Colombia

Land-value capture (LVC) – broadly understood as a series of planning instruments for the recovery by governments of land value increments generated by actions other than the landowner’s direct investments– has been subject to a uniquely mixed set of interpretations within critical geography and urban studies. Many global north critical scholars argue that LVC structures incentives for local governments to promote increases in land value to increase its fiscal returns, and inserts a logic of financialized land speculation into public planning departments (Ryan-Collins et al., 2017; Stein, 2019; Weber, 2021; Wolf-Powers, 2023). And yet in Colombia, LVC instruments such as land taxes, betterment levies, land readjustments and increase of zoning windfall gains have been promoted and defended by progressive planners, Marxist economists and leftist lawyers. Based on 8 months of field work among planners, urban economists, lawyers and think-tanks in Bogotá, this paper in part of a broader dissertation research arguing that land-value capture is an “abstract technology” (Ewald, 2020) which does not carry a univocal political charge. Following STS scholars such as Callon, (1998, 2009) and Collier, 2011), it explores the relationship between technical expertise of economics, law and planning and politics, and argues that expertise is both shaped by and defines the conditions of politics and particularly, how land value is shaped as an object of government that is (or fails to become) “public”. This paper specifically contemplates the relationship between the theoretical justifications for LVC and its fiscal design and implementation by focusing on one particularly politicized instrument: that of Participación en Plusvalías, or participation in land value increments. This instrument – contemplated in the 1991 Constitution – allowed municipalities to capture up to 50% of the land value increments resulting from government regulatory actions, such as changing land uses or density by zoning changes, and led one expert to claim that “few if any other countries have attempted to so directly incorporate Georgian principles into actual legislation at the national level” (Doebele, 1998). And yet, for all its ambitions, its implementation has largely failed to capture even a fraction of the original projected amounts, leading Participación – for which Colombia is a model worldwide – to be suspended during the current master land use plan. This paper will explore the minutiae of tax instrument design as a site of unexpectedly heated contestation in which familiar ideological divisions and the distinction between the technical and political is blurred. In doing so, I hope to destabilize some of the familiar categories of the critical LVC literature – particularly around the public-private binary – in order to identify new terrains of struggle over the right to the value of the city.