Contested Meanings of Territorial Production: Modern Territories of Coffee and Steel in Colombia

This chapter provides an approach to how the notion of territory as a process can be problematized as current and past benchmarks of modernization, based on two cases in Colombia: specialty coffee in Narino and steel mill development in Boyaca state. We investigate the senses of ‘territory’ as localized processes, leading to a discussion about these two specific contexts. Coffee and steel have marked narratives in Colombia that allow us to problematize the ways of visualizing ‘national development’ and thus understand territories designated as peripheral underdevelopment narratives, and to interrogate their use and integration into national modernization discourses. By addressing two spatially and temporally distinct contexts—the Colombian centre-east in the Sogamoso Valley in the mid-twentieth century, and the south-west of the Colombian Massif in Narino’s northern region in the present period—it is possible to analyse two modernization experiences that constitute specific meanings of territorial organization and disputes.