Bogota

Bogota, The Proud Revival of a City by Victoria Solis

Name	Bogota, The Proud Revival of a City
Place	Bogota
Country	Colombia
Topic	Urban Redevelopment
Author(s)	Martha Fajardo - Victoria Solis Pauwels
Completion	1991-Today

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Implementation of a series of master plans in recent years has turned Bogotá from a chaotic, unsafe city into a capital with a progressive transport system, public parks, pedestrian and cycle networks. Bogotá is the capital city of Colombia.

Transforming the urban fabric of any city is an overwhelming task. The alignment of public support, political will, financial resources, and human capacity is a rare event. To achieve a transformation on the scale of a mega-city in the developing world is virtually unknown.

Cities in the Third World have experienced great change in a short time; by cataclysm, by politics and by leadership. Therefore, we professionals must come to terms with time and change. Bogotá has benefited from a series of political leaders with a highly progressive view on the importance of urban space. This degree of political will contributed to dramatic changes in several areas, including reclamation of public space and improvement of mobility.

The intention of this presentation is to present innovative solutions, document the key events, projects, and people who have helped shape the City of Bogotá, with special emphasis on the Public Space Transformation.

Author's perspective

The accomplishment: Rethinking the city from its public spaces imposing them as the principle of the collective and recovering the administration’s leading role in their construction and regularization were the most important goal of those who have the opportunity and responsibility to the people, and the city.

The goal: Bogotá is visually a different city today than it was in 1997; the changes in public space and in mobility infrastructure have translated into quantifiable improvements on incomes and social advancement. Specifically, changes in property values, employment generation, air quality, and benefits to particular income groups.

The means:  What is perhaps most striking about the Bogotá project is the energetic and ingenious way in which the professional and technical team has moved beyond the theory and rhetoric, to its actual realization on the street and in the daily lives of those who live in Bogotá.

Thus, what is the main accomplishment is, the exercise in what we have to call: the Politics of Sustainability.

Landscape and/or urban context

The Bogotá Challenge The city of Bogotá, grew in the last 30 years, it passed of being a city of less than a million inhabitants to almost eigth millions, until very recently it was one of the most chaotic, insecure and ruthless cities of Latin America, with a chaotic system of transportation, parks covered with garbage, wild grass, a nobody’s land. A city affected by the urbanisation phenomenon and the migration because of the internal armed conflict.

In addition to a quantitative deficit, the city’s environment, landscape and existing urban spaces had a very low quality. Such situation was partly due to the fact that a very generic name was assigned to all of the following: the notions of “left land” and “green zone” imposed a homogeneous and anonymous reason to spaces that could become very important for the collective. Therefore, a methodology was imposed with the aim of promoting not only square meters of space, but also the user definition and the allocation of forgotten social qualities.

The diagnostic of the environmental profile performed between 1993-1996 evidenced an environmental crisis for the city and the fact that its environmental problems should be solved in an integral and combined manner by all entities of the District Administration with a straightforward collaboration of the private sector and the community. Bogotá’s chaotic growth, together with a weak attention and priority given to non-planned processes of urbanization and appropriation of urban space resulted in a significant part of the city’s population being excluded from proper social and public services.

Illustration: Map; sketches; short descriptive analyses

Cultural/social/political context

Brief explanation of culture, political economy, legal framework

Illustration: Bullet points, image, background notes

History

How did the area/project/plan at the focus of the case study evolve?

Illustration: Table or time line