Learning from Bogotá: How Municipal Experts Transformed Public Space

Abstract

This paper examines how the decentralization of state power and, advent of mayoral elections in Bogotá, Colombia, enabled municipal government, with the help of a cadre of professional planners and designers, to transform the city socially and physically by reinventing civil society and public space. Three contiguous mayoral administrations used public space as a setting and tool to reinvent a culture of citizenship as well as to demonstrate competency on behalf of the mayors. The mayors’ strategy was largely successful as Bogotá has experienced a move from individualism to collective spirit, and citizens report improvements in civility, friendliness and quality of life. Much of the city's success derives from the vision of the mayors and the important role urban planners and designers provide in implementing that vision. By examining Bogotá's transformation, it is possible to better understand how local politicians and planning and design administrators are key to that change.

Notes

 1. In Bogotá, where recent mayors (including Mockus, Peñalosa and others) have won on independent political platforms, the need to demonstrate credibility locally and globally to establish themselves and their administrations lends power to urban planning and design, especially to visible projects.

 2. Prior to 1988, the President directly appointed Bogotá's mayors. Appointments did not last long, as little as nine months. There was an ingrained pattern of elitism and cronyism, which perpetuated the focus on private gain within public infrastructure projects.

 3. Jaime Lerner was also directly aided in pursuing this vision by Brazil's then dictatorial government, which in 1969 appointed him director of the IPPUC (Institute of Urban Research and Planning of Curitiba) and in 1971, mayor of Curitiba (Irazábal, 2005, pp. 94–97).

 4. Saldías Barreneche was the Secretary of the Treasury during Mockus's first administration. She served in Mockus's second administration as an advisor on regional and competitiveness issues, and as Director of Planning, a position that she continued on into Luis Eduardo (Lucho) Garzón's administration (2004–2007).

 5. Bogotá's population can be further broken down to understand relative levels of income by studying its stratified taxation (estrato) system. Each household in Colombia is assigned a number from one to six according to its socio-economic status (Martin & Ceballos, 2004, p. 82). Ones and twos are classified as low income, threes and fours are classified as middle income and fives and sixes are classified as upper income. This system in used, for example, to determine ability to pay for utilities. The utility payment structure is set up so that the threes and fours pay their own way, so to speak, while the fives and sixes pay more to help subsidize the reduced amount that the ones and twos pay.

 6. Little land invasion or spontaneous popular settlement has occurred in Bogotá, unlike some other Latin American cities (Violich, 1987, p. 224). Rather, a process of pirate (illegal) subdivisions has proliferated, in which private developers created subdivisions outside the legal approval process. These subdivisions were extremely popular, but were typically created without public space, services or utilities, and were often constructed on the least expensive and most undesirable land (Violich, 1987, p. 224; ODCU & Zambrano, 2003, p. 51).

 7. Former Mayor Jaime Castro (1992–1994) was responsible for nearly single-handedly rewriting the City Charter and reorganizing the city's property tax collection system. One citizen characterized Castro, Mockus, and Peñalosa thus: “Castro organized the finances of the city, Mockus organized educational campaigns, and Peñalosa changed the image of the city”.

 8. There is an elected council in addition to the mayor, however, in the time period covered by this paper, the power of the mayor was paramount. In the early 1990s, significant revisions to the City Charter structured the relationship of the mayor and council in favour of the mayor; essentially the mayor governs and the council legislates. For more information see Ardila-Gómez, 2003 and Gilbert & Dávila, 2002.

 9. As the capital, and the centre of culture, economy and services in Colombia, Bogotá had an available cadre of talented and experienced professionals at the time that state power was decentralized. For example, Mockus came from the National University, where he has served as President, Vice President and as a professor. Peñalosa was trained as a journalist specializing in urban affairs and held several high-level public administration positions before becoming mayor.

10. Bogotá's mayor nominates a local mayor for each district (localidad) in the city. These local mayors are chosen from candidates nominated by each district's elected administrative board.

11. The City of Bogotá is the Distrito Capital (Capital District) of Colombia, much like Washington DC in the United States. Established in 1954 by the consolidation of seven municipalities, it is a large, well-consolidated municipality, where over 90% of residents live within the District's administrative borders (Peñalosa, interview conducted in 2006).

12. The inventory was created during Mockus's first administration (1995–1997) as the initial effort towards (re)discovering what the city owned. Using it, his administration began reclaiming spaces that had been privatized and normalizing the management of these spaces.

13. El Tunal is located in the southern periphery, El Tintal in the western periphery, and Virgilio Barco near the geographical centre of the city.

14. He calls these informal gathering spaces ‘3rd places’ following the home (1st place) and work (2nd place).

15. Mockus was criticized by historian and former District Council member Juan Carlos Florez as taking this to an extreme during his first administration by governing via pedagogical authoritarianism (Mockus, 2004, p. 3).

16. The public space survey was conducted by four native speakers in a range of public spaces throughout the city in November of 2006 (n = 455).

17. Respondents who noted a three (fairly important) or a four (very important) on a scale of one to four, with one being the lowest.