Bogota

Abstract

Bogota in the early 1990s was recognized internationally as one of the most violent cities in the world, plagued by drug trafficking and urban chaos. Ten years later, the city received the Golden Lion award at the X Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale.

This chapter addresses the phenomena that took place in the Colombian capital between 1995 and 2003, which provided the urban transformation, understood as a grouping of complementary and successive actions, of diverse nature: from politics to the implantation of grandiose and articulated urban projects.

Political actions combine several laws and public policies, which have allowed urban interventions to be implemented, articulated, and continued, and social programs for the construction of “citizen culture,” responsible for the public appropriation of the major interventions implemented.

The changes in the territory were materialized by adding three axes of articulated urban interventions. The determinant axle was the restructuring of the collective transportation systems, since the implementation of the Transmilenio BRT system, linked to other modes of transportation such as bike paths, providing intermodality and, above all, integration with other actions, such as construction and improvement of public spaces and collective facilities, and library parks and promotion of social housing integrated to urbanity and urban expansion process control policy.