Urban Development in Bogotá: The Metro Case of Study

Abstract

Bogota is a growing city with a lot of difficulties shared by most of the Latin American cities nowadays, like the social and economic segregation, that tempt to produce areas of accentuated poverty, inequity, and insecurity, while other areas of the city have services and a better environment; problems related with the distances and the traffic that makes these cities difficult to move around; and among other problems. It seems like the city planning focused on the transport system as a key step to push urban development has been marking the course of the public policies around the city planning in Bogota, in the last nearly 70 years. The Bogota Metro is a massive transportation project that has been the subject of debates and studies since 1950 when the major Fernando Mazuera decided to eliminate the tram by burying its rails. The purpose of this text is to reflect around urban development in Bogota and how this thought about transport infrastructure, as the key step of the urban development, has been marking the city planning policy in Bogota the last two government periods. For this purpose, the institutional discourses and practices are going to be analyzed. The main argument of this reflection is that in the current period of the government, the idea of development through the transport infrastructure and the plans, through which this idea is carried out, accentuate the social, economic, and spatial segregation, as well as the fragmentation of the city, producing territorial reconfigurations that intensify social inequalities and tensions among the multiple and diverse social actors in the territory.