Overview

Once known as a ""drug capital"" and associated with kidnappings, violence, and excess, Bogota, Colombia, has undergone a transformation that some have termed ""the miracle of Bogota."" Beginning in the late 1980s, the city emerged from a long period of political and social instability to become an unexpected model of urban development through the redesign and revitalization of the public realm-parks, transportation, and derelict spaces-under the leadership of two ""public space mayors,"" Antanas Mockus and Enrique Penalosa (the latter reelected in 2015). In Learning from Bogota, Rachel Berney analyzes how these mayors worked to reconfigure the troubled city into a pedagogical one whose public spaces and urban policy have helped shape a more tolerant and aware citizenry. Berney examines the contributions of Mockus and Penalosa through the lenses of both spatial/urban design and the city's history. She shows how, through the careful intertwining of new public space and transportation projects, the reclamation of privatized public space, and the refurbishment of dilapidated open spaces, the mayors enacted an ambitious urban vision for Bogota without resorting to the failed method of the top-down city master plan. Illuminating the complex interplay between formal politics, urban planning, and improvised social strategies, as well as the negative consequences that accompanied Bogota's metamorphosis, Learning from Bogota offers significant lessons about the possibility for positive and lasting change in cities around the world.

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9781477311042

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Learning from Bogota helps us understand the political nature and contradicaitons of Bogota's urban planning process...the book delivers an assessment of how specific projects realize (or not) the larger political agenda conceptualized as pedagogical urbanism. * Journal of Latin American Geography * [Learning from Bogota] is clearly written and free of excessive academic posing...a worthy book insofar as it discusses several significant urban space projects in a city which was greatly improved in the late 1990s and early 2000s. * Journal of Latin American Studies *

[Learning from Bogota] is clearly written and free of excessive academic posing...a worthy book insofar as it discusses several significant urban space projects in a city which was greatly improved in the late 1990s and early 2000s. * Journal of Latin American Studies * Learning from Bogota helps us understand the political nature and contradicaitons of Bogota's urban planning process...the book delivers an assessment of how specific projects realize (or not) the larger political agenda conceptualized as pedagogical urbanism. * Journal of Latin American Geography * [Learning from Bogota] is well structured, graphically compelling, and important for considering whether framing urbanism as a platform for knowledge production permits more fundamental solutions than pure formalism, and if so, what civic infrastructure is required. * Latin American Research Review *

Author Information

Rachel Berney is an assistant professor of urban design in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington.

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