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To believe that Bogotá can become a walkable city sounds like a distant scenario. Almost science fiction. As of 2020, more than 2,490,000 vehicles were on the streets of the Colombian capital of nearly 8 million people, causing 34,984 road accidents. The effective public area per inhabitant is currently just under 4.6 square meters and it is no secret to anyone that there is a public transport deficit. Bogotá is a car city. However, a group of Mobility Ministry officials have licensed themselves to think differently: through some projects called Barrios Vitales, they are experimenting with stealing space from vehicles to give it back to pedestrians. Investigate how it can be achieved that public space is not a transit space but a permanent space.
“We are developing strategies to create more walkable neighborhoods where people can walk or cycle in a sustainable way. And in the event that the cars have to pass through the neighborhood, they should do so at low speed,” says Daniela Castaño, manager of the Vital El Porvenir neighborhood in Bosa, in the south-west of the city of the five drivers who are already being intervened. In this polygon, which covers 45.6 hectares, it is already known what they will do in almost each of the blocks and intersections. South 52nd Street, which Castaño says is the “heart of the neighborhood,” will be left with a single lane for cars to make room for bicycles and pedestrians.
Remember that 52 South is a street that connects to the care blocks, a facility that provides education, laundry facilities, and space for the neighborhood’s female caregivers, and is also the street that is home to several schools and a headquarters the district university. In fact, it’s just a few blocks from where Bogotá’s first subway line will pass. “It’s a place with a cycling vocation with a big presence of both boys and girls, so the idea is that the place is designed for them,” he adds. In other areas of the territory that will intervene, they are also trying to create community orchards and exclusive areas to allow the shops’ trucks to unload their produce.
The idea of creating walkable neighborhoods isn’t unique to Bogotá. The project is inspired by the super blocks of Barcelona and the pedestrianized areas of London, also known as low traffic neighbourhoods. “These models are urban cells within a perimeter where pedestrians are the priority,” explains Barcelona architect Salvador Rueda, who was behind the superblocks and now advises Bogotá, via the World Bank. “Then when you change the speed of traffic, you replace the asphalt with green and a new city appears. A wonderful place. But the first is a tactical intervention.”
In the San Felipe district, towards the center of Bogotá and where, with 38.2 hectares, is the first pilot of the Barrios Vitales in the city, several intersections of Carrera 22, formerly a thoroughfare for cars, have already been intervened. They placed flower pots so that only pedestrians and cyclists can enter and they painted the streets with colors so that this mark, that of color, makes it clear that it is a place to be, to rest, to walk and even to be “An agreement has been reached with the department of public space defender of Bogotá (Dadep) with the vendors that they can set up tables for 17,000 Colombian pesos ($4) per square meter per month,” says Javier Guerra, an official by the Ministry of Mobility and known as the “father” of the Barrio Vital San Felipe.
And if the vocation of the Porvenir district was children and bicycles, that of San Felipe is art. Galleries and studios as well as restaurants are located in this space. The pots that form the boundary between the pedestrian and the vehicles have been painted with different motifs by local artists, and each of the 223 there has been adopted by someone. In other words, people who live or work in San Felipe signed a document pledging to water each of the plants and take care of the mesas on a daily basis.
The terrace of a restaurant in the San Felipe neighborhood.VANNESSA JIMENEZ
The officials accept that these are small interventions, because the Ministry of Mobility reaches that far. It’s what they call tactical urbanism, precise and small interventions, like acupuncture, where a single pressure point can make a big change in the environment. In San Felipe, whose planning began in 2020, there is already an initial balance of these changes. Traffic accidents, which before the project averaged between 20 and 27 per semester, fell to 17 after the interventions. Thefts, which averaged 50 per semester, fell to 40, down 20% from the previous five years.
urbanity versus insecurity
“One of the most complex problems that prevents people from moving sustainably in Bogotá is the insecurity,” says the architect Rueda. “And urban planning can help in some ways – if not all – by favoring income mixing in the same area and by making public spaces fill with people who live in them.” Furthermore, the first results, as Vanessa Velasco, expert on urban development at the World Bank, comments, “a reduction in carbon emissions, an improvement in security and an economic reactivation have been shown, leading to a greater sense of belonging and a greater appropriation by people of citizenship”.
Despite the benefits of the first pilot, gaining community support has not been easy in some vital neighborhoods. In San Carlos, a neighborhood that has an improvement plan for 68 hectares in the city of Tunjuelito, south of Bogotá, people are skeptical about the project. On October 28th and 29th, the Ministry of Mobility conducted an experiment. They removed a lane for vehicles on the long diagonal 54 Sur that connects the Villavicencio highway to Caracas and abandoned the site of an illegal parking lot that had been created in front of a row of shops to make it a permanent zone. They even painted golosas (heaven and hell) for the children.
A small square in the Barrio Vital of San Carlos. VANNESSA JIMENEZ
But the neighborhood’s Community Action Board didn’t like the idea. As mobility officers walk through the area, neighborhood traders still yell at them, “We want our parking lot,” claiming that most of their customers drive and such intervention would affect their business. “We respond to these requests,” says Juan Carlos Tovar from the Ministry of Mobility. “For this reason, they are assigned a parking spot in the design plan, but on a different block so the trucks can park there.”
In a car-dominated city like Bogotá, the Barrios Vitales are a disruptor, but also an “urban laboratory,” as Guerra puts it. It’s about finding answers through trial and error. In fact, the Land Management Plan, the instrument used to plan Bogotá, states that a total of 33 vital neighborhoods are to be created. And the backers like to imagine even more ambitious things in the distant future. Tree-lined streets, people who only have to walk 15 minutes to get to school or the hospital. Platforms without gaps and wider. Imagine a city where the car is no longer the protagonist.