When I came back to Bogotá, I encountered many positive surprises; the capital has truly change for good, people now care for the city and enjoy the public spaces that before couldn’t because of safety issues, poverty has decreased even though it is still very high, and new projects are on the rise bringing important development to the city. Le Corbusier’ s five finger plan for the city has been long forgotten, now with 6,776,009 inhabitants (2005 census), plus its metropolitan area, which includes municipalities such as Chía, Cota, Soacha, Cajicá and La Calera, the city has an estimated population of 7,881,156. The city keeps sprawling and these municiplaities are rapidly becoming part of the metropolitan area, fortunately, after lessons from American cities we have learned that the expansion of a city must be controlled. For too many years the downtown area was abandoned becoming a nest for poverty and violence. From all the changes in Bogota, my favourite one is the conscience of urban regeneration and reactivation of the downtown area, we have found inside the city great architecture to restore, rich public spaces and a huge capacity of urban regenaration at every single scale. 
One of the major proyects that are part of this regeneration process is to bring back the train to the city; the aim is to liberate the pressure in the city by connecting urban and rural areas, and fomenting transportation with this method instead of the car. Some of the most important regenaration projects are around the main stations, this areas are the key and gateway of the city, meaning that they should be the first to change nevertheless the fascinating part of all this is that basically you can go around the city selecting beautifull sites ready to be “fixed”, I would dare to say that this is the great potential that this city has.
The reactivation of the downtown area is been pushed by the government by lowering taxes to construction firms who are willing to restore the centre’s architecture and by transforming the area into a historic, business and cultural hub. From this phenomenon the city is now evolving from a mono into a polycentric metropolis. The main artery is the “Av Jimenez” which is the only street that goes entirely from east to west and also is the one connected to the international airport; along this road a number of financial, commercial and education districts have raised, and along this districts new housing and better quality of life.
The city is transforming into some sort of treasure hunt adventure for hungry architects were if you look right is possible to find beautiful architecture jewels to restore, or sites with great potential for interesting projects, competitiveness is increasing as well as quality of ideas, the difficult part is to find the resources and the right political tools to bring these ideas to reality.
As I mentioned in a post several weeks ago the south of the city is the area that still has a lot of problems and poverty issues, even though the efforts of the government has been outstanding and now we can see beautiful schools, bicycle paths, libraries and parks in the middle of “slums” there is still a lot of work to do to erase this word from the city.
One of the major proyects that are part of this regeneration process is to bring back the train to the city; the aim is to liberate the pressure in the city by connecting urban and rural areas, and fomenting transportation with this method instead of the car. Some of the most important regenaration projects are around the main stations, this areas are the key and gateway of the city, meaning that they should be the first to change nevertheless the fascinating part of all this is that basically you can go around the city selecting beautifull sites ready to be “fixed”, I would dare to say that this is the great potential that this city has.
The reactivation of the downtown area is been pushed by the government by lowering taxes to construction firms who are willing to restore the centre’s architecture and by transforming the area into a historic, business and cultural hub. From this phenomenon the city is now evolving from a mono into a polycentric metropolis. The main artery is the “Av Jimenez” which is the only street that goes entirely from east to west and also is the one connected to the international airport; along this road a number of financial, commercial and education districts have raised, and along this districts new housing and better quality of life.
The city is transforming into some sort of treasure hunt adventure for hungry architects were if you look right is possible to find beautiful architecture jewels to restore, or sites with great potential for interesting projects, competitiveness is increasing as well as quality of ideas, the difficult part is to find the resources and the right political tools to bring these ideas to reality.
As I mentioned in a post several weeks ago the south of the city is the area that still has a lot of problems and poverty issues, even though the efforts of the government has been outstanding and now we can see beautiful schools, bicycle paths, libraries and parks in the middle of “slums” there is still a lot of work to do to erase this word from the city.
1 comment:
this sounds interesting how the city is able to change it self over time. but its more like facts of an ongoing process.
would it be possible for u to focus on an earlier discussed topic for example boundaries as we lately discussed. maybe you can outline some boundary elements like I tried in basel and we could kind of set up a collection of elements.
in terms of cycles I think the story ur telling is very interesting. it shows that the city is in a constant process of changing and many factor such as trends seem to apply to these processes. it looks as if urban areas within a city have their own "ups and downs".
if I think of basel, here too applies the trend that the old city center is undergoing a change in use and the very old part of town has become very popular for business and shopping and a remarkable loss of housing.
even in london we can see that the city of london has been transformed into the business district of the city, especially with the courts and lawyers area. there is not much housing left.
but this does not mean that this is meant to last for ever. what comes next, how do these areas change into something else? it does not necessarily need to be abandoned first, but in such a case regeneration is much more obvious.
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