Introduction
The city-plan that is being designed in the outskirts of Bogotá to deal with the housing deficit, similar to the model of large housing complexes in the northern hemisphere, during the second half of the 20th Century,1 is making no effort to explore a rural-urban hybrid identity model, which should be considered from three perspectives: the inquiry into rural-urban planning; relations between the urban identity structure and the ecosystem, which could open the door to the exploration of more sustainable city models; and the cultural identity of the populations, mostly rural migrants, which could be an useful resource for the design of more integrated cities.
This project recognizes the principles of Habitat Production and Social Management, considering it “a social and cultural product [not a commercial product] that implies the active, informed and organized participation of the habitants in its management and development,”2 but it doesn’t start of the production of housing nor of institutional mechanisms formulated from the State perspective,3 rather than a grassroots approach to local social movements who have their own identity, agenda, objectives and action plans, focused on sustainability and social justice, based on social values and their own cultures, offering a network of methodological, self-governed bottom up solutions.4
Through a methodology of investigation-action5 and the digitally mediated participative mapping6 between architecture and hip-hop collectives, our focus is to identify the main tensions between this urban development model and the daily practices of collective self-government.
Methodology
The methodological process is developed over the course of one year and is structured in three phases:
(1) The “Urban Negotiations”7 project of cocreation and co-construction of mobile installations in the Parques de Bogotá neighbourhood after 2 months of in-situ residency, with public space workshops 4 days per week and centred around three local organisations: football (30 youths under 18 years old), communal gardens (15 adults, mostly women), and hip-hop (30 people 16–33 years old).
(2) These hip-hop collectives showed the architecture students around, exhibiting the main concepts presented here, which further stimulates their interest in mapping the context. They propose a “study group” through social networks to share texts, songs or films addressing these territorial contradictions.8
(3) The “Mapeo al Pedazo” Project9 was developed over 8 months through virtual-presential meetings with 25 youths between 20 and 33 years old, linked to the hip-hop collective “Golpe de Barrio” (GdB) (Neighbourhood Knocks). A collective cartography is being proposed, which integrates the language of hip-hop with architecture and that GdB designed around three dynamics related with the three scales of vulnerability in the territory: animal, human, and environmental.
GdB documented the stories through short films and composed and produced the song and videoclip “Jauría.” The urban situations shown are based on the online cartography Google Maps,10 in which layers relating to citizen dynamics are integrated with layers relating to urban developmental processes.
The narrations of these collectives found here correspond to the project’s online social spaces.
Context
Bosa is a locality in the southwest of Bogota with 776.363 inhabitants, the majority of whom are from low socio-economic strata: 1 (13%) and 2 (85%). It is the city’s most densely populated zone,11 with very few green areas12. It is situated near a vast hydric structure between the Bogota River, the Tunjuelo River, and wetland, which was constructed through informal processes based on landfill, drainage, and pirate urbanism during the second half of the 20th century.
After the redefinition of the land and its use, proposed in the 2004 Land Management Plan, there are notable land transformations taking place in the surrounding areas (Figure 2) where thousands of priority and social housing (Table 1) residencies are being built, although its social development indicators are below average for the locality and city (Table 2).
Figure 2.
Cartography of land transformations in development in Bosa, Bogotá (UPZ Tintal Sur and Porvenir) since 2004. Source: “Mapeo al pedazo” Project, 2020.
Development
This methodological process has led to the identification of four concepts regarding the tensions between territory transformation and the daily practices of urban self-government:
The scars: cultural value and agricultural heritage
The authority of the Bosa Muisca Indigenous Local Government was recognised in 1999, in the old rural countryside of San Bernardino and San José, based upon the heritage of the indigenous reserve that was abolished in 1951. It currently includes 1000 families and 3800 members.
The redefinition of rural land into urban expansion had a visible impact on the indigenous community. The comunero (a member of the Muisca indigenous local government) J.S.N explained it like this:
The modification of the Land Management Plan in 2004 caused uncertainty about entering the development zone. The so-called land pirates started to arrive and through juridical procedures and violence they started to take over the comunero’s land. The lack of clarity about land ownership meant that many of the comuneros ceased their agricultural and ranching activities and their productive development as indigenous communities was gravely affected. In addition to this, taxes were criminally raised to such an extent that the comuneros had to sell their land because they simply could not afford to pay, and so could not continue working there.13
In 2005, comunero José Armando Chiguazuque appealed for a popular action against the Bogotá local council requesting the halting of works with the aim of protecting strategic ecosystems, calling for judicially supported protective measures and giving way to the recognition of the “La Isla Wetland”.
The indigenous council had previously made various appeals to participate as intervening third parties in the consultations previous to the social housing design plan for the area. After several denials by the judge, their participation in the Edén-Descanso housing plan was made viable, and an agreement was reached that 3.1 hectares would be assigned to the 500 differential social residences for the indigenous population, although today there are no clear criteria as to what “differentiability” means.
These agreements have caused frictions within the local indigenous government as, for some comuneros, participation in this space has meant the perversion of cultural principles that characterise the revindication of the Muisca people:
Many of these people don’t even consider themselves indigenous, but they go to the local government because they consider it to be the best way to sell the land at a higher price. Although they have their surnames and their grandparents… they don’t give a damn. These comuneros are capitalists and the mistake was to have centred the argument around the price of land and to not have constructed the cultural values of the sacred ancestral territory, of what is really important to the indigenous community.14
Other rural-urban land models were implemented in 1948,15 when the Institute of Land Division, Colonisation and Forestry Defence was created, with the main objective of
Carrying out the division of uncultivated or insufficiently exploited land, consulting the economic and social needs of the country and of each region, giving preference to rural zones near to cities and transport links and procuring that the conditions of respective local lots allow for smallholders to live on the land with their families.
One of these rural-urban productive housing models was developed in Bosa in a zone now referred to as “El Porvenir.”
Repetition and Isolation: Dead Point
The hip-hop collectives have rebaptised the Parques de Bogotá16 neighbourhood: “We call it Dead Point because it’s a place where transport doesn’t reach to, there’s no decent phone signal, no internet, no health centre, just the repetition of separate housing divided by canals.”17
On one hand, we consider the lack of equipment and green spaces for recreation, favouring instead a monofunctional landscape of social housing. The largest scale facility that has been designed for the zone is a penitentiary complex for teenagers18 in conflict with the law: “Straight away, the only thing they’re saying to us is you are “thieves” (…) what you need are cages and tamers in order to live in peace together.”19
On the other hand, there is the notable homogenisation of the urban environment, repeating design codes and spatial distribution that are not adapted to the social and economic dynamics of the population:
They build car parks when the reality in this community is that people are more likely to own a sales cart to earn their livelihood (…) what’s more there are thousands of homes there and no employment, so everybody ends up using the public space to make a living20 (fig 5)
Figure 5.
Mobile sales carts in housing parking lots and in public spaces, 2019. Source: Own elaborated.
A recurring perception in this developmental urban planning is the indifference towards the physical, social and environmental context:
To the right is Parques de Bogotá and to the left is Bosa San Bernardino and what’s in the middle is like a hole, like a stain left by the new ghetto life and the old way of facing community development. You can see it in the picture: total indifference towards what is already there, towards the existing community and what was there before.21 (fig 6)
Figure 6.
Boundary between Campo Verde social housing Plan and the popular neighborhood- old San Bernardino village, 2020. Source: Mapeo al Pedazo project.
The construction of these housing complexes has been to the detriment of existing environmental protection systems, such as the reduction of the Bogota River Environmental Management and Protection Zone, designed to prepare land for the construction of housing linked to the “River City”22 project or to enable the construction of logistic yards for the Bogota Metro23.
The Borders: Risk Mitigation and Self-Management in Sport.
The flood risk mitigation works have created divisions in urban life:
The canal has separated what is Bosa — from its health centres, its schools and its shopping centres — from these new housing areas. One of the things you have to learn in Punto Muerto is how to cross the canal so as to not have to walk an extra 20 to 30 minutes to do what you have to do. It’s the way people look for a quick connection with the city. The idea of a border is very marked.24
They are spaces which not only limit movement between sectors, but neither are they designed as spaces for public recreation or of environmental value. The experience of the Campo Alegre BMX club, by the Santa Isabel canal in the Recreo rural-urban zone, demonstrates the capacity for self-management in sport in these spaces through the fully independent and unfunded construction and maintenance of the Dirt Jump project. Its development over the last 12 years, with no external support, has been possible due to the fact that no materials were required apart from earth and water and effort of the participants in shaping the mounds (fig 7).
In 2020, this space was demolished by the Local Mayor’s Office of Bosa under the criteria of the Local Natural Risk Council with no notification nor previous agreement with the BMX club, who had already expressed concern at the lack of institutional support:
The water for making these ramps is the trickiest part. This is where we realise that nobody supports us; nobody, literally nobody, because we have to fetch the water from the river and from the canal (…) and it’s not exactly the most pleasant water, but we put all of our effort and heart into it, because it’s our passion.25
Figure 7.
Self-built and self-managed Dirt Jump BMX tracks in Bosa-Recreo, 2020. Source: Own photographs.
This sudden rigidity in the application of risk management mechanisms is in stark contrast with the accumulation of rubble and garbage in the canals and with the variability in the technical definition of risk threat zones, which changes according to the urbanisation projects to be developed: in 2013 the level of high flood risk areas in the zone was increased to 70% of the total area26, which should have impeded urban use. In 2016 the construction of 6,000 VIP residences through a national initiative was announced — for victims of the conflict and demobilised troops — for which the District Institute for Risk Management and Climate Change updated the studies,27 decreasing the area of high-risk land to 1.9% thereby allowing construction in 98% of the zone.
Overspills: Citizen Appropriation
In the cracks in urban model, we have found multiple citizen overspills, appropriations, and spatial redefinition:
Even the Land Management Plan puts you in such a rigid framework, but without knowing the dynamics of the community, and putting so much pressure on the people and marginalizing them so much, means the community starts to break out, be it for necessity or for cultural identity.28
Public space infrastructure has been installed in some of the lineal parks, but priority has been given to the construction of closed sports fields, which imply a certain bureaucracy for their use, in contrast to the sport use on the city outskirts in an area named Fostra del Porvenir (which corresponds to the future roadway intervention of the Longitudinal West Avenue ALO) which consists of plain grass fields and whose “rules of use” are based on the ad-hoc agreements of the community.
Citizen appropriations have also been found on ALO land in rural areas accessible by foot within the administrative boundaries of the Mosquera municipality (fig 8):
The lack of these spaces has turned into a TAZ29, in a place of culture, of Street markets, of cyclists, stunt bikers and skaters. The same community has spilled over the edges of the locality to reclaim spaces that are indispensable for development as a community.30
Various communal gardens have been established inside the housing estates, such as the one developed by the group Herederas y Herederos del Saber (Heirs to Knowledge) in the VIP Senderos de Campo Verde housing estate. They are often intergenerational processes largely led by women and strongly rooted in rural traditions of the migrant population. They are fragile processes that do not benefit from much support from their communities nor the housing complex administrators and have possibly survived due to public program support at their beginnings.31 (fig 9)
Conclusions
The urban developers involved in urban expansion zones in the southwestern side of Bogota can deal with some of the quantitative problems in the city, but there is still a big challenge ahead in the mitigation of socio-spatial segregation and the loss of neighbourhood government mechanisms.
Some voices are very critical of the future of these neighbourhoods: “in some way or another the State is hugely indebted to all these neighbourhoods and instead of paying the debt they start to create new territories and new debts.”32
But the citizen spillovers that appear in the cracks of this urban development show interesting ways of territorial self-governance that have certain rural/urban identities in common, such as communal gardens, Dirt Jump or the recreational activities in the zone of land affectation that have not yet been urbanised, and that can give clues for more inclusive socially and environmentally sustainable rural-urban planning.