Public space in contemporary Bogotá: From policy artifacts to urban assemblages

In my paper I explore the emergence of public space as an object of governmental knowledge and intervention in Bogotá since the mid 1990s. I focus on the ways in which public space has been conceived and deployed as a tool of governance and planning. I also explore the contradictions and unintended effects of the implementation of such “policy artifacts” in light of the everyday politics of public space (Low & Smith 2006). I thus expect to shed light on: 1) the shifts of urban governance in Latin America and 2) the production of public space as a dynamic “assemblage” (Latour 2005; McFarlane 2011) of ideas, things, institutions, and people.

My paper asks: What urban visions have been translated into Bogotá’s policies of public space? How have such policies evolved over the past years? Under what schemes, designs, and institutional arrangements have the city’s recent public spaces been produced? What types of spaces have emerged from these efforts and in what ways have they been appropriated, transformed, or contested by everyday users? How are current ideals of sustainability and social justice incorporated into Bogotá’s public space policies?

My paper is organized in three broad sections. First, I analyze the emergence of spaces of civism where public space is conceived as a key element in the construction of a ‘culture of citizenship’. Second, I explore the creation of spaces of order aimed at ‘recovering’ and ‘securing’ urban areas. Here I emphasize the circulation and re-contextualization of policy models such as New York’s “broken windows” policies (Davis 2007; McCann & Ward 2011). Finally, I study planning efforts to configure spaces of renovation through the joint action of public and private actors. Here I consider the institutionalization of the production of public space within the city’s ongoing processes of ‘urban redensification and renewal’.