Locating Right to the City in the Global South by Chen Guo. He Shenjing. Samara Tony Roshan

Author:Chen, Guo.,He, Shenjing.,Samara, Tony Roshan.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Public space, citizenship and the right to the city

Jürgen Habermas (1974) defined the public sphere as “a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body” (Habermas 1974: 49). The potential for the “public body” of which Habermas speaks to occur in Bogotá depended on the quality, availability and types of public spaces, as well as how and whether they allowed people to come together.

Public space can be defined essentially as a space of unmitigated encounter where strangers may freely meet: its essential quality is publicness. The strength and possibility of reinvention via public space in Bogotá depended greatly on the concept of public space as the fundamental punto de encuentro (point of encounter) necessary for democracy (Borja and Muxí 2003: 25; Velásquez Carrillo 2004: 1; Carrión 2004: 60–1). Ideally, this point of encounter for Bogotá would be a “classless space”. Castro Jaramillo writes, “public space has no estratos (socioeconomic divisions) and any investment that is made in it is for the benefit of the entire city”1 (2003: 86). In this way, the public space mayors saw the creation of public space as a means of mitigating Bogotá’s lawlessness and poverty, which played a large part in the city's global image.

Bogotá’s public spaces became a crucible for the hopes and dreams of local leaders and were employed as a comprehensive fix for the city's problems (Berney 2011). Public space was seen as a territorial integrator and socioeconomic defragmenter, meant to empower and connect people. Local leaders viewed public space as an effective policy arena for delivering communal resources. Additionally, public space projects were viewed as easier, cheaper and more visible than other types of infrastructure and social projects (Salazar Ferro 2003: 72). As such, they were ideally suited to reflect the competency of the period's politically independent mayors, Mockus and Peñalosa (Berney 2008). These mayors viewed public space as the most effective platform for reaching and transforming Bogotá’s citizens, while increasing equity regarding public resources in the city (ibid.). In this sense public space became a planning ideal, a symbol and a solution (Berney 2011). Making this space truly public also meant that all citizens would have a stake in maintaining, in the broadest sense, the newly constituted public space.

The creation of public space also represented a shift to understanding citizens’ right to the city. The basic right of Bogotanos to use public spaces within the city is well protected by the 1991 Colombian Constitution. The constitution lays out a precise definition of public space and establishes the right of access to public space for all citizens (Martin and Ceballos 2004: 267). In Colombia, therefore, access to public space became a right to which each citizen was guaranteed. This constitutional change at the national level became integrated into a crucial period of policy and legal reform around public space in Bogotá during the public space mayors’ time in office.

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