Enlarging Bogotá: The Production of Urban Space

Abstract

In 1914, seventeen people asked Bogotá’s municipal council to close a sewer, build a canal for a river, and enlarge the street where they lived arguing it was the “most infected place” in the city. Since it was a matter of “life and death,” they offered to cede their properties to help. By analyzing the incomplete paper trail of this unresolved petition, this article examines on the ground political practices to explain why and how people with unequal access to resources participated in Bogotá’s urban renovations during the early twentieth century. Besides detailing why enlargement mattered, the article explores the problems with assigning value, establishing compensations, and determining the differences between public and private gains. It argues that peoples’ participation and practices of autoconstruction were not illegal or peripheral, nor a collective claim to the right to the city, but the core, widespread practice through which Bogotá’s space was produced.