124 Citizenship, Culture and Coexistence

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Chapter 7
Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You,
to Us
Reflections on Coexistence in the
Public Space
Angie Viviana Reyes Cifuentes

Introduction
The discussion on the usage of public space in the city of Bogotá must
be approached by considering several perspectives. Amongst these, it
is fundamental to vindicate the educational character of the city and its
importance for the quality of life of Bogotans, who are constantly claimed
for more participation, and a focus that integrates other ways of inhabiting
the city and redefinining it through their collective experience.
In this chapter, the problems of public space is approached by using
the idea of educating cities as a foundational category of analysis within the
context of Bogotá, and presenting intervention alternatives that recognize
other factors that interact with the territory, such as inclusion, democratic
participation and the positive coexistence relationships between the
members of the community.
In order to achieve a broader comprehension of the phenomenon, data
was collected through a mixed methodology that allowed obtaining both
quantitative and qualitative information. According to this, perception
surveys were conducted with citizens of every district in Bogotá, and
social cartography workshops that work as a participative diagnosis were

Licentiate of Social Sciences.

Email: angiezzureyes@gmail.com
 Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You, to Us: Reflections on Coexistence 125

conducted in prioritized districts. The said sample allowed the recognition

of the current situation and the perception of public space in Bogotá.
Finally, pedagogical actions were proposed and oriented to transform
Bogotá into an educating city that promotes the enjoyment of public space
and that establishes commitments both from the administration and the
civil society on its preservation and appropriation, opening a door to
new possibilities and experiences towards the guarantee of rights and the
improvement of well–being and coexistence in the city.

Theoretical Framework
The use of public space in Latin America constitutes a fundamental focal
point in the elaboration of public policy in the region. To consider the
diversity, dynamism and social interactions that come up in the public
space, it takes a special interest for not only social science researchers, but
also members of the administration and the government of the city. Public
space is not homogeneous or unified, it is a live actor that positively or
negatively influences the quality of life of those who inhabit, build, occupy
and transform it. In this sense, understanding public space transcends
the limits of its physical reality; therefore, this analysis is focused on its
importance as a meeting point where communal life takes place. As Ipiña-
García (2019) explains:
The public space is the city itself. It is ground for encounter,
equality and social equity, and the scenario for the collective
expression of social and cultural diversity [...] The citizen lives,
shares and enjoys the city, its colors, scents and sounds, they
interrelate with other human beings and, together, communal
appropriation and participation largely define the quality of life
of its inhabitants. (Ipiña-García 2019)
This way, it is every citizen’s right to occupy, move about and reshape
public space, a right that must be guaranteed by the local administration;
but as the citizen inhabits it, it becomes a space of collective reflection
about the democratic, multicultural and inclusive nature that demands
commitment from the society. Public space represents a transition from
the private space (isolated and individual) to the collective space of
encounters, dialogues of wisdom, passing of knowledge, and the practical
exercise of politics and citizenry. Therefore, instead of drafting laws
that coerce people into using public space in a single, approved way,
resignification must be promoted from the life stories and diverse usages
of those who explore it daily and who appropriate it depending on their
needs. According to Balparda (2019), cities start from the necessity of a civil
society to organize and meet, thus making public spaces a fundamental
cornerstone of democratic participation:
126 Citizenship, Culture and Coexistence

Cities are the result of the profound human necessity to design

and build collectively, to get together, to imagine ourselves in
society, to be with others. For this reason, shared spaces that cities
define and indicate as public must speak of the way that citizens
choose to summon each other and reunite. From the design and
implementation of these spaces can stem other ways to transit, to
play and to learn the city. (Balparda 2019)
Considering the above, promotion of participation of the community
in public spaces positively impacts its collective view, overcoming the
vision that proposes isolation and depersonalization and, at the same
time, encouraging the creation of new support networks and generating
stronger communal links to promote relationships of peaceful coexistence
and contribute to the regaining of trust in institutions and government
entities. Moll (2008) recognized the importance of democratic discussion
in the public sphere, which allows people to engage in conversations on
differences, tolerance, respect, and coexistence with others.
From this perspective, the discussion on democracy and a
new public sphere is presented as the possibility for the city’s
reinvention not as the ground for similarities and homogeneities,
but as the ground for expression and recognition of human
diversities. (Moll 2008)
To talk about relationships of peaceful coexistence necessarily
requires the vindication of the role of public space, the understanding of
its use within the context of Bogotá, as well as elucidating its educational
role in a society moving towards reconciliation and peace. It is not a
matter of eliminating conflict or dissidence, but of transforming tensions
into opportunities for dialogue. Because of this, public space is centered
around the symbolic character of social relationships and works as a
learning environment as opposed to the private spaces of movement.
Meetings, disputes, consensus and every shape that citizen
coexistence might take in and about the public space are
untransferable to any kind of private space, domestic or
commercial. This doesn’t mean that the educational potential
is attributed only to the public space, but, for these reasons, an
urban educational project inevitably finds in public space its
foundational territory. (Balparda 2019)
Amidst discussions on the importance of public space, the question of
its transforming, educational character emerges. In this way, individuals
not only form the public space, but the public space forms them as well; it
 Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You, to Us: Reflections on Coexistence 127

determines their vision of the city and guarantees the enjoyment of their
time, along with encounters with relatives and neighbors, contributing
directly as well as indirectly to the development of social skills and
attitudes of tolerance and solidarity. Páramo Bernal (2009) addressed the
significant character of public space by turning the city into a fundamental
element for cultural passing and as a tool for informal education.
The city, the street, is a massive channel full of signifiers that
might convey messages. The city, informally, teaches the culture
in a mosaic, composed by scattered contents, without any order
or epistemological hierarchy, in an apparently random manner
(Moles 1978). Therefore, the city is an incredibly rich informal
educator, but ambivalent at the same time. Informal education is
not selective and, in the city, from a certain point of view it is
possible to find everything, the good and the bad. (Páramo Bernal
2009).
In order to analyze the framework of relationships and categories that
intertwine within the conception of public space as holders of knowledge
as well as drivers in coexistence linkages, integration of concepts such
as urban pedagogy and educating cities has been proposed, which serve
as theoretical guidelines to structure a paradigm shift in the territorial
view of the city. The main goal is to understand the appropriation of the
public space through democratic participation and the implementation
of pedagogical and artistic strategies that lead the conversation on the
concept and its usage. Using urban pedagogy becomes necessary in order
to understand the frame of reference of the studies that have researched this
topic already. Páramo Bernal (2009) uses this term to refer to the formative
interactions within the city and the public space as an intermediary in the
educational process and citizen participation.
Urban pedagogy centers its analysis on the transactional
interactions of the individual and the social groups with their
constructed environment, the city. The experience of living the
city establishes relationships of reciprocity between the influences
of the context with the individual education, and of the individual
as agent that designs, builds, and transforms the city. It promotes
democracy, citizen participation and coexistence between people.
(Páramo Bernal 2009)
Connected with the concept of urban pedagogy, and directly related
to it, comes the idea of the educating city, a transnational proposition
that since the 1990s has set the path for the study of social relationships
that reflect in the public space of the biggest cities. The educating city is a
social and political project that officially started during the International
128 Citizenship, Culture and Coexistence

Congress of Educating Cities in 1990, in the city of Barcelona,1 and has

the goal of creation and divulgation of artistic, pedagogic and cultural
strategies, as well as public policies that aim at not only understanding
the meaning of public space for the society, but also guaranteeing that its
enjoyment improves the quality of life for its inhabitants. The educating
city is a governmental project expected to explore different perceptions
of the public space, to guarantee its access and to allow citizens to build
knowledge, participate in the social process during their whole lives, and
strengthen values to live in a community.
The educating city is defined as:
The Educating City constitutes by itself an educational resource
through its architecture, history, topography, urban legends,
music and landscapes. It is a context of learning, meaning, a space
that influences educational processes that take place on it through
its inhabitants, habits, customs, urban legends and traditions.
It’s a space with a permanent student body, since it facilitates
the construction of citizenship and the knowledge of rights by
the entire population, contributing to the democratic life of both
the city and the country. It is a material and cultural provider,
given that it offers every real and symbolic space for the process
of multiple learnings: museums, streets, art galleries, theatres,
beaches, human groups of diverse ethnic and cultural origins.
(Cabezudo 2015)
The International Association of Educating Cities (AICE) highlights
the importance of this process, given its positive impacts on the social
transformation of the community, promoting values such as respect,
tolerance, conflict resolution and inclusion.
The Educating City lives a permanent process that has as its
objective the building of communities and a free, responsible and
supportive citizenry, capable of living within difference, solving
peacefully their conflicts and working for “the common good”.
(Asociación Internacional de Ciudades Educadoras 2020)
Moving towards a city that can call itself an educating city implies
setting new social agreements between the administration and the civil
society, and creating and meeting the commitments in pursuit of an
inclusive, democratic city that aims to produce a long-term transformation
tailored to the citizens that inhabit it and reshape it on a daily basis. An

1
Official data taken from the Charter of the Association of Educating Cities, Asociación
Internacional de Ciudades Educadoras. (2020) Charter of Educating Cities. https://www.
edcities.org/en/charter-of-educating-cities/
 Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You, to Us: Reflections on Coexistence 129

educating city cares about making its public spaces a safe place for meeting
and dialogue, as the fundamental goal is to coexist within the difference,
promoting empathy, tolerance, respect and solidarity as the primordial
values of Bogotans. In consequence, turning Bogotá into an educating city
requires political will to promote educational projects that involve the
entire district territory in the first place, along with the commitment of the
civil society. As Figueras Bellot (2008) explains:
The educating city is, simultaneously, a proposition and a
commitment that are necessarily shared, basically by local
governments and the civil society. Since it cannot be in any other
way, for the city which aspires to be an educating city, this factor
—education in a broader sense—constitutes a fundamental and
transversal pillar of its political project. (Figueras Bellot 2008)
The educating city transcends the limits of formal schooled education
and, in this analysis of public space, allows the creation of a horizon in
which the city becomes a scenario where citizen participation is exercised,
simultaneously incentivizing the creation of symbolic bridges of dialogue
that improve coexistence and co-living of citizens. Therefore, in the
analysis of public space and pedagogical and artistic strategies that cross,
it becomes important to mention the association of educating cities and its
experiences in South America and other continents, in order to replicate
them and design innovative processes that are inscribed within the said
goal. The educating city is a political, cultural and pedagogical project
that strengthens the social fabric, promotes values for a good coexistence
integrating every actor in society, and forms support networks within the
community.
The educating city will further the right to culture and
participation for everyone and, specially, the collectives in
situations of higher vulnerability, in the cultural life of the city
as a way for inclusion, promotion of a sense of belonging and
good coexistence. Additional to the enjoyment of cultural goods,
this cultural participation will include the contribution that the
entire citizenry might offer to a live, evolving culture and the
citizen implication in the management of cultural equipment and
initiatives. In turn, the educating city will stimulate the artistic
education, creativity and innovation, promoting and supporting
cultural initiatives, both as avant-garde and as popular culture,
as means of personal, social, cultural and economic development.
(Asociación Internacional de Ciudades Educadoras 2020)
Promoting the usage of public space as an area of informal education
outside of the schooling system does not imply that there is a clash with
130 Citizenship, Culture and Coexistence

the formal educational system; instead, the goal is that the school and the
territory complement each other not only for children and teenagers, but
also for the adults that see the spaces that they move through daily as
spaces of construction of collective knowledge that transcend the walls
of the classroom. The educating cities are, in essence, creator cities that
stimulate creativity, learning, and political participation, as referenced by
Moll (2008): “It is understood that the street can be educational when it is
a path traced by collective, intentional and identarian action from groups
who live and explore the city and its multiple territories in a pedagogical,
political and cultural way.
However, the pedagogical focus is not the only one relevant for this
analysis. It is important to comprehend firstly that an educating city
promotes care, solidarity and debate between every inhabitant of the city,
values that have been historically prioritized by the district governments:
The space that can be created and also taken care of, the disputed
space and the space for coexistence. Because of this, public spaces
are, and will become even more, the vital scenarios between
everyone to meet, to debate, to look at each other and to avoid
forgetting ourselves. (Balparda 2019)
In this sense, Bogotá, counting with pedagogical and artistic strategies
paired with a significant variety of public places destined for cultural
interchange, finds in its streets the opportunity to become an educating city
that directly promotes the democratization of the territory through public
policy, appropriation and resignification of public space. The educating
city does not limit itself simply to passing academical knowledge, but has
prioritizing citizen formation conversations that allow individuals to live
with others through social agreements as its main objective.
The term education, linked to the idea of city, has the capacity of
appointing the intervention that embodies the goal of learning to
live together. That is how it is understood from the standpoint
of the educating city, which has been taken and deepened by
many cities from our continent and the world. When we say
educating cities, we say cities that undertake the responsibility
of turning the city into an area for citizen upbringing, individual
and collective, and the preoccupation of committing every actor—
those in charge of government, organizations of civil society,
the common citizen—to this task. Asociación Internacional de
Ciudades Educadoras 2019)
The discussion on the opportunity that Bogotá has to become a
member of the International Association of Educating Cities is not a recent
 Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You, to Us: Reflections on Coexistence 131

one; back in the sectoral plan on education in Bogotá from 2004–2008,2 the
necessity of integrating the school to the city and the public space was
brought up, as mentioned by Álvarez Gallego (2005) in the implementation
frame of the said plan:
In the immediate future Bogotá aspires to affiliate to the
International Association of Educating Cities. In the middle of it is
brewing an important pedagogical movement to which we hope
to direct our educational project. Said movement is multivaried
and expresses many tendencies in the way that the role of the city
is understood within its educational duty. (Álvarez Gallego 2005)
The Ministry of Education at the time proposed two effective ways to
execute this approach. The first one was related to school outings oriented
towards getting to know the city and bringing the community and the
schools from the district together; the second proposition took advantage
of open academic spaces for any citizen to reflect on and analyze the
problems within the district and to invite the school to contribute towards
integral solutions. In this sense, the sectoral plan highlights the need of
recognizing the territory as an agent with an educational potential, where
students can learn using their direct experience with it. In the educating
city, the public space stimulates intergenerational dialogues of wisdom
and the grasping of new knowledge related to the city.
Finally, the goal is to broaden the debate on public spaces in Bogotá,
recognizing the potential that the city has to become an educating city that
is inclusive, tolerant, environmentally sustainable and which safeguards
the rights of its citizens, acting in harmony with the objectives that
Lipovetsky (2017) proposed:
The goals of the educating city are multiple. Firstly, it is
about vindicating knowledge under its every form and the
permanent learning to promote the leadership of districts in a
global competitive market that demands qualified workforce.
Nonetheless, the educating city aspires to go further and stands as
a tool for social inclusion and self–realization, unleashing all the
potential of its inhabitants. I would like to insist specially on this
relationship between the educating city and the social inclusion.
(Lipovetsky 2017)
According to the above, it becomes fundamental for the current
administration, and for future governments as well, to bet on social and
cultural transformation, opening spaces for experts and citizens to work

2
Plan Sectorial de Educación 2004-2008 Bogotá : una gran escuela para que niños, niñas
y jóvenes aprendan más y mejor. https://repositoriosed.educacionbogota.edu.co/
handle/001/619
132 Citizenship, Culture and Coexistence

together for the design and implementation of cohesive and pertinent

pedagogical strategies within the Bogotan context, so that the city can
restore the citizen links and the coexistence relationships that are currently
deteriorated.

Data and Method

Analyzing knowledge on public space in Bogotá and the perception that
the community has about the city is fundamental to the elaboration of
public cultural policies and educational strategies that involve all the actors
that interact with each other daily in the city. Therefore, data is collected
through the use of a mixed methodology. First of all, a survey is conceived
and conducted with the goal of familiarizing with the participant’s
experience in the public space; after this, the gathered information is
complemented with social cartography exercises that, as Suárez (2017)
indicated, allow approaches from several perspectives about the territory
and the collective imagination around it.
By drawing maps, social Cartography facilitates the symbolic
construction of the territory and opens up points of view
for a better comprehension of territorial reality, it becomes a
communication system, not only for the variety of information
regarding social, economic, organizational aspects, which may
be included in a map, but because it transmits relationships,
sensations, projections, an entire collective imagination of those
who participate in the exercise of rendering a cartography of their
reality. (Suárez 2017)
The participants of the survey were 127 people currently residing in
the 20 districts that make up the city. The partakers were both men and
women within the age range of 19 to 64 years and with varied occupations.
The questions in the survey were oriented towards enquiring
about the knowledge that the participants had on their district and the
neighborhood in which they reside, their perception of the public spaces
in which they move along, the present cultural offering and the peaceful
coexistence within their communities.
Even though the survey was conducted on social networks and several
areas of broad reach for every member of the community, the resulting
sample does not include the participation of minors, who didn´t take part
in the research by personal choice. For this reason, in this instrument,
there is no evidence of their perception as a focus group.
To the question “On a scale of 1 to 5, how well would you say you know
the neighborhood in which you reside?” with 1 being ‘not at all’ and 5 being
‘very well’, citizens manifested a wide knowledge of their neighborhood
of residence on an average, implying that they are capable of recognizing
 Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You, to Us: Reflections on Coexistence 133

and identifying reference points, meeting places, commercial areas and

ways of access.
The next question “Do you frequent public places in your neighborhood?”
enquired about transit and the appropriation of public places in the
respondent’s daily experience. About 77% of the partakers manifested
that they usually frequent public spaces in their districts, as evident in
Fig. 1. However, in the responses to the following question, “Which public
spaces in your neighborhood do you frequent?” it became evident that the
respondents who replied affirmatively to the former question were mostly
unaware of what constitutes the nature of public space, given that they
seemed to mix it up with private spaces of a commercial character (such
as bars, restaurants, supermarkets or malls).
To the questions referring to the emotional link with the space that
the partakers inhabited, it was reflected that there was appropriation and
a sense of belonging, as manifested by the majority of respondents, who
also said that they felt comfortable in their surroundings, without any
concern of the socioeconomic stratum in which they were categorized or
the material conditions that surrounded them. Subsequently, an enquiry
was conducted on the issues that they would address and change in their
neighborhood, and the answers were directed towards matters related to
security, accessibility, street lighting on avenues and inner roadways, and
park maintenance, among other issues associated with public furnishing
and the responsibility of the city government.

Figure 1. Frequency of visit to public spaces. Source: Author

134 Citizenship, Culture and Coexistence

The respondents mostly manifested a negative response when

referring to the issue “Are there any spaces that promote culture in your
neighborhood?” (Fig. 2). Nonetheless, when analyzing the survey data in
a disaggregated way, it becomes evident that the residents of the more
central districts replied affirmatively in a more significant way, while
the participants who lived in the outlying neighborhoods of lower strata
replied in the opposite way. This suggests a growing inequality when it
comes to the accessibility of the cultural offering of the city.
Through the question “Which artistic and cultural activities would
you like to find in your neighborhood?” it is expected that the participants
manifest their personal preference with regards to the cultural offering
of their neighborhood of residence. According to this issue, as shown in
Fig. 3, partakers prioritized activities related to theater, public space
touring and museums, assigning more importance to collective activities
as well, such as trade fairs or communal gardens where the district
neighbors can interact with each other and strengthen the social fabric.
Finally, the partakers were asked about coexistence in their
neighborhood. It was found that most of them considered it to be good
and that there were no significant problems with their neighbors or any
other actors that they might interact with on a daily basis.
As a complementary data collection exercise to the perception survey,
social cartography workshops were conducted in the districts of Kennedy,
Bosa, Suba, Tunjuelito and Santa Fe; these locations were chosen because
they manifested a higher population density and because of the amount
of fines for quarrelling (according to the data collected by Secretaría de
Seguridad y Convivencia de Bogotá).3 The participants of these workshops
were children, teenagers and senior citizens. The main objective of these
social cartography workshops was to identify the most relevant problems
for the citizenry, their individual and collective perceptions, and to collect
qualitative data through the recognition of territories.
The said workshops were executed by using collective mapping as a
starting point, beginning with the cartography of their district and their
neighborhood. During the exercise, it was asked of the partakers to identify
public spaces, meeting points, access ways, main transportation routes,
commercial areas and public buildings. A group reflection was conducted
on the importance of public space for the city and its demarcation, as well
as the responsibility of the administration and the citizenry regarding its
preservation and maintenance.
The collective mapping exercise allowed for a better understanding
of the relationship between individuals and their territory, the strong
attachment to the city, and the construction of alternative spaces where

3
Information sourced from the internal database of Secretaria Distrital de Seguridad y
Convivencia https://scj.gov.co/es/oficina-oaiee/estadisticas-mapas
 Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You, to Us: Reflections on Coexistence 135

Figure 2. Spaces that promote culture. Source: Author

Figure 3. rtistic and cultural activities. Source: Author

social and communal relationships come first. For this research, the
activity was centered around inhabitants who resided permanently in
the mentioned districts and not around the floating population that only
occasionally visited these areas of the city.
136 Citizenship, Culture and Coexistence

The meetings were designed in a way that did not respond to a rigid
structure but which opened the door to flexibility among the participants
and their stories, executed in time slots of an hour and a half, mediated
by a coordinator that delivered instructions and made the conversation
dynamic. The participants were selected through an open call without
any required knowledge. The information obtained was of a descriptive
nature and based on individual and group perceptions. This information,
which was obtained through the said technique, was of a qualitative nature
and responded to the direct experience of inhabiting the city, narrations
that allowed construction of a common thinking regarding the reality of
Bogotá, particularly in the peripheral districts that were located far away
from the cultural and recreational centers.
Said workshops take place by using the collective mapping as a starting
point, from the cartography of their district and their neighbourhood.
During the exercise, partakers are asked to identify public places, meeting
points, access routes, main transportation means, commercial areas and
public service buildings. A group reflection on the importance of public
space for the city and its delimitation, as well as the administration’s and
the citizenry’s responsibility regarding its preservation.
In a second opportunity, it was asked of them to locate geographically
on a map the problems related to public space, that were the most
impactful and relevant to their neighborhood, followed by a discussion
about the causes and alternative solutions, as well as the positive and
negative effects that these issues had on the quality of life of the residents.
Finally, a collective discussion took place on the cultural offering of
their neighborhoods, socializing the different pedagogical and artistic
initiatives (public or private) of each district and debating on their

Figure 4. Map of localities of Bogotá. Source: Own elaboration.

Population data taken from Secretaria Distrital de Planeación (2020).
 Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You, to Us: Reflections on Coexistence 137

pertinence to social transformation, construction of social fabric and

strengthening of trust and coexistence between neighbors within the area.
Among the fundamental findings of this participative diagnostics,
it was evident that the community did not easily recognize the public
spaces of their districts and neighborhoods; they tend to mix them up
with private spaces. There is a generalized perception that public space
has been neglected by the administration and, because of that, its usage
has been restricted only to transit, thus rejecting the possibility of its
enjoyment. On another note, the lack of security and the poor condition
of roads, parks and squares had a negative influence on the conception of
territory and advanced the abandonment and depersonalization of public
space. However, the participants recognized the need to reappropriate
and recover public space and showed a growing interest in the creation of
cultural activities for the entire community, as long as the initiatives were
paired with guarantees of access, security, and safeguard of rights.
Focus groups reacted in different ways when asked about public space
and the cultural initiatives that they hoped to find in it; children talked
about the need for more green zones and parks; teenagers required spaces
where they could practice sports, listen to music, paint graffities or simply
meet to chat and spend their leisure time without being in danger due
to delinquents or clashes between them and the authorities; and senior
citizens placed more importance on ways of access, freedom of movement,
and public squares. There is an evident split with the views of the
administration and they demanded more spaces for citizen participation.
Finally, the workshop participants affirmed that it is necessary to promote
a sense of belonging, which would trigger the resignification of their
neighborhoods, through the recognition of its own history and that of the
people who live in it. They showed interest in cultural activities that may
include guided tours, local museums, or artistic exhibitions.

Results and Discussion

The results obtained from the perception survey and the social cartography
workshops made it evident that there was a need to discuss the usage of
public space in Bogotá and to promote the vision that understood the right
to inhabit the city as a cornerstone of the quality of life of every citizen.
According to preliminary data, there was no consensus on what public
space means, which in turn renders its limits vague, and it does the same
for the responsibility of its preservation.
The members of the community who participated voluntarily in
the data collection exercises held consensus when it came to the need
of rethinking and reflecting on the territory in which they live; the said
reflection must not be done only individually, but must be a collective task
mediated by the government in turn, who must establish the adequate
138 Citizenship, Culture and Coexistence

mechanisms to incentivize participation and to show compliance with the

acquired commitments.
Public space is a disputed territory in a city, which moves towards
repressive policies that set conditions over its usage and further distance
the community from its rights to appropriate, resignify and rebuild it
according to its needs. It is not by persecuting those who occupy the public
space in an improper way, but by creating more spaces where different
visions of the city can be included that bridges within the community can
be built and Bogotá can benefit from it.
It is also important to recognize the territory not as a scenario empty
of signifiers but as a live force that teaches, transforms and conditions
the individual and the community. It is important to extend exercises
of dialogue and to make the right, concerted decisions regarding the
correct use of public space and other ways to inhabit it, without denying
the capacity that the citizen has to intervene in it and create new ways of
narrating, moving through and enjoying it.
The discussion must include members of the administration, experts
and representatives of the community. Moreover, it must be extended to
every possible scenario; in this way, the debate must transcend the walls
of academia—it must take place on the streets, in the park, the square, the
social networks and on virtual media.

Conclusion
Finally, following the theoretical approach and the data analysis regarding
the individual and group perceptions about the use of public space in
Bogotá, the conclusion is that the problem concerning it necessarily
involves a discussion about territorial planning, construction of the city
and the expansion of the Bogota territory. To speak of the city as an
educational space where social and cultural transformation is the goal is
more than relevant, and it is urgent to reactivate the conversation about
the proposition that might solve the needs of the citizens.
It is also important to mention that Bogotá has already kickstarted
several strategies for the civic culture, that are projected as artistic and
pedagogical propositions, and have transforming negative actions into
coexistence between citizens as their objective. However, the current
strategies do not have the expected impact and they are limited to
performative actions that do not address actual problems and situations;
they do not maintain consistency and results over time, are left isolated
from the administrative plans and depend exclusively on the government
in turn.
Another reason because of which the impact of the civic culture
actions being executed by the numerous local institutions does not reflect
visible changes for the targeted population is that these actions are often
 Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You, to Us: Reflections on Coexistence 139

conceived from outside the community and, as well-intentioned as

they might be, during implementation, they are reduced to patronizing
practices that instrumentalise the citizens who participate.
Hence, a change in the paradigm of conception of public space
in Bogotá is proposed through two lines of action. The first one would
be composed by the commitments from the government and includes
investments in public buildings, adequate maintenance of parks, roads,
squares and public spaces, paired with efforts to guarantee security and
accessibility to essential services such as education, healthcare, decent
housing and recreation. To be an educating city demands contributions
for the improvement of the coexistence relationships of inhabitants and,
as stated by Del Pozo (2007), even though every structural inequality
cannot be addressed, the target must be to reduce the access breach and
encourage their capacities:
The educating city, in light of the complex, ever–changing and
stimulating situation that has been analyzed with its significant
challenges, cannot pretend to be by itself the key to solving of
every difficulty and to overcoming every challenge, but it can
aspire, as we will see, to generate a climate of civic quality and of
urban coexistence that allows to make conscience of changes, to
orient people better within its complexity, to soften and overcome
some of its negative effects and to contribute to the enhancement
of opportunities and positive elements that are also part of the
described change. (Del Pozo 2007)
Aiming towards the transformation of the city into a territory with
significant educational potential demands the involvement of not only
the students of the city but all its inhabitants, through the recognition of
its context and immediate reality, looking to identify daily problems and
offer solutions by means of dialogue and the use of confrontation tools
that promote tolerance and cooperation at local, national and regional
level.
The Educating Cities perspective allows for active citizenship
by presenting students with issues that arise from the city itself,
whether through its educational means, its rich learning contexts,
or through the dialogue and confrontation of knowledge typical
to city life. (Alderoqui 2002, Gadotti et al. 2004, Trilla 2005a, 2005b,
Fabrício et al. 2022).
The second line of action would be formed by the political participation
of the citizenry. The administration must ensure the consolidation of
democratic mechanisms of representation for all the citizens of Bogotá. Even
though the city can already count on local and neighborhood governments,
these spaces must be openly discussed in a more effective way, in order to
140 Citizenship, Culture and Coexistence

reach as many Bogotans as possible, who might be interested in acting

proactively on public space, to make their actual worries about the
territory known, and to propose collective solutions and alternative ways
to appropriate the city. This line of action demands commitment from the
institutions as well as the civil society. It also requires a reflection on rights
and duties that come from living in the society.
On the other side, the presence of neighborhood fairs should be
increased, where collective work and respect for the occupation of parks
and squares are incentivized. This proposition surges from the direct
dialogue with the community, which manifests a growing interest in
having closer spaces that help reactivate the economy through local
entrepreneurship, strengthen the coexistence relationships, weave support
and care networks, as well as prioritize the spirit of solidarity among
neighbors. It is important for these fairs to be designed and conceived by
the community, the administration assuming a mediating role instead of
an imposing one.
In conclusion, according to the pedagogical experiences and reflections
that followed the research and conversations with the community, an
artistic intervention is proposed, centered around three fundamental
aspects of educating cities: (a) recognition of territory, (b) life–long
education, and (c) democratization of knowledge.
The abovementioned strategy is called ‘Live Museum’ and is framed
as an interdisciplinary action that fundamentally aims at turning every
street in every district in Bogotá into an exposition where, by means of
stories and life experiences, it reshapes the history of each neighborhood.
This action is conceived as an urban intervention in streets and squares
with literary excerpts or graphical pieces that allow the spectator to
know the social history of the neighborhood in which they are moving
along. The museum is therefore alive because it changes, is interactive
and transforms the city into a vehicle that passes along memories and
vindicates them; also, it helps in establishing a bridge between the past
and the present, while simultaneously facilitating the creation of new
stories to be told about the territory, for future generations. Streets talk
through fantastic narrations, with examples of poetry, excerpts of songs,
life stories and illustrations from those who have built the neighborhood,
taken it down and rebuilt it over and over again to turn it into their home.
The live museum serves as a tool to learn the city, learn about the city and
learn with the city. This initiative is proposed to act in harmony with the
foundations of the International Association of Educating Cities:
So, it is important to state that it is not enough to recognize that the
city educates, either we like it or not. The city becomes an educator
of the necessity to educate, to learn, to teach, to know, to create, to
imagine […] The city is culture, is creativity, not only for what we
 Bogotá Belongs to Me, to You, to Us: Reflections on Coexistence 141

do in it and of it, for what the create in it and with it, but also for the
aesthetic aspect appropriately mentioned or for the plain horrors
that we make in it. The city is what we are, and we are the city. But
we cannot forget that there is something of what we used to be in
what we are now. Something that comes from a historic continuity
that we cannot elude—and from the cultural peculiarities that we
have inherited. (Bosch and Secretariado de la AICE 2008)
Educational strategies that involve the city as the fundamental stage
for meeting and the exchange of experiences are important, for they
construct common stories that have a positive impact on the sense of
belonging and the reaffirmation of identity, influencing the well-being and
a bilateral relationship defined by the guarantee of human rights and the
full, conscious exercise of citizenship, and the commitments established
with one another.
With the prevision that the inherent cultural diversity of the
cities will grow soon, the program of Educating Cities, or the
people and organs that constitute them, are called to respond to
the challenge of promoting balance and harmony between the
local identity and the diversity, allowing, in their educational
actions, the communities that integrate the territories of action
to be stimulated to participate. The goal of this consideration,
according to the program, would be to create a sense of belonging
of these communities to the processes born from the activities that
take place in their territories (Marinelo 2022).
Bogotá is a city with a promising future in terms of culture and
education, that can count on several artistic strategies of local reach that
must be reunited under the same goal: to formally become a member of the
International Association of Educating Cities. By doing this, Bogotá would
promote its tourism, guarantee of rights, and appropriation of public
space, thus improving the quality of life of Bogotans and transforming
Bogotá into a leading city in innovation, inclusion and sustainability,
through international partnerships.

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