After the urban expansion land of the city of Bogotá was exhausted to the north, south and west, initiatives to redensify the city center emerged and alternatives for new housing areas began to be sought in central zones with access to transport and work, but with problems of insecurity and abandonment such as several neighborhoods surrounding the city center.
These urban densification initiatives created urban complexes of great importance to the city, such as the Santa Fe Citadel, designed by Rogelio Salmona in 1980, which, however, disrupted the spatial and social dynamics of the Santa Bárbara and Belén neighborhoods.
Another important factor in the change of the study area was the channeling of water tributaries such as the San Agustín River, which served as an aqueduct for part of the center during colonial times. It was channeled between 1910 and 1915 due to sanitation problems, and this road was later widened in 1982 to become Seventh Street. The Avenida de los Comuneros (Sixth Street) was built in 2018 over the old channel of the San Juanito Creek. It is a perimeter road of the center with 6 lanes and wide green medians, for which valuable examples of early 20th-century residential and industrial architecture were also demolished between the Belén and Lourdes neighborhoods, including the Pottery Factory, located in the Lourdes neighborhood.
These transformation processes in the peripheral neighborhoods of the city center have led to a need for a deeper understanding of the communities, public spaces, and tangible and intangible heritage, in order to develop these urban areas by integrating existing communities and rescuing and valuing their heritage, avoiding gentrification processes in these areas of the city, a process that already exists in several parts of downtown Bogotá.
Peripheries
Power plants
HERITAGE, CITY AND COMMUNITY IN LOS BARROS BELÉN, SANTA BÁRBARA AND LOURDES
Urban expansion in Colombian cities transformed the peripheral areas of urban centers, turning them from traditional residential zones into areas of abandonment, insecurity, or urban voids, creating a disintegration of the historic center from its surrounding neighborhoods. This process also fostered the city's expansion to the north (Chapinero) and to the south (Santa Lucía, Quiroga, and Usme in the 1920s and 30s), and the growth of working-class neighborhoods as housing solutions with better conditions than the deteriorated housing and public spaces of the neighborhoods on the periphery of the city's historic center.
Jane Jacobs spoke to us of four fundamental conditions for urban life, including the mixture of eras, uses, densities, and permeability, which should be even more present these days in the development agendas of the city center, if we want these peripheral areas to be able to preserve the neighborhood life and culture that gives foundation to their community.
The project seeks to explore the historical and economic processes that generated the changes and ruptures in the neighborhoods surrounding downtown Bogotá and their impact on the social fabric, sense of belonging, and tangible and intangible heritage of the communities. In this sense, it is also worthwhile to investigate more specifically the impact of urban development projects or interventions on the structure of the traditional neighborhood throughout its history and how these may have fostered social and cultural ruptures and discontinuities.
Many of the needs and problems identified so far are related to territorial transformations, generated by events or milestones stemming from economic, social, and political factors, which affect the development of some sectors on the periphery of the city center. Therefore, it is important to understand the events that have generated these transformations, their impacts, the territories and populations affected, and how development has been affected by these changes.
This research seeks to collect and document institutional and community information as input so that it can be known, disseminated, appropriated and protected, including the assets and communities that are behind these neighborhood stories.
