From placemaking to sustainability citizenship: An evolution in the understanding of community realised public spaces in Bogotá’s informal settlements

Purpose: Placemaking is an established practice and research field. It takes on a spatial dimension created through a socio-political process where value and meaning are assigned to settings. An emerging concept, sustainability citizenship relies on social actors creating sustainable urban settings by working, sometimes, “outside” formal planning; offering an evolutionary step in the creation and understanding of community realised places. The purpose of this paper is twofold: examine one of Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlements to explore the placemaking/sustainability citizenship relationship, and use this exploration as a means to argue the appropriateness of sustainability citizenship when investigating/realising settings in Bogotá’s informal settlements. Design/methodology/approach: To address the paper’s aim, books, journal articles and monographs related to citizen/community participation, placemaking, citizenship (in Latin America and conceptually) and sustainability citizenship were collected and critically reviewed. Identification of these documents was achieved through a literature review of the library database at Deakin University and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the co-authors of this paper contributing to and reviewing submissions to the 2016 Routledge publication, Sustainability Citizenship. Field observation and engagement with the citizenry living in the informal settlements of Bogotá, Colombia were conducted at various times in 2013, 2014 and 2017. Findings: Sustainability citizenship and placemaking are linked through their “process-driven” approach to realising places and use of the citizenry to enact change. In Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlement of Caracoli, public spaces are created outside formal planning processes through alternative path dependencies and the resourcefulness of its citizens. Sustainability citizenship, rather than placemaking, can work outside formal planning and manoeuvre around established path dependencies, which offers an evolutionary step in the creation and understanding of community realised places in the global south. Originality/value: This paper provides insight into the use of placemaking when explaining the realisation process of Bogotá, Colombia’s informal settlements. The paper’s contents also explore the placemaking/sustainability citizenship relationship, which in terms of the latter is a new citizenry dimension that can be used to provide new insight into the realisation process of public spaces in Bogotá’s informal settlements.