Untangling the vitality of public spaces of Bogotá's informal settlements

The implementation of sprawled car-oriented urbanism, in the global north, led designers to develop different strategies to re-activate public spaces, through incentivizing street vitality in the planned formal city. Examples of these strategies are policies focused on best practices of urban design such as the so-called Smart Growth movement, that in recent years have been disseminated globally by international organizations and multi-national urban design practices. However, public spaces designed with little oversight by urban design professionals in Latin America's informal settlements, are already vibrant and display a variety of social and cultural connections that seem to have evolved naturally. This chapter seeks to unravel the causes of this vibrancy by identifying social and cultural practices in the urban space, as well as critically evaluate the neighbourhood sustainability assessment tool LEED-ND v.4.0, via the indicators derived from Smart Growth principles that contribute to vitality in public spaces within Bogotá’s informal settlements.

The explanation is conducted by using the case of a set of parks in the southern periphery of Bogotá, in areas informally developed. We use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to discover why these spaces achieve high levels of vibrancy, but we also discuss critically the pros and cons of these practices. After this introduction, the discussion of the main theoretical themes, in which this research is based on, is presented. The chapter then moves on to the explanation of the methodology and the case studies, followed by the research results in which, from the qualitative and the quantitative perspectives, the arguments about vitality are elaborated. Finally, in the concluding section, the main arguments are put together and further discussions outlined.