Behind Bogota's car free day projects and the referendum is a very substantial body of critical thinking, negotiation and creation with years of background and action behind it. We call this "The Bogota Project". And without it, the referendum would of course have made no sense. What the citizens of Bogota were above all being asked to vote on was just this... The Bogota Project. Quite possibly the most advanced and far-reaching transportation initiative of the last half century.
The links under this section will help you to familiarize with some of the main components of this large scale, highly innovative transformation program. Almost all of the materials here are from the original sources and of course in Spanish, but if you wish to know something about their contents we suggest that you can do this by making good use of the Translate Help utility.
You will quickly see that these pages have been organized to help you get a very good picture of what is going on, all of the way down to the fine grain detail of how for example construction is being handled on a specific street, cycle route, or aspect of their Transmilenio project.
One of the important building blocks in the development of the Bogota project was the award received by the city on 5 June 2000, together with The Commons as their international partner, as the outstanding environment project nominated for the Stockholm Challenge Award in the year 2000. Further background on prize, together with the reasons that the Bogota was selected over more than 600 others, is available here.
If you go to Bogota today you will see that the city is a construction site. But a somewhat different one of the sort you will see when the objective is to build a new metro or urban highway system. The process is extremely labor intensive.
One of the abiding concerns of the Bogota team has been to use the program to create jobs, while at the same time making maximum use of locally available resources in order to minimize the negative trade impacts (which often are VERY substantial with transport infrastructure projects of the type that Third World governments so often spend their scarce resources on.
We have no firm information on this to date, other than the following short statement recently issued by City Hall:
The Building Blocks
This overview piece was drafted by Eric Britton subsequent to the joint project between the City of Bogotá and The Commons, which led not only the the very successful Sin mi Carro event of 24 February but also eventual to the Stockholm Prize nomination. It takes a stab at putting the extremely ambitious and far reaching overall transportation reconstruction program into context. It bills itself as a 'thinking exercise' and in this spirit sets out a variety of information and observations which it offers as food for thought. We modestly propose that this is required reading for all who wish to have a full understanding of what the Bogota project is in the final analysis all about.
The Bogotá Challenge 
Back to top
Summary of Stockholm Environment Prize citationJob Creation
Last updated 1 November 2000 © EcoPlan , Paris, France.
Best viewed with Internet Explorer 4.0 or better.