Mobile Capital: Producing and Consuming Bogotá

From the 1880s to the 1920s, bureaucrats, politicians, capitalists, and citizens alike tried to turn Bogotá into a matrix of wide streets, paved sidewalks, and beautiful parks. These spaces, many believed, would allow people to stroll comfortably and behave decorously, while being dazzled by an array of books, textiles, and marble statues. By expropriating plots to open roads, replacing “infected places” with open green ones, and building bridges to link the upper and lower parts of the city, members of the municipal council and the national government tried making movement “effortless” around the city. Not only would these planning procedures guarantee that people, commodities, and capital could circulate without impediments, but they also tightened the city’s connections to the wider world. This process of destroying, refurbishing, and rebuilding the space of Bogotá during the late nineteenth century was driven by the desire to alter the prejudice about the city’s location in the Andes and its somewhat inescapable association with stagnation and isolation. Instead of a remote, colonial-like city, bureaucrats sought to prove that Bogotá was a vibrant, modern place with myriad communication and transportation technologies that alleviated its distance from the ocean. The urban renewal processes from the 1880s onwards, however, did not unfold only through the imposition of the state. Some of the city’s inhabitants were also invested in cleaning, embellishing, and rebuilding the city, and contributed with their tools, money, and un-paid labor to build roads and pave sidewalks. Albeit through contested notions of what a connected, modern city was, both bureaucrats and citizens alike became active producers and consumers of Bogotá.