Who Deserves Space in the City? Peñalosa and the Fair Street

Who deserves space in the city is the political question that Enrique Peñalosa, mayor of Bogotá from 1998 to 2000 and again from 2016 to 2019, turned into a principle of government: if a street has a limited width, every metre reserved for the car is taken from the pedestrian, the child, the cyclist and the bus passenger, and that distribution is not technical but a decision about equality. Imagine an avenue where almost everything belongs to the car, pedestrians advance along a narrow strip and a child must cross several streams of traffic; for Peñalosa, that scene shows whom the city considers important. His answer is that public transport, cycle paths, pavements, parks and quality public space are not luxuries but democratic rights.

The advanced city is where the rich use public transport

The argument starts from inequality. In Bogotá, as in most Latin American cities, the minority who owned cars in the late 1990s had most of the road space, while the majority who walked or used collective transport squeezed onto invaded pavements and slow buses. Peñalosa argued that an advanced city is not one where the poor have cars but one where the rich use public transport, and that a bus lane carrying a hundred passengers has more right to space than a lane carrying twenty cars. His most quoted phrase sums it up: a wide pavement is a symbol of democracy, because on it the citizen with a luxury car and the one with none meet as equals.

TransMilenio, cycle paths, bollards and the Alameda El Porvenir

The works applied the principle. TransMilenio, opened in 2000, gave buses exclusive lanes on the main avenues; the cycle path network grew into one of the largest in Latin America; bollards removed parked cars from pavements; the Alameda El Porvenir, a kilometres-long pedestrian and cycling promenade in the poor south-west of the city, was built before the expressways; and the pico y placa scheme restricted car use at peak hours. The Sunday ciclovía, inherited from the 1970s, expanded to close more than a hundred kilometres of streets to traffic every week. In his second term he added the TransMiCable to Ciudad Bolívar and a massive expansion of cycle paths.

The pavement as a symbol of democracy: which bodies count

The pavement shows the logic. It may seem the simplest element of the city, but it determines whether a person can move on foot with continuity and whether a child can experience the city outside the car; a wide pavement expresses which bodies planning considers important, and a city can declare that it values equality while handing most of its streets to a single mode. Peñalosa extends the same reasoning to parks, the only place where the poor child and the rich child play as equals, and to public transport, whose quality decides how much time those who cannot choose lose.

Counterargument: overcrowding, the metro and segregation

The counterargument exists and is serious. TransMilenio suffers overcrowding and decay, and the promise of a metro that Peñalosa postponed in favour of buses became his main political weakness; his second-term projects, from the elevated metro to the intervention in the Van der Hammen reserve, divided the city; and critics note that quality public space, without affordable housing or nearby jobs, does not correct the segregation of a city where the poor live hours from the centre. Peñalosa replies that redistributing the street is what a mayor can do in a few years, and that without that first step no policy of urban equality reaches daily life.

Peñalosa's lesson is that the distribution of urban space is the most visible and immediate distributive policy a city can make. Every metre of pavement, bus lane or cycle path changes who can use the city with dignity, and that decision is taken in every traffic plan and every avenue project. Asking who deserves space, and answering first the pedestrian, the child, the cyclist and the transit rider, is the principle with which Bogotá showed other Southern cities that equality is also designed.