ABSTRACT
For the past twenty-five years, the city of Bogotá, Colombia, has labored to overcome its dystopian image as the world drug capital. Prior to this effort, the city environment was so hostile that residents were used to negotiating life only in their own self-interest. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s the city combatted this individualism by re-imagining public space as an educational ground for citizen interaction and learning. Civic administrations sought to integrate dispersed territories within the city, humanize public space and encourage socioeconomic integration. The mayor's office instituted public space projects to forge links between the city's prosperous north and the poorer south. The broad goal, according to officials, was to supersede the income disparities and hostilities among residents by forging a sense of shared citizenship and, as a result, generate attitudes of civility and common purpose.
