Urbanized Page #2

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or professionals

they normally tend to answer

the water heater.

And in 100% of the cases

when we asked the families

they preferred the bathtub

over the water heater.

You have to understand

that they are coming

from no water, no sewage.

A shower meant to have a can with

water in the courtyard.

So they are going to have privacy.

More important than that,

when they move in,

they do not have money to pay

the gas bill to heat the water.

So knowing that in their priorities,

bathtub is much higher

than water heater,

let's do the bathtub,

and allow them over time

to buy the water heater.

Think about the final stage

and how design

can facilitate families' lives

to achieve that middle income

standard in the future.

That's how quality

should be measured.

And that is definitely not the way

social housing was

being measured, not the way

it was being designed.

Historically cities have come into

being for many different reasons.

Cities grow up around

logistical issues,

for example, on a port.

Or somewhere that is advantageous

specifically for trade.

It's almost always

an economic question.

By the mid-1800's industrialization

had been a reality

for a couple of decades already in the

major cities of Western Europe,

and the congestion,

the insalubrity,

the un-livability of those cities

made it such that there needed to be

some sort of a solution.

In Paris, Baron Haussmann comes in

and radically demolishes the city

eliminating all

of its medieval streets,

its slums, and rebuilds the city

with the roundabouts and the other

iconic elements of Paris.

Unlike Europe,

America's cities didn't have

a really strong architectural legacy.

City Beautiful was a movement

to bring the grand boulevards

and large civic arenas

of classical architecture

into American cities.

To encourage a kind of civic pride.

The next major shift would be

the Garden City movement,

which is happening right

at the end of the 19th century.

The idea would be to separate out the

different functions of the city

with concentric roadways

and greenbelts.

The Garden City proved

to be incredibly influential

on the Modernist movement.

Modern city/urban planning

is very similar

to modern graphic design

or modern industrial design.

It's minimalist,

very ordered, very rational,

separate everything out.

Modernistic city,

built on all the ideas of

the Modernistic manifests.

It looks fantastic from the airplane,

but if you are down at eye level

on your feet and going

from one place to another,

Every distance is too wide,

things are not connected.

You have to trample

for endless miles and miles

along completely straight paths.

Nobody ever started to think about

in between all these monuments.

Of course it makes a certain logic

to separate things out.

You don't want cars and pedestrians in

the same place, it's not safe.

But as we've certainly

come to experience,

if you design the city

so that every single trip

has to made by car,

suddenly you aren't zipping

around anymore,

you're stuck

in enormous traffic jams.

The 1950's is when the automobile

starts to have a real impact

on cities, especially American cities,

and a largely a detrimental effect.

Not only do you have increased means

of access to the city,

bringing more cars, and creating

congestion, and noise,

but also radically changing the way

cities are designed.

And this is becoming increasingly

a global issue,

especially in developing countries.

Many things about cities are very

counterintuitive, for example

it seems to us that making bigger

roads, or flyovers,

or elevated highways

will solve traffic jams.

And clearly it has never been the case.

Because what creates traffic is

not the number of cars,

but the number of trips

and the length of trips.

So the more road infrastructure

you do,

the traffic will become even worse.

The only way to solve traffic jams

is to restrict car use.

And the most obvious way to restrict

car use is restricting parking.

People seem to imagine

that parking is...

a right, almost a fundamental right

to be included

in the United Nations Charter.

In our Constitution,

there are many rights:

the right to housing,

the right to education, to health,

but I don't find the right to park.

I don't see any Constitution which

includes the right to park.

So if you ask me where you should park,

the Mayor can tell them,

it's almost if you're asking me

where should put

your food or your clothes,

This is not a government problem.

Before I was Mayor,

I have never been in a city

which hated itself more than Bogota.

There was a total lack of self-esteem

and lack of hope.

So when I was elected mayor we

started investing in people.

In sidewalks, in parks,

in great schools, in libraries.

And also we created a bus-based

public transport system.

We copied a system from Curitiba,

a small city in Brazil.

We called it TransMilenio,

we gave it a name.

Because buses in most places have a...

stigma, a bad image of being

for the poor,

so we had to raise the bus's status.

TransMilenio bus system

actually works more like a subway

on wheels than a traditional bus.

Buses go on exclusive lanes.

People pay when they enter the station.

When the buses arrive,

the station doors open

simultaneously with the bus doors.

You can get a hundred people out

and hundred people

onto the bus in seconds.

And now they can go from one extreme

to the other very fast.

For the same cost that we could do

a 25km subway,

we do 400km of TransMilineo.

These systems are also more flexible.

Younger cities don't have such

a defined center

and the center is shifting.

So if you put a hugely expensive

infrastructure like a subway line,

you might find that the

new center in a matter

of twenty or thirty years

is somewhere else where

the subway line doesn't go.

This system is very powerful

symbol of democracy.

The first article in every Constitution

says that...

The first article in every Constitution

says that all citizens

are equal before the law.

This is not just poetry.

It means for example

that a bus with 100 passengers

has a right to 100 times more

road space than a car with one.

It's democracy at work.

You can really see that public good

prevails over private interest.

Okay, here we are on part

of the Porvenir Promenade.

This is a 24km,

pedestrian and bicycle-only street,

which networks

very low income neighborhoods

to the richest area of the city.

I think it's a revolution

in the way urban life works.

This kind of high quality

infrastructure for bicycles

increases the social status

of cyclists.

Before we had bicycle ways,

low-income people

were ashamed of using bicycles.

Now a high-quality protected bicycle

way shows that

a citizen on a $30 bicycle

is equally important to one

in a $30,000 dollar car.

And here is something interesting,

you can see how the pedestrians

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