Made in Bogotá

Made in Bogota as a research project has been developed in different stages over time. It started in 2015, under the name of “Atlas Eclectico / Bavaria Centro” at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota, Colombia, in the development of an atelier course: Centros Urbanos (Urban Centers) under the direction of Fernando Rubio and Jacobo Molina, with the support of other professionals (Fabio Avendano, Natalia Valencia, Luz Mery Rodelo, Angela Leon and Andrea Mozzato) and developed as a teamwork of students formed by Laura Perez, Ricardo Stahelin, Melissa Pachon and the author of this thesis. This first approach for its time was quite complex, in a way that most of the work was done in understanding the territory through different field visits and interviews with inhabitants and workers in the area. Years later, now as a master’s degree student at Politecnico di Torino, I decided to continue with this research and with the development of an urban proposal. This time being followed by Professor Matteo Robiglio and framing this work under the ongoing research of Professor Nina Rappaport with her Vertical Urban Factory project, which marked the structure under which this thesis was developed, generally keeping the same sector of the city but this time with a much clearer approach, which redirected and facilitated the focus of the research. So, I started with the question: what is the relationship industry-city? It is clear that it is something too wide so I needed to limit it, my interest turned towards understanding the industry in the Latin American city. In this way, I came to the concept of Company Towns and its influence in Latin America because it seemed coherent to start studying cases of the first urban settlements that combined housing with work, understood from the productive activity framed within the industry/manufacturing. And this was precisely the next question to answer, what really is industry and what is manufacturing or at least how the modern city defined it since its appearance in the twentieth century and how it is still defined today in the land use regulations and policies. After trying to answer these questions, through a limited case study in the center of the city of Bogota, I started to deepen, passing from a metropolitan scale, to a zonal and finally to a neighborhood scale, understanding the nature, the factors and phenomena that make this case study unique, that is, its local particularities, in comparison to its previously explained global factors of the general problem. How does this area really look like? How does it feel being there as a tourist, as a pedestrian, as a resident or as a worker? In this way, I came to concepts such as informality and the "hybrid". At this point, feeling that I already had the necessary tools to face a successive step, I explained through scenarios which is the future that I believe possible for the area in relation to its position in the city and in the region, to subsequently make a master plan that finally sought to propose practical strategies at a block scale, in which it was sought to give a contemporary response to this problem of modernism of making the industry live with housing, attacking it from sustainability this time around.