Transforming a City

Here is a story of hope. A city famous for chaos, traffic, pollution, poorly-maintained public space, bad public services, misery, and squalor transforms itself into a more liveable, happier place because of one mayor's determination and an imaginative redevelopment plan. That city exists, but it is not in the United States, Europe, or the prosperous places of Asia. It is Bogota, Colombia. The full story is in The Tyee, a Vancouver-based news web site.

Bogota's situation looked hopeless, and its transformation may or may not provide a model for other places. Each city is different. But the story is instructive.

The city suffered from extreme class divisions. Rich residents drove everywhere, resulting in heavy automobile traffic. They parked anywhere they wanted, including (illegally) on sidewalks. They fenced in public parks for their own private use. And most development money in Bogota went for highway improvements.

Following his election, Mayor Enrique Peñalosa decided to change all that. He improved public services, removed the fences from the parks, got cars off the sidewalks and off the streets, and created an efficient, high-speed bus system so that everyone could still get to work and other destinations. He built bicycle lanes. His guiding principle was not traditional economic growth, but happiness.

In the United States, the writers of the Declaration of Independence ranked "the pursuit of happiness" with life and liberty as primary human rights. As the nation grew, we forgot that happiness means happiness, not economic growth, and "pursuit of happiness" became "pursuit of a greater Gross Domestic Product." This ideology came to dominate Western economics, and the making and buying of things—not happiness—became the goal of economic policy.

Peñalosa decided to look again at that goal, and realized that his city could never be as rich as, say, New York or London—but it could be happier, and it could have quality of life that actually surpassed that of richer places. His programs haven't achieved all of this, but they have moved Bogota closer to happiness. And happiness, after all, is the real goal, even of growth-centered economics.

The pursuit of happiness, of course, is of little use if human society has no future. Bogota's transformation made the city more happy, and it also made it more sustainable—fewer people in cars, more people on buses, bicycles, and foot. What Peñalosa did in Bogota showed that in order to have a future, we need not destroy our own happiness. That may be the most important lesson we can draw from Bogota.