REDEFINING A SMART CITY WITH
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
In 2023, during my tenure as the first director of LabDC, the Innovation Lab at Bogotá’s Planning Secretariat, I had the opportunity to produce a map that reflects indigenous knowledge and practices on their ancestral territory.
The Muisca communities of Bogotá and its surrounding Savanna conducted a tremendously rigorous process to identify their sacred places in and around the city; they also compiled their knowledge about rivers, wetlands, plants and animals hoping that it would help reframe Bogotá’s relationship with its natural elements.
This resulting map is not only a vindication of Muisca resilience and communal rights to the city. It was formally included in the Bogotá Master Plan (POT) as a tool to protect the city’s ecological structure.
Retracing the geography of war and forced displacement in Colombia, 2022
I led a partnership between Columbia’s Center for Spatial Research and Colombia’s Truth Commission to produce maps and data visualizations related to the difficult history of the Colombian armed conflict. I had the opportunity to contribute some maps to the Commission’s Final Report, included in the chapter on Human Rights violations.
This work was centered around visualizing the nationwide network of forced displacement - a form of violence that created more than eight million victims in the country since 1985 - and understanding its regional nuances. Cities of various sizes played different roles in expelling and accepting victims of forced displacement, and regional patterns of forced migration emerged as we continued this exploration.
Additionally, I extended this research to produce new visual products that could provide novel insights into the geography of forced displacement, its relationship with other forms of violence in the country, and the social and economic transformation of the territories most impacted by armed confrontation.
Urban Heat Islands and Heat Vulnerability in New York City, 2019
Extreme heat is not evenly distributed in cities. In this project, Zeineb Sellami and I mapped social vulnerability to heat during the hottest day of 2019 to illustrate this inequity. Cooling centers put in place by the city may not be enough, so libraries could perform an additional service and cool more New Yorkers.
Where is urban growth directed in Bogotá?
Rampant urbanization
Similar to other Latin American capitals, Bogotá expanded at a vertiginous pace during the second half of the twentieth century. The city recorded 100,000 inhabitants in 1905; 330,000 in 1938; 1.7 million in 1964; 6.7 million in 2005; and, according to the most recent census, 7.2 million in 2018.
Despite its growth in population, Bogotá’s urban area did not develop at the same rate than other cities in the region (e.g. Santiago, or Buenos Aires.) Instead, the Colombian capital became a very dense city, with an estimate of 245 persons per hectare in 2010.*
environmental disdain
During the two-and-a-half years I spent as an advisor in Bogotá’s City Council (Feb ‘17 - Jul ‘19), there was a heated public debate around the city’s potential growth and its effects on the local ecosystems. The mayor’s office was spearheading a project to transform the northern border of the city - a periurban and rural area - into a dense, mixed-use zone.
The cost of remaking this portion of Bogotá would have been the potential to realize a forest reserve that exists in paper but still needs work to perform its environmental functions.
As of July ‘20, the urban renewal project was stopped by a court order.*
the missing question
The debate around this project centered on the deleterious environmental effects that it would have caused: lost connectivity between ecosystems, threats to vital aquifers, and conurbation with neighboring towns.
But there was a missing question. Cali (Colombia’s third largest city) has 2.4 million inhabitants in an extension of 183 sq km. This project aimed to construct housing and retail space for 1.3 million inhabitants in just 38.5 sq km. This project would have resulted in one of the most overcrowded urban areas in the world.
Did Bogotá really needed that much housing? According to the last census, the answer seems to be no.*
The environmental burden on the south of Bogotá, 2017
Bogotá's urban expansion has come at the expense of the environmental quality of the south of the city. These communities have endured severe environmental deterioration, and the cost of urbanization has been the depredation of natural resources.
In Spanish.
Mapping intangibles, 2016
Bogotá’s historical center - the core of the colonial city - required a new plan for its conservation and management.
I was part of the team in charge of collecting and characterizing its cultural heritage, understanding historical changes in perceptions and recollections of the built environment. I produced a series of maps to illustrate place-based memories and trajectories through these spaces.
historical Agrarian conflicts and elevation, 2015
Two Colombian sociologists conducted research on land conflicts in Valle del Cauca, a southwestern region of the country, during the first half of the twentieth century. Colonization and the continuous extension of agrarian frontiers were the main drive for transforming the landscape. I was interested in illustrating how geographical elevation entwined with the intensity of these conflicts.
Notably, I drew all eleven elevation levels by hand.
