CITY FRAGMENTS Bogotá; re-shaping the city from mobility infrastructure. Residual spaces as potentials for urban activation tools. =

Residual spaces are one of the many shades of urban decay and segregation in a city, they are evident lack of vitality in the urban life. The logical consequence of fragmenting processes in urban contexts, derived in this case from mobility infrastructure. Mobility infrastructure is the physical mean of interrelated systems that interconnects the urban fabric, allowing displacement and organization between physical spaces in a territory. What happens to a city when this modern idea of mobility inherited from the 20th century, that now shapes all our industrialized urban contexts around the globe, outshines all the rest? That which is more favorable to motorized vehicles, consumption and rapid growth. This massive, asynchronously superposition of mobility enablers (highways, roads, metro lines, massive means of transportation, etc.) in most cases tent to have a fragmenting impact in a local scale, especially when conceived as an independent agent, that have little to do with the local scale. But rather as a direct component of planning, regulations, and the idealization of the city as a result of an “orthodox urbanism” (as Jane Jacobs would describe it in her book “The death and life of great American cities”.) These residual spaces derived from large mobility infrastructure are common phenomena in the expanded center of Bogotá in Colombia. A city that seems to expand over its own control limits, and that appears to have developed as odds and ends of multiple, sometimes alienated, planning decisions, and interventions. The urban fragmentation process from the mobility infrastructure, to which this kind of deteriorating phenomena in the city seem to relate to, is the starting point of interest in the investigation. How they can be addressed, and positively influence in the transformation process of the sustainable future for the city, through the urban project (as Solá Morales describes in “La segunda historia del proyecto urbano”); a valuable urban intervention tool, allowing an intermediate scale of approach, a less rigid and more holistic view of the city, is the ultimate interest of this dissertation. The urban area where two milestones in the mobility infrastructure of Bogotá in Colombia, intersect. And multiple social and economic phenomena collide, is the study area chosen to develop the analysis and formulate the urban project.