Bogota – Urban Expansion Social Segregation and Land Degradation

Colombia’s capital city Bogota was founded in 1538 by Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, a Spanish Conquistador who came down from the north to reach the Sabana de Bogotá, i.e. the intermountain plateau (and “Savannah”) around Bogota. The whole region was already well-developed by then, and inhabited by the Muisca people. Their settlements were dispersed across the plateau, though only rarely did these encompass flat areas suitable for crop-growing. Today’s Bogota is the largest metropolitan area in the country, with more than 8 million residents currently, and occupying a considerable part of the extensive high plateau. Processes which have resulted in Bogota’s present spatial form and its – in some ways – unique functional and spatial structure, are manifold, and highly complex. They include environmental, political, social and economic factors. Nevertheless, among all of these cause-and-effect processes, institutionalized segregation (called estratificación in Colombia) is the reason why rigid spatial structures are maintained, while the spontaneous and uncontrolled movement of groups of people within the city and from one social class to another is restricted.