Equality and the City: Urban Innovations for All Citizens

In Equality and the City, Enrique Peñalosa Londoño draws on his experience as mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, as well as his many years of international work as a lecturer and consultant, to share his perspective on the issues facing developing cities, especially sustainable transportation and equal access to public space.

As mayor of Bogotá, Peñalosa Londoño initiated development of the TransMilenio Rapid Bus Transit system, among the largest and most comprehensive public transit systems in the Global South, which carries 2.5 million passengers a day along dedicated bus lanes, bike paths, and a rapid metro line. The system emphasizes accessibility for the entire population. 

Peñalosa Londoño’s efforts to create public space were similarly ambitious: over the course of his two terms, more than a thousand public parks were created or improved. Underlying these policies was a conviction of how cities should be—a compelling humanistic philosophy of sustainable urbanism. For Peñalosa Londoño, city design is not just engineering; it defines human happiness, dignity, and equality. “An advanced city is not one where the poor own a car,” Peñalosa writes, “but one where the rich use public transport.”

Equality and the City provides practical criteria for conceiving and constructing different and better cities, describes the obstacles that are confronted when doing so, and identifies ways to overcome them.

"Enrique Peñalosa Londoño has been a powerful advocate for making better cities; cities that embrace the human experience and equality for all citizens. As Mayor of Bogotá, Peñalosa Londoño made that city inviting and accessible to people of all incomes through transformative achievements in public transport, green infrastructure, and neighborhood civic institutions. In this brilliant book, Peñalosa Londoño demonstrates how a vibrant pedestrian realm is at the heart of a healthier, more livable and truly equitable city."
—Amanda M. Burden, former New York City Planning Commissioner

"For the last twenty years, Enrique Peñalosa Londoño has tirelessly campaigned for equitable cities. His message has been transformational at many levels, not just in his native Bogotá, but in cities worldwide. This book offers a charismatic mayor’s insights into how a city’s DNA can be shaped to promote greater social inclusion, environmental equity, and human well-being at a time when cities are at the frontline of planetary change."
—Ricky Burdett, London School of Economics

The following excerpt from Equality and the City: Urban Innovations for All Citizens, by Enrique Peñalosa Londoño, was published in April 2024 as part of The City in the 21st Century Series. As mayor of Bogotá, Peñalosa Londoño initiated development of one of the largest and most comprehensive public transit systems in the Global South and created or improved a thousand public parks. Here he presents a compelling image of how cities should be—sustainable and accessible to all. For the full text, visit pennpress.org.

Copyright University of Pennsylvania Press 2024. Excerpted with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

In the 1970s, it became increasingly clear that communist countries were lagging behind capitalist ones, as illustrated by the comparison of East Germany to West Germany. Reluctantly I came to accept that private ownership and the market were the best ways to manage most of society’s resources in order to achieve high economic growth. Unfortunately, that entailed an indefinite persistence of inequality, which was still unacceptable to me.

Then, suddenly, I discovered the city. While I was at university, my father was appointed secretary general of the United Nations Habitat I Conference, held in Vancouver in 1976. A whole new world opened up to me as a result of my father’s experience there. At the time, Latin American cities’ population was growing at an astonishing rate—Bogotá at 4.3 percent a year, which meant that it doubled in seventeen years. My father often sent me documents and occasionally even let me draft his speeches. I was fascinated to discover the importance of cities in the creation of equality and the possibilities of making them different and better.

Gradually, I became more interested in cities than in socialism. I believed economic development would arrive in Colombia anyway, sooner or later: it might take fifty years, more or less, but it would come. However, if cities were not designed well, the damage would be irreparable. For example, if ten hectares (about twenty-five acres) could be set aside for a park, then millions of people would enjoy it for hundreds of years. But if those ten hectares were covered with buildings, it would be almost impossible to demolish them to make a park there later.

The cities I had in mind were Colombian—Bogotá in particular. I was born in Washington, D.C., and had lived in the United States for the last three years of high school and my four years at university. Although I enjoyed my experience enormously, I never considered spending my life there. At the time, I was not interested in what had to be done to be elected to public office in Colombia, but deep down, I had a feeling that I would want to run for office. And the fact I was born in the United States and had that nationality could be an electoral disadvantage. 

During a trip to Colombia halfway through my studies at Duke, I went with my father to see the American ambassador and told him I wanted to surrender my nationality. He was astounded. “Just look out of that window, take a look at that queue two blocks long of people waiting to get a visa! They would give an arm and a leg to have what you want to give up. Why don’t you go home, think a bit, and if you want to, come back in a few days’ time.” So I went home, I thought about it, and a week later returned to the embassy and formally renounced my U.S. nationality…

…With the savings from ten months of construction work, I set out with a friend, intending to follow the Silk Road from Turkey to Iran and Afghanistan and through to China. The first stop was London, where we had our initial taste of the wonders of the great cities of Europe, and when we arrived in Paris, I was dazzled—ecstatic about the city’s beauty….I lived an austere student life, for a while sharing a room so small that when the two narrow cots were unfolded, there was no room to walk around them…

…It was only many years later, however, that I realized I had been poor in Paris because while I was living there, I missed nothing. I had Paris! It was totally different from the beautiful but antiseptic Duke University campus, from the Washington suburb where I had lived while in high school, or from the Bogotá of my childhood, which lacked so much. Paris was a fresh delight every day. It generated happiness and equality: I shared the sidewalks, public transport, and parks with people from all walks of life, as well as the beauty of the architecture, the river, the museums, and free cultural activities. I experienced what I had intuitively believed since I’d become disillusioned with socialism: the city could be more effective than communism in building equality and more powerful than economic development in building happiness…

Happiness is difficult to define and impossible to measure, yet it is the only thing that truly matters…Happiness is closely related to the realization of human potential. An obstacle to achieving happiness, I would add, is feeling inferior or excluded. What I focus on in this book is the inequality that causes unhappiness and the ways to resolve it… Where there is legitimacy, individuals feel they are members of a community of equals. Where there is legitimacy, individuals play by the rules, report those who break them, and even demand punishment for them; individuals don’t evade taxes or litter the street, and they walk their dog with a plastic bag in hand. Individuals join civic initiatives and government plans. Legitimacy is the mortar that binds the edifice of organized society.

Visible inequality and exclusion such as that caused by conspicuous and extravagant consumption—mansions reminiscent of the palaces of the nobility that sparked the French Revolution, enormous fuel-guzzling yachts, private beaches, and exclusive clubs—gnaw at legitimacy. The state loses its moral authority. When there is no legitimacy, citizens evade the rules and populist leaders prosper. If they get power, they not only harm the market economy but also democracy….

…My impression…is that what bothered citizens more than the existence of megabillionaires or the concentration of income and lack of desired social services was the feeling of being excluded and belittled by the establishment… In this book, I propose that beyond income equality, there are other powerful forms of equality, many of which a good city can construct.