High-rise building and metropolitan landscape. Rebuilding against reurbanization in Bogotá

Abstract

This article analyzes the Bogota’s metropolitan landscape configuration from the high-rise increase in the processes of rebuilding and reurbanization. The first, as a development lot by lot that never update the infrastructure and, the second, as the one that must do it from an urban project. From interpreting cartographies, photographs and archival information from different times, it was identified where and when buildings with more than twelve stories emerged, and that was correlated with political, economic, and cultural changes in the rules of land use and the ways of seeing and acting on local and global architecture. This presses confirmed that vertical growth represented opportunities to compact the city, but also to concentrate the economic power, the real estate dynamics, an increasing of land value and technological and the design innovations by prestigious architects. The greatest landscape’s transformation occurred by rebuilding, in imbalance with respect to the accumulated physical and social deterioration that required a reurbanization. While action of rebuilding modifies whole neighborhoods, relatively recent and better urbanistically qualified, pockets of indigence and physical degradation accumulate, urging a reurbanization, apparently unattractive for investors.