Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
by Charles Montgomery · 12 Nov 2013 · 432pp · 124,635 words
a long pass. Two bodyguards trotted behind him, their pistols jostling in holsters. There was nothing remarkable about that, given his profession—and his locale. Enrique Peñalosa was a perennial politician on yet another campaign, and this was Bogotá, a city with a spectacular reputation for kidnappings and assassination. What was unusual
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the memory has remained with me, as vivid as the Andean sun. That was the day the journey began. You may never have heard of Enrique Peñalosa. You may not have been among the crowds that gave him a hero’s welcome in New York, Los Angeles, Singapore, Lagos, or Mexico City
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of activists in Portland, Enrique was urging planners in Los Angeles to let traffic become so unbearable that drivers simply abandoned their cars. In 2006 Enrique Peñalosa was the talk of Manhattan after he announced to crowds of gridlock-obsessed New Yorkers they should ban vehicles entirely from Broadway. Three years later
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it carries both the sweetness and the subjective slipperiness of the happiness we sometimes find in cities. It occurred on the afternoon that I chased Enrique Peñalosa through the streets of Bogotá. Just as he had insisted on that first ride, our cycle across what was once one of the most infamous
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most modern cities. It was also a demonstration of Peñalosa’s urban revolution, a terrific photo op for the happy city. The Mayor of Happy Enrique Peñalosa in Bogotá, 2007 (Andrés Felipe Jara Moreno, Fundación por el País Que Queremos) “Look,” he yelled to me, waving his cell phone toward the bicycles
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optimism? Which of the high-minded schemes of the great city builders have actually produced more of the pleasurable feelings Jeremy Bentham called “hedons”? Does Enrique Peñalosa—or anyone else who promises happier design—have a leg to stand on? These questions take us all the way back to Socrates: What is
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-being that include not just how much citizens earn, but how we feel. The truths of happiness science should also lead us to accept that Enrique Peñalosa and his fellow travelers are right: cities must be regarded as more than engines of wealth; they must be viewed as systems that should be
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way to break old patterns of thinking about streets. “A collective learning experience,” is how Britton framed the proposal. He’s the one who convinced Enrique Peñalosa to pull off the first big-city car-free day in Bogotá in 2000. Now more than a thousand cities have followed suit. As with
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high-tech people mover. It was a bus. A bus—just the low-status ride that North Americans love to hate. But the TransMilenio, as Enrique Peñalosa dubbed this bus system, had turned the transit experience upside down. Based on a rapid bus model pioneered in Curitiba, Brazil, the TransMilenio had appropriated
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relegated to the edge. (Dan Planko) The incivility and violence even seeped into the mayoral campaigns. During a televised debate between candidates Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, a raucous student audience stormed the stage, and Mockus was caught on film brawling with the interlopers. Peñalosa and Mockus offered Bogotans two radically different
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, safe streets, and public space—were still acute. The city had begun to change its mind, but it was being held back by its body. Enrique Peñalosa, who finally won the mayor’s seat on his third try, insisted that there was an inherent connection between urban form and culture. It was
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would use his term to build that respect into the city, using concrete, steel, leaf, and lawn. At the start of this book I credited Enrique Peñalosa with a big and simple idea: that urban design should be used to make people happier. Peñalosa is indeed a student of the happiness economists
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a corrective for weak systems. It is a plan for resilience. The Green Surprise Consider the by-product of the happy city project in Bogotá. Enrique Peñalosa told me that he did not feel the urgency of the global environmental crisis when he was elected mayor. His urban transformation was not motivated
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the money to fly in Jan Gehl for streetscape studies and pep talks with policy makers. It was they who coordinated pedal-powered summits between Enrique Peñalosa, local politicians, and bike-loving celebrities such as David Byrne. It was Naparstek himself whose media campaign vilified the city’s old guard transportation commissioner
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of people over the course of five years. I am grateful to the many people who shared their ideas with me. First among them is Enrique Peñalosa, who sparked the journey. The fire was stoked by many passionate minds. Among the many whose ideas and research I have borrowed or expanded upon
Straphanger
by Taras Grescoe · 8 Sep 2011 · 428pp · 134,832 words
The twentieth century was a horrible detour in the evolution of the human habitat. We were building more for cars’ mobility than children’s happiness. — Enrique Peñalosa, 2008 When it comes to modernist architecture and modern cities, form follows function. At least that’s what I thought I knew, and every place
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oversight. As picturesque as they can be, such systems are a disaster for any major city, causing exponential increases in congestion, pollution, and carbon emissions. Enrique Peñalosa, the man who created TransMilenio, has vivid memories of the chaotic Bogotá of the ‘90s. “I have never been in a city where people had
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have used real estate development as a funding mechanism to build transit infrastructure, as they do in Hong Kong and Singapore. When he was mayor, Enrique Peñalosa asked us to do urban development around TransMilenio stations. But we had only three years to implement the system, so we had to ask him
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that really use public transport. And we citizens will have to pay the costs for years to come.” The current mayor, Samuel Moreno, had defeated Enrique Peñalosa in 2007 by promising to build a metro. One of the proposed routes was along Carrera Séptima, Bogotá’s version of Los Angeles’s Miracle
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to happen any time soon. It’s a solution for the next twenty years.” Did Bogotá’s only hope lie in an expensive metro? Naturally, Enrique Peñalosa didn’t think so. During our interview, the former mayor had stood up and pointed to an eight-story apartment building visible across a leafy
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. How do we fix them? At this point in my travels, I’d heard this question answered many ways. Civic leaders like Antonio Villaraigosa and Enrique Peñalosa argued that sophisticated public transport is the key to liberating cities from gridlock and congestion. Echoing Frank Lloyd Wright, such defenders of auto-based suburbia
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Revenge of the Loser Cruiser Ardila, Arturo. “How Public Transportation’s Past Is Haunting Its Future in Bogotá, Colombia.” Transportation Research Record 2038 (2007). “Can Enrique Peñalosa Restore a Tarnished Municipal Model?” The Economist, March 10, 2011. Despacio, Ando. “Bogotá: Edging Back from the Brink.” Sustainable Transport (Winter 2008). Dugger, Celia W
The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed
by Carl Honore · 29 Jan 2013 · 266pp · 87,411 words
stunts, he donned a superhero costume and dubbed himself “Supercitizen” to promote a “culture of citizenship” as part of the city’s transformation. His successor, Enrique Peñalosa, is a sparky, well-travelled economist with a Marxist past. Less colourful than Mockus, who once resigned as rector of the National University after mooning
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in the next morning with a clever solution that has incubated overnight. We have already seen emotion at work in many Slow Fixes. Remember how Enrique Peñalosa made the members of his team feel cherished, how treating prisoners with dignity helps combat recidivism in Norway and Singapore, and how much it means
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David Edwards pulled together a multidisciplinary team to invent a new drinking vessel at Le Laboratoire. How Iceland is using crowdsourcing to reboot democracy. How Enrique Peñalosa played a catalytic role in the transformation of Bogotá. How Ricardo Pérez became a better coffee farmer by taking charge of his own business. How
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forging one solution can often be applied to similar problems elsewhere. All those years studying urban renewal and shaping the transformation of Bogotá have turned Enrique Peñalosa into a globetrotting Florence Nightingale for failing cities. “I’m now like a doctor who can just look at the patient’s colour and know
Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution
by Janette Sadik-Khan · 8 Mar 2016 · 441pp · 96,534 words
and roller skates, roller blades—however they wanted to get around. The Ciclovía idea didn’t take hold until the early 2000s, when Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s brother, Gil Peñalosa, left a lucrative post heading a television station to become the city’s parks commissioner. At the time, Gil Peñalosa told
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, paying their fare beforehand and boarding via all doors. Mariana Gil/EMBARQ Brasil Bogotá’s bus rapid transit system, TransMilenio, was a pillar of Mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s administration, and its effects resonate beyond the bus route. In his first term, Peñalosa combined TransMilenio with strategies to increase public space, reduce car
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, 2015, http://brtdata.org/location/latin_america/brazil/curitiba. 194 cities . . . 32 million daily passengers along 3,200 miles of streets: Ibid. “An advanced city”: “Enrique Peñalosa: ‘América Latina debe mirar más a Amsterdam que a Miami,’” Semana, January 13, 2011, accessed August 8, 2015, www.semana.com/vida-moderna/articulo
Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture
by Justin McGuirk · 15 Feb 2014 · 246pp · 76,561 words
also included offering slum dwellers free bus passes and groceries in return for collecting their own trash. The Curitiba experience was highly influential on Mayor Enrique Peñalosa’s implementation of the TransMilenio bus service in Bogotá, just as Antanas Mockus’s programme of civic education in Bogotá helped pave the way for
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1995–97 and 2000–03, taking an unruly city and using his unique pedagogical style to instil a sense of civic culture. The second was Enrique Peñalosa, who, between Mockus’s two terms, drastically improved Bogotá’s transport infrastructure, building the TransMilenio bus service, hundreds of miles of bicycle lanes, public spaces
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pedagogical methods were also highly cost-effective led directly to a dramatic physical transformation of Bogotá under the next mayor. A Man of Action When Enrique Peñalosa was elected in 1998, he not only had a vision of what Bogotá should be, he had the money in the coffers to make it
Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars
by Samuel I. Schwartz · 17 Aug 2015 · 340pp · 92,904 words
a smaller one. That’s the philosophy of what has to be the world’s most inspiring municipal leader on the subject of transportation equity, Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia. Sometimes transportation equity is best studied in a place where inequality of all sorts is off the charts. That
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transportation system. The list of transportation innovations begun by Antanas Mockus when he was elected Bogotá’s mayor in 1995, and expanded by his successor Enrique Peñalosa from 1998 to 2001 (Mockus would, in turn, succeed Peñalosa, and serve until 2003), is nothing if not impressive. The most significant, in terms of
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migrating to big cities are just the leading edge of an avalanche. On the other hand, all that action is causing a powerful reaction. When Enrique Peñalosa lost his bid for reelection in 2000, he was followed by three successively more conservative administrations, and it’s not too much to describe what
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, 2013. Ross, Darren. “Millennials Don’t Care About Owning Cars, and Car Makers Can’t Figure Out Why.” Fast Company, March 26, 2014. Roth, Matthew. “Enrique Peñalosa Urges SF to Embrace Pedestrians and Public Space.” StreetsBlog SF, July 8, 2009. Ruiz, Rebecca. “America’s Most Obese Cities.” Forbes, November 7, 2007. Schmitt
City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith · 19 Jun 2012
urban motorways. It is now held up as a model to the rest of the world. Thanks to the policies of mayors Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa, who ran the city from 1995 to 2003, the number of deaths from traffic accidents in Bogotá has been almost halved, falling from 914 fatalities
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. 50. ‘Annex – Managing car use in cities’, in Urban Age, Cities and Social Equity (Urban Age/LSE, 2009), 166–8. The point is made by Enrique Peñalosa. 51. Collectif Argos, Climate Refugees (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010), 238. 52. Knoflacher et al. (2007), 345. 53. ‘Mayor unveils programme to transform cycling and
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Bureau, June 2007 (data for 2005). 66. Darryl D’Monte, ‘Cities should be for people, not cars: Enrique Peñalosa’, Infochange (December 2009) <http://infochangeindia.org/Environment/Eco-logic/Cities-should-be-for-people-not-cars-Enrique-Penalosa.html> Accessed 16 December 2009. 67. ‘Annex – Managing car use in cities’, in Urban Age, Cities and
Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis · 31 Mar 2013 · 385pp · 118,314 words
smart transit policy is made even clearer in the example of Bogotá, Colombia, and the story of another series of visionary mayors – Antanas Mockus and Enrique Peñalosa – who saw the importance of using public transport to ensure access to the city for all. Mockus first came to prominence when he was forced
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, on the back of his successes in Bogotá, Mockus stood for election as Columbia’s president, which he lost. As mayor he was succeeded by Enrique Peñalosa, leader of the local Liberal party. Peñalosa inherited a city that was in the process of social transformation but also on a solid financial footing
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not a technical issue. The technical aspects are very simple. The difficult decisions relate to who is going to benefit from the models adopted.’13 Enrique Peñalosa on his bike For Peñalosa, the modern city should be rebuilt with the poor and children in mind, and as a result it needs a
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impact of walking has long been ignored, and is only now being revealed as one of the key components in developing a happy city. As Enrique Peñalosa says: ‘God made us walking animals – pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim, a bird to fly, a deer to run, we need to walk
How Cycling Can Save the World
by Peter Walker · 3 Apr 2017 · 231pp · 69,673 words
And yet the streets are dominated by vehicles, whether parked or driving past, pumping out fumes, creating noise and danger, to the detriment of everyone. Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Colombia’s sprawling, chaotic capital city of Bogotá, built hundreds of miles of protected bike lanes, arguing that they are vital to
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developing nations. As part of this, she was taken on a tour of a newly rebuilt former slum area of Bogotá by none other than Enrique Peñalosa. He proudly pointed out that there was a smooth, paved route for bikes and pedestrians, but just a dirt road for cars, Bender says: “Enrique
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need a barrier, or their own phased traffic lights. If that seems too technical you can think about it in the more evocative phrase of Enrique Peñalosa, the bike lane–building mayor of Bogotá, who we met in chapter 3: “A bicycle way that is not safe for an eight-year-old
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. 4 Center for Transit Oriented Development, 2008 study. 5 2011 UK census, car or van availability by local authority. 6 Enrique Peñalosa TED talk, September 2013. http://www.ted.com/talks/enrique_penalosa_why_buses_represent_democracy_in_action. 7 UK National Travel Survey. 8 League of American Bicyclists. 9 John Pucher and Ralph
Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
by Jeff Speck · 13 Nov 2012 · 342pp · 86,256 words
habit in some places than in others. It is those places that hold the most promise for the physical and social health of our society. Enrique Peñalosa, the former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, sees things in a much simpler light: “God made us walking animals—pedestrians. As a fish needs to swim
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chapter’s prescriptions woefully inadequate. What, five feet for a bike lane? They will remind me of Copenhagen’s eight-footers, and quote Bogotá’s Enrique Peñalosa, “If a bike lane isn’t safe for an eight-year-old child, it isn’t really a bike lane.”52 Some will bemoan my
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