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Women and Public Space in Bogotá, Colombia: 'A Field of Battles, of Risk and of Fear' presents some of the results of an investigation aiming to determine in which way the women of Bogotá use urban public spaces. It is based on a fundamental premise: urban regions are not a place of neutrality but rather involve unequal relations between men and women. One of the most significant contributions of this paper is the approach to the scenarios through an intense ethnography. In the Colombian case, this is the first investigation developed on the relationship between women and public space through the realization of an important fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper attempts to measure empirically the externalities generated by the street vendors in four zones of the city. Given the lack of information censuses and surveys were carried out during December of 2004 and January 2005. The descriptive statistics show that the established commerce is less formal than expected; whereas the street vendors are mostly stationary, exhibit reduced scale and low space rivalry. The econometric estimations show that the congestion of the public space generated by street vendors has a negative impact on both sales and employment of established retail commerce. The simulations of a reduction of street vendors pinpoint that although street sales account for just 2% of total sales in the four areas under study, they reduce 14% and 16% sales and employment of formal retail commerce respectively. Finally, some limitations of the methodological strategy are raised and some public policy proposals to face the phenomenon are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an exercise on the ethnographic interpretation of the "paseode olla", an urban practice observed at a traditional park in bogotá, the "Parque Nacional Enrique Olaya Herrera". The text combines ethnographic descriptions and reflections about the urban public space as well as socio-spatial analyses of human interaction. The text emphasizes in the importance of space practices analyses as forms of culture materialization in urban contexts. It also shows the persistence of the family in contemporary urban practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the factors underlying the shift of public space management Bogotá's Historic Center from one neglect by presidentially appointed mayors to an aggressive public space recuperation campaign led by Bogotá's elected mayors from 1988 to the present. Faced with the high barriers to public space recovery-the potential loss of needed political support from vendors and the power of vendor unions to obstruct their removal-this article holds that two factors enabled elected Bogotá mayors to recuperate public space. These are: 1. a democratization of the Bogotá Mayor's Office which made elected mayors responsible to the electorate for their neglect of public space, and 2. the political-economic marginalization of traditionally obstructive Bogotá vendor unions. Field work was carried out in metropolitan Bogotá to determine the impact of the public space recuperation on vendors who were relocated by the Mayor's Office of Bogotá. When compared to data from the street, results of the randomized surveys illustrate improvements in working conditions but lower income and fewer clientele for relocated street vendors. The study similarly documents how more benefits accrued to relocated vendors in markets that specialize in the sale of one product instead of more generalized markets. The conclusion points to the importance of public space recovery for the reinstatement of public order and for downtown economic revitalization. These benefits are described parallel to the disadvantages of the intensification of vendor-government conflict and the large-scale abandonment of costly markets by relocated street vendors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]