BOGOTÁ: Social Housing versus Actors

The Metropolitan area of Bogota, has nearly 7.035.000 inhabitants, out of which 22% live in illegally generated sub-urban settlements. One of the most recent settlements is Ciudad Bolivar. This settlement represents 10% of total Bogota population and, during the last decades, is the fastest growing locality in Colombia. Between 1993 and 2002, its population grew by 50% more than twice as much as the city as a whole. According to Echanove (2004), the population will grow from 35.000 residents in1973 to 713,000 in 2005. Indeed, the population grew to 563.223, according to the City Hall of Bogota. Faced with a social product of such an immense scale the main actors of the Colombian society have become the key factors in defining, examining and evaluating the relationships they impose on the social-space production through time. The case of Bogota’s Ciudad Bolivar, as the most extreme social product of Colombian system, is the object of this paper and focus of analyses based on concepts of social construction of the urban space by Milton Santos.