Adelaide,Bogotá as seen from Cerro Monserrate. Photo Jordan Matthew Yerman

Bogotá and Adelaide: Reinventing Cities with 21st Century Infrastructure

Jordan Yerman
Jul 10, 2017 · 4 min read

It’s tough for a city to change. The weight of history and the inertia of status quo can gang up on you and seem insurmountable. In spite of this, two cities have boldly began to reinvent themselves by leveraging the power of infrastructure, with immediately positive results. These two cities are Bogotá, Colombia; and Adelaide, South Australia. They’ve been shaped by different histories, environments, and economic situations; but they share a similar goal—to be ready and waiting for the world of tomorrow.

Bogotá: Getting a City to Move

When Enrique Peñalosa became Mayor of Bogotá, he implemented several transformative mega-projects to make Colombia’s embattled capitol more livable and productive. Besides repurposing land for housing and public parks, Peñalosa’s government grabbed the center lanes of Bogotá’s major roads and cut them off to private traffic. These roads, outfitted with subway-station-like platforms, became the trunk lines of the TransMilenio, which is best described as a bus network that acts like a subway.

Portal Norte, the terminus of the TransMilenio. Your contributor has spent way too much time here.

A quarter of the city’s eight million inhabitants use the TransMilenio each day, pushing it past its capacity (which is why locals call it the TransMi-lleno). Still, it’s impossible to imagine the city’s northern and southern areas to be thriving the way they are now, and the various nightlife districts to be as jumping, without a quick and cheap way to get around the normally-gridlocked region. Peñalosa wanted a subway system, but the capital costs were totally out of reach. So he and his government used what they had to transform the way Bogotá moves.

Gil Peñalosa, Enrique’s brother and executive director of 8-80 Cities, said in his Moving the Future keynote address that the only obstacle to creating a livable city is political will. (Enrique Peñalosa, by the way, is back in office as Mayor of Bogotá.)

Adelaide: Speeding Towards the Future

Adelaide, way down at the bottom of Australia, was a manufacturing hub that was hemorrhaging jobs as factories closed. The national outlook, despite outward trappings, wasn’t much better. Australia is a primary-industries economy, driven by mining. Coal, however, as you may have heard, is not a fuel with a particularly bright future. GM’s Adelaide plant closure in 2013 was the last straw. The city stopped thinking rust belt and started thinking Silicon Valley.

Adelaide is now reinventing itself by focusing on a different resource: human ingenuity. The city is now working to foster local and national innovation talent while wooing the best and the brightest from the rest of the world. Like Bogotá, Adelaide is building off of the infrastructure it already has: in this case, over 150km of gigabit fibre linking its hospitals and academic institutions. This existing infrastructure is the springboard for something much bigger: not only a city entirely linked by ultra-high-speed internet, but a world-class environment friendly to business, education, and creativity.

Adelaide even hired a Chief Innovator: technologist and entrepreneur Tom Hajdu. His job is to make sure that Adelaide’s repositioning as a global center for the digital economy is more than just hype. Adelaide is the first international municipality to be accepted into the US Ignite Smart Gigabit Communities program, which has already transformed Chattanooga, Tennessee from a ghost town to a thriving hub for international business and manufacturing.

It’s working.

Elon Musk (whom popular opinion has deemed “not an idiot”) picked Adelaide as the spot to build the world’s largest ion battery—he’s going where the infrastructure is. This influx of investment and workforce will in turn boost the region’s other economic drivers, from tourism to produce and wine. Like Bogotá, Adelaide has the will to transform, and is therefore marshaling the means. Now Adelaide isn’t just responding to change—it’s effecting change, a change that may prove even more profound than that of Bogotá.

The Cities of Tomorrow

We have to be ready for the fact that the London and New York of tomorrow won’t be London and New York. The future is interconnected: the world’s economies—local and global—are changing seismically, and the cities that think two steps ahead are the ones that will reap the benefits. Even now we see that borne out in Bogotá and Adelaide. These changes are not without controversy, of course, but urban decision-makers have to honestly ask themselves that most hackneyed of questions: “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

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Jordan is a writer, photographer and artist who examines urban metrics and global mobility. He has presented at ProductYVR, BIL, and the International Symposium on Electronic Art. You can find his work in the Vancouver Observer, APEX Experience Magazine, Wallpaper*, Travel+Leisure, Akihabara News, Tokyo INSIGHT Magazine, the Vancouver Sun, Vancity Buzz, Vancouver Courier, Gripped, Spaced.ca, Manager Magazine, Love Meow, and the Canadian Avalanche Journal. He was also featured in Buzzfeed that one time: yoga with cats.

Jordan Yerman

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Writer and storyteller who commits the occasional act of journalism. Travel junkie. Newfound love of skiing and running.

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