Bogotá 2025 was born as a partnership between the Chamber of Commerce of Bogotá and City Hall, and had the methodological guidance of Adam, from Reos Partners, and the assistance of the Leadership and Management Center.

Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá

Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá | Secretaría General (2012-2015)

Con el apoyo de: Centro de Liderazgo y Gestión

Con el apoyo de: Reos Partners

Strategic areas

If we want to transform the future of Bogotá, on what do we have to work and focus our efforts?

To answer this question, we invited more than 200 people as representatives of the city. In this way, we identified strategic areas that will allow us to transform Bogotá up to 2025. Let's imagine for a moment that Bogotá is a big ship, and to be able to change the course of this big ship, we have to activate certain levers, that is, a strategic area: an efficient way to focus our efforts on sensitive points.

So, finally, based on the collective work, five strategic areas were identified, all of which are deeply related. These areas set the stage for the topic of leadership, citizen participation and shared citizen responsibility. These areas make up a fabric, a vision of Bogotá and the Region through to 2025. However, we do not want to limit ourselves to the discourse; we want to generate, promote and coordinate initiatives that will contribute to achieving this vision in the short, medium and long term.

1

Educator city

The idea is to make Bogotá a city that is aware of itself, of its cultural diversity, its environmental wealth, its capacity to coexist with respect and its productive and innovative potential, and for this awareness to be reflected in the daily lives of its inhabitants, to the extent that simply walking around the city and interacting with it becomes an experience full of social learning.

In that sense, we must recover the leading role of the family in the cognitive and ethical preparation of new generations, understanding that teachers are not machines to take care of children or grade exams, but rather active agents of insight and transformation. And finally, there is a need to promote an education that is innovative, competitive and critical, but at the same time supportive. An educator city finds, in its networks of entrepreneurs or citizens, an educational space where they live and learn at the same time.

2

Opportunities for equality

Based on the collective leadership, we have to build a sense of sharing, that will avoid the usual unequal distribution of opportunities. This forces us to review the old way of thinking of the city as a classifying structure of socioeconomic levels and privileges, to create closer ties between the human fabric and our sense of dialog, where quality of life is the common purpose. One of the keys is to strengthen the networks of contact between people. This translates into more job options, cultural alternatives, personal growth and ultimately, equality.

In turn, having good quality public utilities is essential. Furthermore, we have to promote a transparent and effective public administration that knows how to invest resources and evaluate sound strategies for the redistribution of wealth. In a nutshell valuing equality is valuing ourselves as a whole.

3

Sustainable region

We need a city where we can breathe, drink clean water, enjoy the landscape, but also, one where we can travel easily from one place to another and, organize its land use with a strategic vision of the future. Sustainability must address these issues at the same time, understood not only as the environmental issues, but also the conditions needed for prosperity, by expanding our idea of a city to an idea that integrates the region in a structural manner.

If we overcome the old idea of a city and start to think from a regional perspective, we can better understand the relationship between consumption and waste, i.e.: learn to reduce the volume of waste and rethink where we put it and how we use it. In turn, we can better understand the different areas of conservation and assimilate their role within a broader scale.

4

Education of the city

Perhaps the most ambitious objective of Bogotá 2025 is to transform the way we think. Achieving this is essential if we want to find a way of being that makes us responsible for the construction of our own city region.

So, the challenge is to coordinate all our educational resources for cultural practices to emerge, setting in motion the gestation of a new regional identity. In addition, in order to gain integrity, we have to recover the link between public organizations and people, by streamlining mechanisms of political participation that place value on the voice of citizens. And what is very important: we have to create real agreements, between us all, that will allow us to recover the value of the city.

5

Smart and innovative city region

To complete the picture, we have to nurture a culture where science, technology and innovation are muscles that push and sustain development in our city region. To do so, we have to start with our own needs and integrate them in a system of research and implementation of knowledge. This requires the development of a genuine policy that values ambitious, far-reaching strategies and initiatives.

So, we have to consolidate solid, competitive institutionality with a fluid and constant budget. It is only in this way that we can get our bearings and implement concrete actions. We have to generate a culture where science, technology and innovation are part of our identity, and that will allow us to create economic opportunities that are profitable and make daily life easier.

Platform of dialog for action 

Bogotá Escenarios 2025 wants to provide the city with a guide for the strategic management of its development based on constructive dialog between its main leaders and stakeholders. This means that we must not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk. In the end, we want to generate, promote and coordinate initiatives that will contribute to a better Bogotá in the short, medium and long term.

To do so, we have been identifying initiatives and projects that enable us together to build a better future for Bogotá and the Region.

All of them are included in the five strategic areas identified collectively: 

City - educator city

Objective

To make Bogotá a benchmark for Colombia in terms of culture, education, innovation and coexistence.

Strategies

• Recover the importance of the family as the center of education and citizen coexistence, by strengthening a positive interaction between the family, the state and society.
• Recognize and empower teachers as transformative agents of society.
• Consolidate an innovative, engaging and fair educational model that recognizes the city as an educational space.
• Coordinate the various social actors, such as artistic, cultural, scientific and technological organizations and the media, among others, to boost the city as a permanent scenario of education and citizen coexistence.

City - Region with opportunities for equality

Objective

To build collective agreements that allow equal opportunities of quality access to human and capital assets in order to achieve equality.

Strategies

• Improve the quality of the provision of services.
• Decent work. Job and income opportunities with a demographic priority.
• Transparency, efficiency and effectiveness in public administration.
• Assess the mechanisms for redistribution. Create conditions of equality.

City - Sustainable region

Objective

To lead actions that enable us to move toward a sustainable region in terms of the environment, land use planning and mobility.

Strategies

• Reduce the volume and the places where waste is disposed (solid, liquid and gas).
• Promote mass collective action toward an inter-municipal vision reflected in the regional POT.
• Develop a model for the sustainability of areas of ecological importance in the region.
• Improve mobility in the region through quality and sustainability in the framework of regional land use.
• Create an ecosystem for education, culture and citizen participation that promotes sustainable living.

City - Education of the city

Objective

To change the way society thinks and acts in order to see itself as accountable for the public aspect in the construction of the city region.

Strategies

• Activate formal and informal educational resources as meeting spaces for the transformation of cultural practices and building a new narrative and identity as a city region.
• Activate the relationship between citizens, public institutionality and the systems for political participation.
• Develop fundamental agreements between the various public, private, social and other stakeholders, and the regional levels regarding the valuation of the city.

City - Smart and innovative city region

Objective

To position science, technology and innovation as the basis of a new way of understanding the productive, social and sustainable development of the city region.

Strategies

• Take the regional system of science, technology and innovation as the basis for the solution of the city's needs and opportunities, and as an example of concrete action.
• Develop a long-term public policy of the city region that coordinates, motivates and provides the tools for the different actors of the system, based on a strategic plan, the strengthening of institutions and a permanent and growing budget for the ST&I of the city region.
• Focus concrete actions that involve scientific training, technology management and the culture of innovation in the city’s different strata.
• Strengthen and coordinate the ST&I capacities regarding the smart specialization strategy, taking R&D&I centers, intellectual capital and R&D developments existing in the region as the basis, in order to solve the problems of the city region and find new economic opportunities