Greening Potosí : making use of green infrastructure in a dense, informal settlement of Bogotá

Sammanfattning: Today more people are living in urban areas than in rural and the global trend of urbanization is rapidly increasing. In Colombia, around 76 per cent of the population is living in urban areas, most of them in the capital city Bogotá. In the absence of governmental planning and land use regulations, the development in many parts of the city occurred in form of informal settlements. These have risen through “bottom up” processes within very limited recourses, often not providing sufficient services to its inhabitants but characterized by a dynamism and constant transformation that contribute to a strong identity. The distribution of greenery and public places in Bogota is spatially unequal – the poorer the neighborhood, the less green and public space there is. These problems are also present in the informal settlement of Potosí, where steep topography and issues regarding security and safety further complicates the matter. The purpose with this thesis is to investigate how a Green Infrastructure can be developed in Potosí to promote ecological, social and recreational benefits. To identify the preconditions and potentials for developing a Green Infrastructure we performed a case study of Potosí that included inventory, analysis, observations and interviews with people from the community. To identify what could be done to promote ecological, social and recreational benefits we turned to literature, reference projects and interviews with Colombian landscape architects. The proposal was designed with the concept More eyes on the greenery, where a green network of hubs, sites and links coincide with a network of well used paths and nodes. In this way active spaces go green and green spaces go active, to provide ecological, social and recreational benefits and at the same time improve the sense of security. To promote social and recreational benefits attractions are created and combined with tools for ecological benefits. In the Green Infrastructure plan, four Green parks with different themes are designed to attract different target groups and to extend the use during the whole day, six existing well-used nodes are developed ecologically into Green spots and Green paths creates a network of links that connects the parks and spots to each other, creating an interconnected Green Infrastructure. Create security, build solidarity and trust, utilize initiatives and engagements and allow for continuous development were aspects fundamental to consider in Potosí. These aspects depend on much more than the physical environment and are not possible to solve directly with a specific design solution or even in a green infrastructure plan, but nonetheless they constituted the core of what the development of Potosí had to be based in. To make a proposal adaptable to the dynamic character, the proposal is designed as a base that can be further developed by the community, rather than a finished product.