Livability is key to the quality of city life as we look to the future. We don’t have to look far into that future to see how this plays out on the streets.
On Sunday, December 15, 1974, a group of residents in Bogotá, Colombia, tried an experiment: they closed 5 kilometers of a major road in the city to cars for a few hours. Ciclovía, also known as “Open Streets,” was born. Since then, it has become a reference, inspiring more than 400 cities to replicate similar programs.
The concept is simple, though not easy to implement in car-centric cities: the temporary creation of more than 100 kilometers of car-free streets every Sunday and public holiday across a city with nearly 9 million inhabitants – 2 million of them come out to Ciclovía every week.
As we approach the 50th anniversary of Ciclovía, it’s time not only to celebrate but also to reflect on the lessons learned from the past half-century. This movement has reimagined urban living and in the next 50 years it could play a pivotal role in addressing the climate crisis and other global challenges.
Ciclovía is like having access to a living laboratory: it’s a chance to study how a city in the Global South with significant challenges has succeeded in creating a car-free environment, even if just for a few hours each week. The question now is how to take all the components of that successful experiment and turn it into permanent change.
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