Bogotá Uses 7,000 Public Design Proposals to Redesign its Main Artery

Bogotá's Avenida Séptima, a six-lane thoroughfare that traverses the city's eastern side, has seen its share of modernization attempts over the last two decades, each creating more disagreement between conflicting interests and spurring demand for increased community involvement. When announcing the latest plan for transforming the traffic-choked street into a green corridor that prioritizes public and active transportation, Bogotá's new mayor, Claudia Lopez, promised a process that would be thoroughly participatory.

Using a custom version of the open-source online platform Streetmix, the city solicited design proposals from the public. Accessible to anyone with an internet connection, Streetmix lets participants build their ideal street design with a set of simple graphic tools. Over the two weeks that the Séptima Verde initiative opened to the public, the city received 7,000 design submissions from 6,000 residents. Analyzing this data provides Bogotá's leaders with invaluable information about what community members want to see on their streets and how to more effectively use street space to improve livability and reduce congestion.

Accessible to anyone with an internet connection, Streetmix lets participants build their own ideal street design with a set of simple graphic tools, giving everyday citizens—the people with deep first-hand knowledge of their community—the chance to make concrete suggestions for improvements on a hyper-local scale. Even(or especially) if those suggestions include magic carpets.