Enrique Peñalosa on making cities people-friendly
Posted on October 18, 2006
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Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, now advises other major cities on transportation policy. Under Peñalosa’s tenure, Bogotá (a city of about 7 million people) established a very successful annual Car Free Day and reprioritized integrating bike- and pedestrian-friendly infrastructure into the city’s transportation policy. He’s now a senior fellow at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York City.
The Gotham Gazette recently published his article, “Putting Cars Behind,” where he says,
“Public space is fantastic, not only because of the obvious thing that we meet as equals in public space but also because upper income people and poor people at work in the Third World are more or less equally satisfied. The difference comes when they have their leisure time. The upper income person goes to a large house, to clubs, to country houses, to restaurants. The poor people and their children have no alternative to public pedestrian space for their leisure time.
Therefore a democratic society should have quality pedestrian space. People can go walk and at least see their city.”
See the Gotham Gazette for the rest of the article.
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