Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

It is unclear for the Colombian planning institutions that there are such things as a built environment and a natural environment, and that both constitute the constructed environment. In Colombia, the main planning instrument, the Territorial Ordering Plan (TOP), is applied at the municipal level but not at the regional one. It means that Bogota (+8 million inhabitants), with +90% of land occupation is planned with the same instrument as its neighboring municipalities, like Cota or Funza (-100,000 inhabitants) with 60-80% of rural land, with absolutely no coordination, because each “territory” is autonomous. The “Bogota Savanna” names a geographical territory that includes Bogota plus seventeen municipalities, yet it does not legally exist for regional planning. We need to change the TOP system for solving this absence of regional planning. The solution, I claim, begins for understanding the mutual dependence between plans and projects, given a core difference: projects are drawn, plans are written. I propose an integrated system of plans and projects that is constructed from the concepts of “region”, in Le Corbusier’s “Plan Piloto” for Bogota, Peter Hall’s contention of “Urban England”, and the differences between “urban project”, “urbanistic project”, and “urban design,” by Manuel de Solá Morales, Philippe Panerai, and José Luis Sert. The proposed plans-projects system could be applied for urbanizing the constructed environment of the Savanna of the Bogota River, at the regional level. In articulating that mutual dependence, I follow and paraphrase the Kantian dictum: Plans without projects are empty, projects without plans are blind.