Market economy has been adopted around the world as the best way to manage most of society´s resources. But it needs inequality: some must earn more, others less, some companies succeed, others fail. Cities can be powerful means to construct an equality different than income equality, to construct environments where nobody should feel inferior or excluded.
As we have smaller households and live in smaller homes, our friends are more our family, our city more our home. Public space can be crucial for our quality of life and for getting people of all income levels to meet as equals, the way road space is distributed, or urban waterfronts used, can be powerful means to achieve more just and harmonious societies.
Enrique Penalosa is an internationally respected urban thinker, who, as Mayor of Bogota in two non-consecutive terms, profoundly transformed his city. As adviser and lecturer, he has influenced policies in many cities throughout the world.
Among his achievements was the creation of TransMilenio, the world´s best BRT which today moves 2,5 million passengers daily and the contracting of the first Metro line in Bogota. He created an extensive bicycle network when only the northern European cities had one, greenways, hundreds of parks, formidable sports and cultural centers and large libraries, 67 schools, 35 of which managed by a successful private-public scheme and high quality urban development projects close to 500,000 people and a radical redevelopment of 33 hectares of the center of Bogota, previously controlled by drug dealers and crime which required demolishing more than 1200 buildings occupying 32 hectares, a few blocks from the heart of Colombia´s institutional heart, including the Presidential house.
Penalosa has lectured in hundreds of cities and in many of the world´s most important universities. He has advised local and national governments in Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America and the United States.
He is a member of the Advisory Board of AMALI (African Mayoral Leadership Initiative), Fellow of the Institute for Urban Research of the University of Pennsylvania. For over a decade he was President of the Board of New York´s ITDP (Institute for Transportation and Development Policy) of New York; member of the London School of Economics´ Cities Program Advisory Board. He was member of the Commission for the Reinvention of Transport of the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority created by the New York Governor Cuomo.
He recently published the book Equality and the City soon be published in English by the University of Pennsylvania and in Portuguese by the IPP (Instituto Pereira Passos) in Rio.
