Bogotá: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

This book tries to explore what has been the trajectory of Bogotá in the last fifty years.

It is not about giving a historical look at a certain period, nor about specifying a psychological or sociological profile of the city in which we have lived.We simply wanted to establish parameters that would allow us to better understand the evolution of a human group that went from being a municipality with precarious characteristics to becoming a metropolis, where problems and conflicts barely compete with the speed with which solutions are sought.

The testimonies collected here do not want to qualify in any way the reality of that evolution.Nor do they seek to avoid a series of imbalances in the situation that the country's capital is experiencing today.

It is usual for books of these characteristics to try to show the positive aspects of a certain human group.All of them appear in this volume: the vigor with which we have been able to face the difficulties of excessive growth, the versatility of the solutions, the development projects and the imaginative way in which they managed to finance themselves, the mechanisms to approach, without further trauma, the conurbation that threatens us day by day.But it also includes, in its entirety, a series of shortcomings and mediocrities that do not have to be hidden but, rather, must be analyzed and weighed in order to face immediate questions with better success.

In short, this book does not seek to highlight only the remarkable.It seeks to present the problems and difficulties of a city like ours.