The educational park is an intervention project of urban regeneration, cultural and social transformation in one of the poorest and most violent sectors of Bogotá, the locality of Ciudad Bolívar, taking advantage of public spaces for the improvement of the quality of the urban life.

Brief: In the town of Ciudad Bolívar, a large infrastructure project is under construction: it consists in a passenger transport system, through a gondola lifts, with the attempt to connect the informal city with the center. In Colombia, I collected information and experimented a participating process that involved the communities, local leaders and young to analyse the situation. It turned out that it is a sectorial intervention, which is not going to solve the upstream problems. It is evident the need of a synergic action which involves public spaces and urban facilities. The thesis’s aim is to bring a more complex meaning to the existing project, through actions that are an integral part of the program itself.

Project description: The educational park project aims to integrate and develop the impact, generated by the new infrastructure, filling every single empty space so that the urban voids without any use and meaning, will become spaces of public character, arranged to involve the participation and the social inclusion: an intervention that reflects and promotes community ideas which are regaining their rights. Those are the places that can become opportunities for a new form of social planning: through a system which works on the porosity and which builds a network between new centralities. The goal is to reinterpret the space, which can become a symbolic place for the city, in these marginal places people need icons, references. The spatial configuration and the functional program of the park inevitably reflect the expectations expressed by the inhabitants of the barrio who see this occasion not only as a point of arrival but as a place to live and cross. A meeting point, in the same way as a mountain shelter for those who walk in the mountains. Public space is seen as the cultural incubator of the individual, used for recreational, pedagogical and educational meaning, promoting integration and socialization, as a network of sporting activities, as a tool for teaching and stimulating culture, as a tool for fighting violence, through physical, emotional and perceptive involvement.