I went to Soacha (a municipality of Bogota) last Friday with Franco, the graffiti artist, to record some sounds for Carolina Caycedo's project for the map. Despite having travelled alone to some pretty punchy places, I'd somehow managed to work myself into quite the lather about how unsafe it would be and was actually quite nervous. People in the richer areas of Bogota talk about the poorer areas of the city as if you're likely to get shot, stabbed or raped if you so much as set foot in them, which probably should have been the first clue as to the outrageousness of such claims. But the constant fear and paranoia are invasive and wiggle their way into the darker parts of one's mind with surprising ease.
Anyway, I needent have worried in the slightest. I didn't feel unsafe. More than anything, I felt angry about how fear is used as a kind of demonising device - turning areas of poverty and displacement into imagined hovels of violence and deprivation. I also started thinking about how strange it is that the only people (at least in Bogota, anyway) who make an effort to actually go to these areas are artists and charity workers and people looking to exploit the poverty (while doing some research for this project, I happened across an absolutely disgusting forum of male tourists looking for prostitutes in the poor areas of the city).
Tourists don't go to Soacha, people who live in Parque 93 or Chapinero don't go there either - people only hear about these areas when something bad (i.e. newsworthy) happens. Hence the reputation.
More and more, it seems fear is being used - by politicians and businesses - to twist people's natural caution and need for self-preservation into a tool to make cities increasingly like the American suburbs - isolating and closed off.
It's funny how in London people often remark how much they wish the city could be a little bit more Mediterranean, with parks and outdoor dining + drinking spaces - but the thing people in the UK seem to want more than anything, at the expense of quality cities - is their own little piece of the pie, their own little castle. Who cares about the common good, city amenities, as long as I've got my own house, my own garden.
In South America, whether through culture or because of necessity, they seem to understand + embrace of the idea of higher-density living, where the city itself becomes a kind of living room (funnily enough, I proposed an exhibition developing this idea to the AF last year, but they weren't interested).
It certainly doesn't appeal to all, and yes, London doesn't always have the climate, but I like the idea of greater-density, smallish flats with more abundant city-wide amenities. And not just shops and cafes, where to have to buy crap to be welcome, but places for doing nothing, for playing, reading a book, painting a mural, riding a bike, whatever. It would be nice to have cities for people again, not for consumers.
It's utterly overwhelming sometimes, the scale of just how screwed up our systems are - it's hard not to feel hopeless of hypocritical or so very, very angry. Who has answers that work? No idea. But where better place to start looking for them than in our cities.
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