Multi-sectoral change has led to Bogotá, Colombia, a deeply unequal and fragmented city, being a global exemplar of sustainable development. Significant research has been conducted on the city’s “best practice” sustainable mobility infrastructure, which has been widely transferred and adopted around the world. A more recent equitable urban development shift has occurred in the city, centered around the needs of unpaid female caregivers.
In Bogotá, 88% of girls and women engage in unpaid care work and 27% of them spend an average of 6 or more hours per day doing unpaid care work. Low-income neighborhoods have the highest concentration of unpaid caregivers. A new Care System initiative aims to give women more time and autonomy by enabling the equitable distribution of unpaid domestic care work across genders.
The program involves both reorganization of new and existing physical infrastructure and the provision of clustered services, distributed across the city and managed by integrated institutions from multiple sectors.
“the caring woman is in the center”
The Manzanas del Cuidado (Care Blocks) program in Bogotá supports unpaid female caregivers to receive rest, education and other services. The innovative public policy has gained international acclaim, but partners on the Change Stories project want the full story of how this program was created to include the unheard voices of instrumental female activists in Bogotá.
Sergio Montero, Associate Professor at University of Toronto explains that “it is also important that we tell that story well, because if we tell this story only as a mayor who came up with the great idea then we are obscuring and covering up the role that for example here women had, the feminist movements or the Women’s Advisory Council.”
Of the policy innovation, Catalina Ortiz, Professor at University College London, says “This process is fascinating because the issues of care have always been invisible. They have always been there, but the relevance they have is never given to them. We forget that what makes and supports the city is precisely the care work, which in a dominant patriarchal system has always been more relegated to a group of the population led by women.”
Partners
María José (Majo) Álvarez Rivadulla, Associate Professor of Sociology at Universidad de los Andes. Álvarez-Rivadulla holds a BA in Social Work from Universidad de la República (Uruguay) and an MA and PhD in Sociology from University of Pittsburgh. She studies social inequality using mixed-methods. Her book, Squatters and the Politics of Marginality (Springer, 2017), tells the political history of squatting in Montevideo. She has also worked and published on residential segregation, popular neighborhoods and urban interventions, social housing, tolerance to inequality, middle classes, gated communities, interclass relations in college and social mobility.
Friederike Fleischer, Associate Professor of Anthropology, at Universidad de los Andes. Fleischer holds a PhD in Anthropology from City University of New York. Her research in China and Colombia centers on processes of socioeconomic and spatial stratification; social life and inequality; and social support and wellbeing in urban contexts. She has authored several books including Soup, Love, and a ‘Helping Hand’: Social Support in Guangzhou, China (Berghahn, 2018) and co-edited the volume titled Ethnographies of Support (Palgrave, 2013). She is a former Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany.
Adriana Hurtado Tarazona, Associate professor in planning, governance and territorial development at the Interdisciplinary Centre of Development Studies (Cider), Universidad de los Andes. Tarazona holds a PhD in anthropology and an MSc in regional development planning and management. Hurtado Tarazona has worked as a researcher, lecturer and consultant in urban, land and housing policy, urban and metropolitan management, inequalities, social housing and informality.
Olga Lucia Sarmiento, Professor of the Department of Public Health at the School of Medicine and director of the Group of Epidemiology at Universidad de los Andes. Sarmiento holds an MD from the Universidad Javeriana (Bogotá) and an MPH and PhD from the Department of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her transdisciplinary research focuses on the relationship between the built environment, policy and healthy behaviors in Latin America.
Consejo Consultivo de Mujeres (CCM) is a women’s advisory group for issues of gender equality that unites different women’s organizations, groups and networks of Bogotá. Local government must work with the council in developing and implementing all aspects of the Public Policy on Women and Gender Equality, including the city system of care and the blocks of care.