In the information age, Bogotá’s historic center presents an opportunity to weave the nation’s identity from the landscape, encompassing its defining heritage in a comprehensive manner. The boundaries between the natural and the cultural, the tangible and intangible, the movable and immovable, are blurred. The dynamics of its experience are recognized as a fundamental aspect for building a community that has evolved with meaning since its origins.

Recording history and its values ​​is not a task aimed at looking back; it is, above all, an effort to recognize the meaning of society from its origins and how this is materialized in the urban context. This approach assumes a holistic form of heritage recognition, transcending academic criteria and recognizing the more than 2,400 stakeholders who attended the meetings and the 40,000 online interactions, as an essential part of constructing a proposal that compiles 502 citizen contributions for the formulation of the instrument.

The Historical Study and Assessment by the National University of Colombia (2017) has been the basis for consolidating a comprehensive interpretation of the territory. The hills are the birthplace of Bogotá’s sun and water, and before colonial times, they were a sacred space fundamental to the cosmogony of the first settlers. Thus, from the recognition of Geography as a starting point, the main sustenance of Bogotá and the backdrop for urban rituals and profiles are evident, emphasizing its status as a natural viewpoint of the savannah, which is, in turn, seen by it. With the arrival of colonial times, the Layout appears, understood as a permanence that has been modified by roads that connect great urban distances, but which break the initially contained homogeneity and prevent close encounters between ecosystems, neighborhoods, and inhabitants. In articulation with the layout, Public Space is understood as a network that decants and accumulates the traces that activate memory and is a facilitator and container of new activities, a place of equity, competitiveness, and sustainability. The Primary Elements, which have constituted the avant-garde and embody the needs of each era, organize a vital landscape in which a Social Fabric is generated, linking dynamics between residents, users, and visitors who, interacting systematically, shape collective experiences that must be mitigated, in the case of divergences between interests, or motivated, in situations of convergence, which are in themselves opportunities for building synergies.

In this sense, the Center contains the greatest historical vestige of the city, is heterogeneous in its aesthetics, and embodies the greatest technical and technological challenges of the country’s formation. Furthermore, it is a symbolic place for the development of national and district democracy. Its character is that of an area of ​​natural and cultural heritage, of knowledge and residents, but above all, it owes its importance to its centrality as a city and a country.
What do we inherit? This is the question we, as a society, must ask ourselves to responsibly receive what has been handed down to us by previous generations and, above all, to consider what we want to leave as a legacy to future generations in order to be sustainable and competitive within a global environment in which the value of the local must be strengthened. This approach leads to a breakdown of mental and physical barriers that allow us to transform our view of heritage, replacing the notion of the ancient with a question that challenges the value we, as a society, assign to what we receive and give.
In the transition toward the country’s long-awaited peace, this instrument presents itself as an opportunity to weave and balance the city and society through heritage, understanding it as a living energy that can make this centrality one of the most important public spaces in the country; as has happened in other Latin American capitals. It is possible to unify the national identity through the historic urban landscape, seen as a place of resilience, encounters, and coexistence.
The historic center must be a space to celebrate and care for life, which is in itself the greatest heritage; It must be a space to recognize where we come from, learn to manage resources, and move toward co-creating our greatest potential as a society through a culture of co-responsibility that strengthens the ability to live in harmony with the land; a place of opportunity for a megacity like Bogotá, which, having expanded excessively, must regroup and refocus to become sustainable.

The Special Plan for the Management and Protection of Bogotá’s Historic Center (PEMP-CHB):

• Recognizes the importance of traditional inhabitants, strengthening and leveraging their presence and impactful participation.
• Establishes knowledge channels and spaces for interaction that strengthen collective experiences, enriching the way Bogotá residents and Colombians relate to their landscape.
• It evolves intelligently over time, leveraging the tangible and intangible resources of the territory and becoming a national example of governance and a smart city pilot, making it an urban laboratory for the best possible city for Colombians.

The profound meaning of the PEMP lies in making heritage a means of uniting forces, aligned through a roadmap that, from the community of the territory, achieves a more friendly and habitable center of attraction. Faced with the polarized and fragmented nature of cities, which has historically led to inequality, insecurity, violence, and paralysis, heritage is presented as a bridge to bring together and interweave ecosystems, memory, productivity, actors, desires, and, in general, city systems through collaborative synergies. It is not a loop that closes; on the contrary, it is a door that invites us to continue creating under the umbrella of a long-term vision, through a plan that is open and dynamic, like the reality that generates it.

Reflection on heritage in this era ceases to be aesthetic and becomes experimental, and in this sense, ethical, in order to sow the optimism, hope, and debates necessary to find consensual paths.

It takes trust and open, holistic thinking to overcome inertia and achieve the inspiration and sense of care required to achieve the desired sustainability of the Historic Center and its container, Bogotá, and the geography of the hill-river system that connects the capital to the country.