Bogotá had been “a cause,” as Mr. Mockus put it. Now it has become a problem. “We’re Latin,” he explained. A deadpan, wry, highly unconventional politician and former mathematics and philosophy professor, Mr. Mockus famously mooned student protesters as a university president and as mayor went on television while taking a shower to demonstrate the virtues of saving water. “The worst thing for a Latin man is to find himself raising another man’s child,” he told me when we met recently. He was talking about the refusal by many Colombian politicians to adopt plans their predecessors conceived, instead preferring to invent their own. So the ousted mayor, Samuel Moreno, had argued for a metro to deal with what the buses couldn’t seem to handle, which may well be necessary in a city whose capital district has almost the same population as New York.
Bogotá, With Pockets of Hope in Recent Architecture – NYTimes.com This is a deep article about my Dad’s home “town”. It’s also about urbanity and livability of high density spaces, and the political will necesary to make those spaces livable.