The urbz collective is working with the municipal authorities of Cali to develop tools and methodologies for participatory urban planning at the scale of the city.

Cali is a 2.2 million strong city based in the lush Valley of Cauca, near the Pacific Coast of Colombia. It is not only the world capital of salsa, but also a hugely dynamic city, coming to terms with decades of violence and corruption, looking at emulating Bogota and Medelin’s urban successes, while following its own unique path to development.

As in other large Latin American cities, many of Cali’s neighborhoods had to rely on their own community-based systems and local markets to provide housing and urban infrastructure. The result is an uneven landscape composed of richer and poorer neighbourhoods connected by a overstretched public transportation system.

Many neighbourhoods have strong, active and capable local project leaders and communities that need all the support they can get. 

The municipality recognizes the needs and potential of its diverse communities. It wants to strengthen its own ability to communicate with local actors and support their initiatives. In a context where there are no sufficient resources to address all the civic needs of the population, the best thing that the municipality can do is often to acknowledge and recognize local initiatives and promote the horizontal sharing of knowledge and resources.

This is precisely what our team intends to work on in the coming months. 

Over the next 6 months urbz is bringing together collaborators from Cali, Bogota and Geneva to meet actors at institutional and community levels, analyze the local needs and capacities, propose an adapted infrastructure for participatory planning, and develop a digital platform that will enable citizens to urban development processes in their neighbourhoods and beyond.

The urbz team will collaborate with the Cali 500+  team – a dynamic and competent team who spearheads participatory planning strategies in Cali and focuses on building a vision of inclusive, prosperous and sustainable development for the capital of Valle del Cauca. Its objective is to promote a long-term vision of progress, strengthening collaborative governance, citizen identity and a sense of ownership of each project. It will also meet community representatives and citizens in various barrios of Cali. 

Together with local groups and residents, our team will design and implement a “tactical” intervention in a specific location. 

This intervention seeks to identify and strengthen a social infrastructure and support social processes that have historically shaped the popular neighborhoods of Cali.

In this project we will be working with Octree, a startup based in Geneva, to implement a Decidim platform and promote its use in Cali. Decidim is an open source content management system designed by the city of Barcelona and now used by over hundred cities around the world. This project is financed by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) with the assistance of urbaplan, which managed the call for proposals.

We are looking forward to this new project and collaborations, which we hope will help Cali fulfill its potential, and which without any doubt will make us smarter as a team as we learn from Cali.