Urban Resilience and Crime: The Case of “El Cartucho”, Bogota

Studies about urban resilience have been proliferating since it has been considered a desirable quality for cities when recovering from flooding, earthquakes, or tsunamis. However, in ecology, resilience is a property of complex adaptive systems, like cities, that might or might not be desirable. The concentration of crime in cities is an excellent example of a highly resilient phenomenon that is undesirable. Nevertheless, it has persisted by adapting successfully to changes in policies, laws, and urban design interventions. How can resilience be used to produce an alternative approach to the design of safer built environments? The present paper discusses the development of crime in Santa Ines, a neighbourhood in Bogota better known as “El Cartucho” that has been the subject of different urban transformations. The methodology used is quantitative and compares different stages in the development of El Cartucho by mapping the urban changes at each stage and the concentration of crime at the end of the twentieth century. A theoretical resilience framework is applied to process the data and to interpret the impact of the urban changes in the concentration of crime. The conclusion discusses the opportunities of using ecological resilience to study urban landscapes and design safer cities.