[Scpg] The Bogotá Experiment Antanas Mockus READ THIS , AMAZING INSPIRING

Thu Mar 25 22:05:14 PST 2004

The Bogotá Experiment
—By Jamais Cascio, Worldchanging.com

March 25, 2004 Issue

Bogotá, Columbia, circa 1995, was a city "choked with violence, lawless 
traffic, corruption, and gangs of street children who mugged and stole. It 
was a city perceived by some to be on the verge of chaos." Enter Antanas 
Mockus, an eccentric mathematician and philosopher with no political 
experience just resigned from a top tier professorship at Colombian 
National University. Looking for a challenge, he finds it in politics, or, 
as he describes it, being in charge of "a 6.5 million person classroom." 
Colombians desperate for change and for a moral leader elect him as mayor, 
thus beginning an uplifting chapter of Colombian history marked by 
innovative creative leadership and inspired social change.

During his two terms as mayor of Bogotá (1995-97 and 2000-04) his 
initiatives focused living standards and on the sanctity of life, using 
creativity and humor. To encourage Colombians skeptical of his ability to 
tackle the chaos and disorder of the city, he publicly donned a superman 
costume and renamed himself "Supercitizen". During a drought, Mockus 
appeared in a commercial taking a shower and asking citizens to turn off 
the water as they soaped --within two months, household water use was down 
14% and is now 40% less than before the shortage. In a now famous move, 
Mockus hired 420 "traffic mimes" to gently mock people who break traffic 
laws." Traffic fatalities dropped by more than half, from an average of 
1,300/year to about 600.

Mockus says that "transforming Bogotá's people and their sense of civic 
culture was the key to solving many of the city's problems". "Knowledge 
empowers people," he says. "If people know the rules, and are sensitized by 
art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change."
-- Eliza Thomas

Go there>> The Bogota Experiment

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March 20, 2004
The Bogotá Experiment
Big Systems - Global Institutions, Governance and History

What happens when you elect a mathematics and philosophy professor mayor? 
You get mimes on the street. And, it turns out, that's a good thing.

The Harvard University Gazette recently ran a lengthy article about Antanas 
Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, after his visit to the campus. If 
you're not familiar with Mockus, you should definitely read the piece; as 
mayor, he actively sought out unconventional approaches to solving Bogotá's 
enormous social problems, and, to a surprising degree, he actually 
succeeded. (The Atlantic Monthly had a good article about him in late 2001, 
which is also worth checking out.)

During his two terms as mayor (from 1995 to 1997, when he dropped out to 
run for Vice President, and then from 2000 to 2004), Mockus's initiatives 
focused both on the standard of living and sanctity of life. He used 
creativity, art, and humor as his tools for getting his messages out. He's 
infamous for hiring mimes to work street corners, gently mocking and 
parodying those who break traffic laws. But not all of his approaches were 
satirical:
"In a society where human life has lost value," he said, "there cannot be 
another priority than re-establishing respect for life as the main right 
and duty of citizens." Mockus sees the reduction of homicides from 80 per 
100,000 inhabitants in 1993 to 22 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2003 as a 
major achievement, noting also that traffic fatalities dropped by more than 
half in the same time period, from an average of 1,300 per year to about 
600. Contributing to this success was the mayor's inspired decision to 
paint stars on the spots where pedestrians (1,500 of them) had been killed 
in traffic accidents.

He also sought ways to improve Bogotá's environment, including a drive to 
reduce water consumption during a shortage (water use is now 40% less than 
before the shortage) and the encouragement of car-free days in the city to 
encourage the use of public transit and bicycles. He also championed 
efforts to bring drinking water and sewage services into every home in 
Bogotá; sewer hookups went from 70.8% in 1993 to 94.9% in 2003, and water 
provision went from 78.7% to 100% in the same period.

Mimes on streetcorners and occasional men-only curfews may not work in 
every city, but Mockus's success in Bogotá is a good example of the value 
of trying innovative approaches to solving seemingly intractible problems. 
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting 
a different outcome. It's a good thing, then, to try something new, even if 
it looks a little crazy.

(Thanks, gmoke!)
Posted by Jamais Cascio at March 20, 2004 11:32 AM | TrackBack

Comments

A brave man! I hope he goes on, holding destiny in his 
hands!  http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/000483.html
Posted by: Stefan Thomas at March 22, 2004 03:53 AM

Wouldn't it be weird if the Judicially Selected President of the United 
States were as HONEST and inspired as Antanas Mockus? Oh but wait, George 
was selected by the Nine Injustices of the Supreme Court. Wow, this really 
could be Heaven on Earth. Oh well, too bad we have Corporate Criminals 
posing as our leaders. Someday in our far future (that is IF we have a 
future) we may very well give ourselves that gift.
Posted by: Blaise Gauba at March 25, 2004 07:19 AM

After visiting Bogota twice, I am willing to trade Mockus for Bush AT ONCE! 
We need this great SOUTH American in a time when we have lost our way.

http://www.tierramerica.net/2001/0318/dialogues.shtml

Bogota: Harmony and Chaos
By María Isabel García*

The mayor of the Colombian capital, Antanas Mockus, outlines the 
achievements of his environmental policy in a Tierramérica interview	

BOGOTA - The philosopher and mathematician Antanas Mockus Cívicas, son of 
Lithuanian immigrants, is in his second three-year term as mayor of the 
Colombian capital.

Mockus, 48, known for his irreverence and his unique grasp of ritual and 
spectacle, left the rectorship of the National University of Colombia for 
the political sphere, and in 1995 was elected mayor of Bogota for the first 
time.

The politician caused some surprise when he held his wedding in a circus 
tent surrounded by tigers, but the biggest shock was when he resigned from 
his post as mayor in order to join Noemí Sanín as her running-mate in her 
bid for the presidency in 1998, which she lost to current President Andrés 
Pastrana.

But despite his topsy-turvy public image, even his detractors give Mockus 
credit for introducing the concept of citizen culture into public 
administration.

P- In a country enduring such an acute civil conflict, it is somewhat 
surprising that Bogota is showing signs of recovery.

R - The last four administrations have known how to value what their 
predecessors built and accept strict parameters, for example, in the area 
of fiscal discipline. In addition, Bogota is known for being a city where 
people vote their conscience.

P - Every year, more than 100,000 immigrants arrive in Bogota, many of who 
are displaced by violence in the countryside. Some ''pessimistic 
ecologists'' say that this will lead to severe environmental threats 
throughout the next decade.

R - There is competition between the city that grows in a disorderly way 
and the one that grows in an orderly way. I hope to favor, through various 
means - education, culture, autonomy and resource designation - orderly 
growth. I see Bogota as a city condemned to have a very conscious 
relationship between order and disorder.

P - Bogota follows Mexico, Santiago and Sao Paulo among the most polluted 
cities of Latin America.

R - Bogota is experiencing an important transition as far as atmospheric 
pollution as a result of changes toward more modern transportation systems, 
the 'transmilenio' (an integrated mass transit system with lanes designated 
exclusively for public transportation). This is an impressive gamble in 
environmental terms. Of 250 buses involved in the first phase, 90 are to be 
run on natural gas. The others on diesel, but with the latest European 
environmental quality standards. We hope that by the end of our government 
we will have expanded from 11 to 25 percent of all public transportation 
trips using this system.

P - What weight will clean production have in the city's plan to maintain 
competition? Will there be incentives, sanctions?

R -We will reinforce the plan with the business community, in other words, 
provide consulting and subsidized credit for the conversion of industrial 
plants. It is essential to promote cooperation among businesses so that 
each one is not isolated with its own environmental problem, but rather 
conduct plans by neighborhood, by district, in order to achieve 
economy-of-scale solutions.

P - How much emphasis will be placed on sewage treatment in the program to 
clean up the Bogota River, a 25-year project that includes three waste 
water treatment plants at a cost surpassing 150 million dollars?

R - We are in the worst of possible worlds: a very limited and extremely 
costly clean up of the Bogota River, absorbing half of the city's 
environmental funding. It would be much more rational now to separate rain 
run-off from sewage along the course of the river's tributaries and 
dedicate the money to providing the people with sewage systems. But it is 
already a done deal (made during the Jaime Castro administration, 
1992-1994) and irreversible. We have to comply with the agreement, and 
invite other cities to learn from Bogota's experience: first things first.

P - Will you continue to promote travel by bicycle?

R - There are 120 km of bicycle routes now, and we hope to have 220 or 230 
km by the end of my administration.

P - What is your definition of 'city'?

R - In the city, a very fertile and respectful interaction between 
strangers is possible. For me it is a paradise where, being anonymous and 
with space for solitude and personal autonomy, one has people at hand who 
know and can contribute different things. The city is like a dense social 
weave that facilitates things that are good for everyone: public space, 
art, culture, and education.

*María Isabel García is an IPS correspondent
Bogota in Numbers	

Area: 1,732 square km.	
Altitude: 2,640 meters above sea level.	
Population: 6.2 million. 	
Population living in poverty: 1.6 million.	
Growth rate: 2.2 percent.	
Vehicles in circulation: 832,000.	
Private transportation occupies 95 percent of the city's roadways.	
Automobiles cause 60 percent of air pollution.	

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.11/01-mockus.html

One of former Bogotá Mayor Antanas Mockus' many inspired strategies for 
changing the mindset - and, eventually, the behavior - of the city's unruly 
inhabitants was the installation of traffic mimes on street corners. (Photo 
courtesy of El Tiempo) 	
Academic turns city into a social experiment
Mayor Mockus of Bogotá and his spectacularly applied theory
By María Cristina Caballero
Special to the Harvard News Office

Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job of Colombian National 
University. A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for 
another big challenge and found it: to be in charge of, as he describes it, 
"a 6.5 million person classroom."

Mockus, who had no political experience, ran for mayor of Bogotá; he was 
successful mainly because people in Colombia's capital city saw him as an 
honest guy. With an educator's inventiveness, Mockus turned Bogotá into a 
social experiment just as the city was choked with violence, lawless 
traffic, corruption, and gangs of street children who mugged and stole. It 
was a city perceived by some to be on the verge of chaos.

People were desperate for a change, for a moral leader of some sort. The 
eccentric Mockus, who communicates through symbols, humor, and metaphors, 
filled the role. When many hated the disordered and disorderly city of 
Bogotá, he wore a Superman costume and acted as a superhero called 
"Supercitizen." People laughed at Mockus' antics, but the laughter began to 
break the ice of their extreme skepticism.

Mockus' seemingly wacky notions have a respectable intellectual pedigree. 
His measures were informed by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist 
Douglass North, who has investigated the tension between formal and 
informal rules, and Jürgen Habermas' work on how dialogue creates social 
capital. (Staff photos Jon Chase/Harvard News Office) 	

Mockus, who finished his second term as mayor this past January, recently 
came to Harvard for two weeks as a visiting fellow at the Kennedy School's 
Institute of Politics to share lessons about civic engagement with students 
and faculty.

"We found Mayor Mockus' presentation intensely interesting," said Adams 
Professor Jane Mansbidge of the Kennedy School, who invited Mockus to speak 
in her "Democracy From Theory to Practice" class. "Our reading had focused 
on the standard material incentive-based systems for reducing corruption. 
He focused on changing hearts and minds - not through preaching but through 
artistically creative strategies that employed the power of individual and 
community disapproval. He also spoke openly, with a lovely partial 
self-mockery, of his own failings, not suggesting that he was more moral 
than anyone else. His presentation made it clear that the most effective 
campaigns combine material incentives with normative change and 
participatory stakeholding. He is a most engaging, almost pixieish math 
professor, not a stuffy 'mayor' at all. The students were enchanted, as was 
I."

A theatrical teacher

The slim, bearded, 51-year-old former mayor explained himself thus: "What 
really moves me to do things that other people consider original is my 
passion to teach." He has long been known for theatrical displays to gain 
people's attention and, then, to make them think.

Mockus, the only son of a Lithuanian artist, burst onto the Colombian 
political scene in 1993 when, faced with a rowdy auditorium of the school 
of arts' students, he dropped his pants and mooned them to gain quiet. The 
gesture, he said at the time, should be understood "as a part of the 
resources which an artist can use." He resigned as rector, the top job of 
Colombian National University, and soon decided to run for mayor.

The fact that he was seen as an unusual leader gave the new mayor the 
opportunity to try extraordinary things, such as hiring 420 mimes to 
control traffic in Bogotá's chaotic and dangerous streets. He launched a 
"Night for Women" and asked the city's men to stay home in the evening and 
care for the children; 700,000 women went out on the first of three nights 
that Mockus dedicated to them.

Bogotá's women enjoy the fruits of a Mockus idea, a 'Night for Women,' when 
the city's men stayed home and women police kept the night secure. (Photo 
by Martin Garcia/El Tiempo) 	

When there was a water shortage, Mockus appeared on TV programs taking a 
shower and turning off the water as he soaped, asking his fellow citizens 
to do the same. In just two months people were using 14 percent less water, 
a savings that increased when people realized how much money they were also 
saving because of economic incentives approved by Mockus; water use is now 
40 percent less than before the shortage.

"The distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task," Mockus said. 
"Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitized by 
art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change."

Mockus taught vivid lessons with these tools. One time, he asked citizens 
to put their power to use with 350,000 "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" cards 
that his office distributed to the populace. The cards were meant to 
approve or disapprove of other citizens' behavior; it was a device that 
many people actively - and peacefully - used in the streets.

He also asked people to pay 10 percent extra in voluntary taxes. To the 
surprise of many, 63,000 people voluntarily paid the extra taxes. A 
dramatic indicator of the shift in the attitude of "Bogotanos" during 
Mockus' tenure is that, in 2002, the city collected more than three times 
the revenues it had garnered in 1990.

Another Mockus inspiration was to ask people to call his office if they 
found a kind and honest taxi driver; 150 people called and the mayor 
organized a meeting with all those good taxi drivers, who advised him about 
how to improve the behavior of mean taxi drivers. The good taxi drivers 
were named "Knights of the Zebra," a club supported by the mayor's office.

Yet Mockus doesn't like to be called a leader. "There is a tendency to be 
dependent on individual leaders," he said. "To me, it is important to 
develop collective leadership. I don't like to get credit for all that we 
achieved. Millions of people contributed to the results that we achieved 
... I like more egalitarian relationships. I especially like to orient 
people to learn."

Taking a moral stand

Still, there were times when Mockus felt he needed to impose his will, such 
as when he launched the "Carrot Law," demanding that every bar and 
entertainment place close at 1 a.m. with the goal of diminishing drinking 
and violence.

Most important to Mockus was his campaign about the importance and 
sacredness of life. "In a society where human life has lost value," he 
said, "there cannot be another priority than re-establishing respect for 
life as the main right and duty of citizens." Mockus sees the reduction of 
homicides from 80 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1993 to 22 per 100,000 
inhabitants in 2003 as a major achievement, noting also that traffic 
fatalities dropped by more than half in the same time period, from an 
average of 1,300 per year to about 600. Contributing to this success was 
the mayor's inspired decision to paint stars on the spots where pedestrians 
(1,500 of them) had been killed in traffic accidents.

'Knowledge,' said Mockus, 'empowers people. If people know the rules, and 
are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to 
accept change.' (Photo by Gerardo Chaves/El Tiempo) 	

"Saving a single life justifies the effort," Mockus said.

The former mayor had to address many fronts simultaneously. In his struggle 
against corruption, he closed down the transit police because many of those 
2,000 members were notoriously bribable.

Mockus was a constant presence in the media, promoting his civic campaigns. 
"My messages about the importance of protecting children from being burned 
with fireworks, protecting children from domestic violence, and the 
sacredness of life reached many, including the children," he said.

Once the mother of a 3-year-old girl called his office to say that meeting 
Mockus was her daughter's only birthday wish.

But the meeting also revealed, said Mockus, that Colombian society has a 
long way to go. During the visit, the mother told him: "When I am going to 
hit her, she runs to the telephone and says that she is going to call 
Mockus. She doesn't even know how to dial a number, but obviously she 
thinks that you would protect her." Mockus, who has two daughters himself, 
was shocked at the woman's nonchalance about striking her daughter.

Women's night and mimes

There is almost always a civics lesson behind Mockus' antics. Florence 
Thomas, a feminist and a professor at Colombian National University, 
pointed out to Mockus that in Bogotá women were afraid to go out at night. 
"At that time, we were also looking for what would be the best image of a 
safe city, and I realized that if you see streets with many women you feel 
safer," Mockus explained.

So he asked men to stay home and suggested that both sexes should take 
advantage of the "Night for Women" to reflect on women's role in society. 
About 700,000
More of Mockus in Bogotá

Here are a few more innovations from Antanas Mockus' two mayoral terms:
Mockus mobilized people to protest against violence and terrorist attacks. 
He invented a "vaccine against violence," asking people to draw the faces 
of the people who had hurt them on balloons, which they then popped. About 
50,000 people participated in this campaign.

Mockus also embraced the concept of community policing. He tried to bring 
the community and the police closer together through the creation of 
Schools of Civic Security and local security fronts. In 2003, there were 
about 7,000 local security fronts in Bogotá. "It is very important to 
understand that the Schools and Fronts respond to a civic ideal. They have 
nothing to do with firearms but basically promote community organization," 
Mockus points out.

Voluntary disarmament days were held in December 1996 and again in 2003. 
Though less than 1 percent of the firearms in the city were given up, 
homicides fell by 26 percent, thanks in part to the attention given to the 
program by the media. The percentage of people who think that it is better 
to have firearms in order to protect themselves fell from 24.8 percent in 
2001 to 10.4 percent in 2003.

In 2003, the Mockus administration provided 1,235,000 homes with sewage 
service and 1,316,500 with water services. The city's provision of drinking 
water rose from 78.7 percent of homes in 1993 to 100 percent in 2003. The 
sewage service rose from 70.8 percent of homes in 1993 to 94.9 percent in 2003.

When Mockus assumed power, many city positions were distributed according 
to council members' recommendations. "I stopped that, and some called me an 
anti-patronage fundamentalist," Mockus said. He remembers that when he 
handed a text explaining his goals of transparency to one key council 
member, the council member first smiled, but later resigned.
women went out, flocking to free, open-air concerts. They flooded into bars 
that offered women-only drink specials and strolled down a central 
boulevard that had been converted into a pedestrian zone.

To avoid legal challenges, the mayor stated that the men's curfew was 
strictly voluntary. Men who simply couldn't bear to stay indoors during the 
six-hour restriction were asked to carry self-styled "safe conduct" passes. 
About 200,000 men went out that night, some of them angrily calling Mockus 
a "clown" in TV interviews.

But most men graciously embraced Mockus' campaign. In the 
lower-middle-class neighborhood of San Cristobal, women marched through the 
streets to celebrate their night. When they saw a man staying at home, 
carrying a baby, or taking care of children, the women stopped and applauded.

That night the police commander was a woman, and 1,500 women police were in 
charge of Bogotá's security.

Another innovative idea was to use mimes to improve both traffic and 
citizens' behavior. Initially 20 professional mimes shadowed pedestrians 
who didn't follow crossing rules: A pedestrian running across the road 
would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every move. Mimes also poked fun 
at reckless drivers. The program was so popular that another 400 people 
were trained as mimes.

"It was a pacifist counterweight," Mockus said. "With neither words nor 
weapons, the mimes were doubly unarmed. My goal was to show the importance 
of cultural regulations."

A bigger classroom?

Mockus noted that his administrations were enlightened by academic 
concepts, including the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass 
North, who has investigated the tension between formal and informal rules 
and how economic development is restrained when those rules clash; and 
Jürgen Habermas' work on how dialogue creates social capital. Mockus also 
mentions Socrates, who said that if people understood well, they probably 
would not act in the wrong way.

Luis Eduardo Garzón, the new mayor of Bogotá, is the first leftist who has 
been in charge of the second-most important political position in Colombia. 
Said Mockus, "His election expresses a consensus around the importance of 
addressing social issues. Garzón has the challenge of opening space to new 
political forces in a country that has been dominated by a 'bipartidismo 
bobo' (dumb two-party system)."

Mockus - a sterling exemplar of the current vogue in Latin America for 
"anti-politicians" - says that transforming Bogotá's people and their sense 
of civic culture was the key to solving many of the city's problems. He is 
looking forward to returning to the classroom at Colombian National 
University after a sabbatical year. But Mockus is also considering the 
possibility of launching a presidential campaign - and perhaps being in 
charge of a 42 million student classroom.

María Cristina Caballero, a native of Bogotá, is a fellow at Harvard 
University's Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of 
Government.
maria_cristina_caballero at ksg.harvard.edu

he Atlantic Monthly | September 2001 
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/09/schapiro.htm

Notes & Dispatches

BOGOTÁ

All the City's a Stage

An eccentric mayor with a flair for the dramatic is bringing hope to a 
notoriously troubled capital

by Mark Schapiro

.....

ne Friday night last March in Bogotá, I walked past a Fernando Botero 
statue of a gargantuan woman on horseback at the entrance to the Parque 
Renacimiento—a tiny island of calm, containing a number of reflecting 
pools, in a grimy working-class district in the southern part of the city. 
I flashed an official card certifying me as a male with good intentions at 
a National Policewoman stationed at the gate, and crossed into one of the 
city zones that had been declared temporarily all-female.

It was March 9, dubbed La Noche de las Mujeres—an occasion on which a city 
famous for its machismo was turned over to its female inhabitants. Men 
without a city-issued pass like the one I carried—essentially a signed pact 
indicating the holder's willingness to learn something from the 
experience—were asked to stay at home. If they ventured out nonetheless, 
they were blocked from many of the city's plazas and thoroughfares. A 
female lieutenant colonel in the National Police was made commander of the 
city for the night, assisted by a mostly female force of police officers 
and citizen monitors.

According to pollsters, nearly a quarter of the city's 3.3 million women 
were out that night—an enormous showing that cut across class lines. In the 
southern barrios grandmothers and their granddaughters trooped into the 
Parque Renacimiento to hear a storyteller. In the city's affluent north 
sophisticated young women, for whom going out with their girlfriends was 
hardly a revolutionary act, listened to a female band at a tidy little park 
and coyly threw handfuls of flour at the few males seated self-consciously 
at an adjacent outdoor café.

La Noche de las Mujeres was the creation of Bogotá's mayor, Antanas Mockus, 
who has a penchant for freewheeling social experiments to combat the 
violence and alienation that have corroded Bogotá's social fabric. La Noche 
was prompted, he told me, by Bogotá's unique combination of social 
conditions. Men are not only far more likely than women to commit violence 
but also forty times as likely to be its victims. At the same time, women 
have improved their status in Colombia—which has one of the highest levels 
of political participation by women in all of Latin America—through a 
wholly nonviolent struggle. La Noche would provide an opportunity to see 
what might be learned from women's forms of social organization and would 
also serve as an experiment in protecting men from themselves. As it turned 
out, violence on La Noche was 40 percent lower than on ordinary Friday nights.

The day before La Noche, I visited Mockus in his office at city hall. 
Seated under a huge portrait of Simón Bolívar signing Colombia's 
declaration of independence from Spain, he hunched over a scrap of paper 
and sketched three boxes. The first he labeled "legal power"—something one 
would expect of a big-city mayor. What marked him as an unusual politician 
was the other two boxes: "moral power" and "cultural power," which he 
defines as power derived from one's own standards and power derived from 
the shared values of the citizenry.

"At first," Mockus told me, "I had the illusion that if I wrote new laws, 
those words would become reality. But it soon became clear that if you want 
to change society's habits, law is only one of the means. Most people 
prefer internal mechanisms for determining for themselves what is right and 
what is wrong, but perceive other people as needing to be regulated by 
laws. The question I asked was how to reduce the difference between the 
laws and cultural and moral means of self-regulation." A governing style 
that could fairly be summed up as theater-as-politics was the result.

Indeed, Bogotá has been transformed in the past six years by Mockus's 
combination of street-level politics—he has expanded the city's public 
parks, launched a modern bus system, and built schools in the city's 
poorest districts—and symbolic acts. In part because of his imposition of a 
1:00 A.M. closing for bars (proclaimed Carrot Hour, from the Colombian 
slang for someone who is uncool) and his unconventional but effective 
gun-exchange program (those who turned in weapons received small gifts of 
appreciation, such as flowers or food, and a certificate commending their 
act), Bogotá's murder rate has plummeted. Some 4,200 murders were committed 
in the city in 1993; the figure for last year is 2,200.

Bicyclists pedal along newly designated bike lanes; strangers relate to one 
another with small acts of civility. In 1996 the city government 
distributed tens of thousands of plastic cards depicting thumbs. When 
someone engaged in uncivil behavior, the thumb was to be pointed down; for 
a genial act it was to be pointed up. The thumb cards have disappeared for 
the most part, but the habit took hold, and it is not unusual for the real 
thing to flash upward after the observation of an unexpected act of 
courtesy or kindness.

The humble sidewalk is an early example of Mockus's attentiveness to the 
interplay between municipal governance and civic responsibility and pride. 
Until the mid-1990s visitors to Bogotá would have noticed the lack of 
sidewalks. Cars would park right up against storefronts, and walking down 
the street involved a perilous zigzag through an obstacle course of bumpers 
and swinging car doors. Five years ago Mockus initiated a 
sidewalk-construction program. Now people stroll down the sidewalks, and at 
intersections they cross in an orderly fashion on the neatly painted white 
stripes known as zebras. Taxi drivers who attended new city-sponsored 
classes in driver etiquette (the classes taught, among other things, the 
principle of yielding to pedestrians) were awarded windshield stickers 
proclaiming them "gentlemen of the zebras."

Such measures carry both practical and symbolic punch. "The lack of a sense 
of citizenship in Bogotá was reflected in our lack of sidewalks," Salomón 
Kalmanovitz, an economist and a director of Colombia's National Bank, told 
me. "There is a dignity that comes from not walking on the dirt or being 
forced to walk on the street. Building those sidewalks was an 
acknowledgment that eighty-five percent of the people in Bogotá do not own 
cars. You are telling drivers that they are no better than the pedestrians, 
which people from the car-owning class are not accustomed to hearing."

Similarly, in 1996, rather than hire more traffic cops, Mockus hired dozens 
of mimes, who stood at major intersections and, with slyly comic, 
extravagant gestures, admonished drivers who ran red lights, veered in 
front of pedestrians, or committed other violations. The city experienced 
an immediate decline in traffic accidents—proof of his theory that power 
can be wielded with a sense of humor. In the face of Bogotáns' deep 
distrust of traditional authority, Mockus told me, "sometimes you need a 
little cognitive dissonance."

ockus, who is forty-nine and the son of Lithuanian immigrants, spent 
eighteen years as a professor of mathematics and philosophy and then rector 
at Colombia's National University—a background that helps to account for 
his pedagogical approach to governing. "Antanas sees the city as a huge 
classroom," Alicia Eugenia Silva, his deputy mayor, says. Mockus was 
elected mayor in 1995. He resigned two years later and ran, unsuccessfully, 
for Vice President; he regained his office in a resounding victory last 
October.

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Links to related material on other Web sites.

The Visionary Party
The party's official Web site (in Spanish). Includes an outline of the 
party platform, news, events listings, brief biographies of party members, 
and more.
In a country long dominated by the Liberal and Conservative Parties, Mockus 
is an independent, a founding member of the Visionario Party. Although his 
social policies tend toward the left, a legacy of his years in Bogotá's 
radical university culture, his economic policies are largely 
neo-conservative: for example, during his first term he engineered a number 
of privatizations and municipal cutbacks.

In spite of his successes, Mockus faces formidable challenges. Twenty 
percent of the city's residents are unemployed, and more than half live in 
poverty or near poverty. Last year alone some 150,000 people flocked to 
Bogotá to escape the civil war in the countryside; slums sprawl ever upward 
into the hills around the city. At the same time, FOR RENT and FOR SALE 
signs abound in the better neighborhoods, as upper- and middle-class 
residents, tired of paying the "war taxes" extorted from business owners by 
the guerrillas, leave the country, often for the United States.

Not surprisingly, Mockus has his critics. One of the most vocal is María 
Emma Mejía, a member of the Liberal Party who served as Foreign Minister 
under President Ernesto Samper and who ran against Mockus last October. 
"Mockus's whole approach is to shock people out of their reality," Mejía 
says. "But reality in Colombia now is enough to shock people out of their 
reality. We have real problems in Bogotá, and his symbols do nothing to 
address them."

Mockus, of course, is quick to counter this assessment. "We live in a world 
of symbols," he says. He showed me his wedding ring, explaining that it is 
a sort of talisman for his administration. The ring is a gold Möbius 
strip—a continuous one-sided band in the shape of a twisting circle. The 
Möbius strip—large-scale models of which served as backdrops during many of 
his campaign appearances—is a symbol, Mockus says, of the fact that "we 
share conflicts in the country, but we are all deeply linked." He 
continued, "Whenever I get involved in strong conflicts, I look at my 
finger and try to remember that in the end we are all on the same side."

What do you think? Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.

1995
Mayor of Bogotá uses street theatre to educate drivers and pedestrians 
http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_schugurensky/assignment1/1995bogota.html

Prior to 1995, the city of Bogotá, Colombia, used to have high rates of 
accidents when pedestrians tried to cross the streets at intersections. 
Many times drivers would not pay attention to stop signs or to red lights, 
and when they stopped, the cars would often be positioned right on the 
intersection, obstructing the path of crossing pedestrians and even other 
cars, with the ensuing traffic chaos and potential danger. Also, many 
pedestrians did not cross the streets at the assigned corners but randomly 
at any place on the street causing deadly accidents weekly. Before 1995, 
crossing a street in Bogotá, as a pedestrian or as a driver, sometimes was 
more an adventure than a normal act.

That year, the newly elected mayor of Bogotá, a 42 year-old philosopher, 
mathematician and university professor named Antanas Mockus, recognized 
that previous attempts to address this issue had not been successful 
because of their exclusive focus on punishment, and decided to shift the 
emphasis towards education. With this approach in mind, Mockus developed a 
creative idea to deal with drivers and pedestrians. Instead of castigating 
them with a ticket or with a mandatory course on traffic rules, he thought 
that it would be more effective to educate them right there in the 
intersections at the moment the infraction was committed.

Then, from July to October of 1995, Bogotá City Hall hired four hundred 
young actors and students of dramatic arts. Their work was to dress and act 
as mimes, illustrating the chaos and the danger produced by the actions of 
drivers and pedestrians, and showing them good civic behavior. The mimes 
were always sure that there was a public around to witness and applaud the 
good behavior and to laugh at their mimicking of bad behavior.

In order to teach pedestrians to cross at the designated places, and to 
teach drivers to stop at the stop signs, City Hall employed mimes, 
professional policemen, young auxiliary policemen and “virtual policemen”. 
The virtual policemen were big folding screens posted in strategic corners 
with drawings of policemen’s faces and very small windows from which a real 
policeman could sometimes witness the streets. It was difficult for the 
drivers to verify if there was a real policeman behind the screen or not.

The experiment started one early morning at several intersections of 19th 
Avenue, one of the busiest streets in Bogotá. One of the intersections in 
particular, at 19th Avenue and 7th Street had zebra-like stripes painted by 
their stop signs. When a car didn’t stop or stopped on the stripes, 
suddenly a mime appeared to mimic the bad behavior of the driver. The 
mimes, with faces painted in white, black outfits, and white gloves, gave 
instructions to the drivers and pedestrians on how to respect the 
conventional traffic signs without using a word, without force and without 
punishment. If the driver failed to move the car from the zebra-stripes, 
there was a police waiting to intervene. Often citizens would start to 
applaud the mimes, and even the policemen when they appeared at the 
appropriate moment. The legal fine was the last measure. The first step was 
the pedagogical sequence of events that taught the more than ten million 
residents of the city to enjoy a more peaceful, respectful and organized 
urban life.

Mockus believed that the shame of not being perceived as a good citizen by 
the community was an effective pedagogical tool to nurture good civic 
behavior. In addition to this particular campaign related to the zebra-like 
strips and the respect for traffic rules, the mimes included public 
education messages to reduce littering, and to help seniors and disabled 
citizens cross the street. With drama, humor and shame as educational 
tools, citizens were the judges of the actions of their neighbours. After 
four months of working in these two important arteries of Bogotá, the mimes 
went to work in another nineteen intersections of the city.

There is a story of a Bogotanian driver that one day asked the mayor why 
bother with these pedagogical issues about stopping behind the zebra-like 
strips, if not all of the streets in Bogotá had the black and white strips. 
Mockus answered: “The lines are not marked on the asphalt, but in the minds 
of all of us”. Arturo Guerrero, an well-known Colombian journalist, noted 
that this story summarizes Antanas Mockus’ philosophy. More than 
constructing an asphalt city, he wanted to build a spiritual metropolis in 
the psyche of its citizens.

Did this pedagogical effort make a difference? According to a technical 
study undertaken by Bogotá City Hall and published by the Inter-American 
Development Bank, before the the beginning of the campaign (July 1995) only 
26% of drivers and pedestrians respected conventional traffic signs. A few 
months after the campaign, in 1996, this percentage rose to 75%. The study 
also noted that as a result of these efforts, drivers and pedestrians alike 
improved their civic behavior, had more adherence to traffic rules, and 
showed more solidarity and respect for others. As Mayor of Bogotá, Antanas 
Mockus implemented many other creative pedagogical projects that embrace 
art, humor and imagination.

For instance, also in 1995, he undertook a campaign to reduce the number of 
guns in the street. For the Christmas season of that year, Mockus made 
public the high percentage of homicides committed with guns in Bogotá: 
73%.  Under the motto “That all guns rest in peace for this Christmas”, the 
City Hall started a campaign of voluntary disarmament. The industrial 
community of the city, and the international community through embassies, 
supported the campaign by giving Christmas gift bonuses to the citizens 
that voluntarily delivered their guns, ammunition and grenades. Some 
citizens didn’t ask anything in return for their weapons. The 2,538 guns 
that the City Hall collected were melted and the metal was used to produce 
thousands of spoons for children. Each spoon had the inscription: “I was a 
gun”. This campaign contributed to a noticeable reduction in the number of 
homicides, from 397 in 1995 to 291 in 1996. By 1997, the percentage of 
violent deaths had come down to 25% in comparison to 1996. A recent new 
study, in November of 2003, released by the National Department of 
Statistics (DANE) from Colombia, showed that the percentages of homicides 
have kept the same low rates for the years 2002 and 2003.

Antanas Mockus was a mayor that was aware of the pedagogical potential or 
cities, and made a conscious effort to educate the citizens of Bogotá on 
several issues through creative and imaginative projects. Mockus was Mayor 
of Bogotá twice, first from 1995 to 1997, and later from 2001 to 2003.

Sources:

Mockus, A.(2001) Cultura Ciudadana, programa contra la violencia en Santa 
Fe de Bogotá, Colombia, 1995-1997. Estudio Técnico. Reference Number: 
SOC-127 Washington: Publicaciones de la División de Desarrollo Social. 
Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo 1300 New York Av. N.W. Washington D.C. 
20577. http://www.iadb.org/sds/soc

DANE, 2003. Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadísticas. “Bajan 
Índices de Violencia en Colombia”. Bogotá, Colombia. Comunicado de Prensa 
del estudio realizado sobre los Índices de Violencia en Colombia. Noviembre 
23, 2003. In the CEPAL Press Release to Subscribed Journalists. Comunicado 
de Prensa de la CEPAL (Comisión Económica para la América Latina).

Prepared by Luisa Fernanda Quijano(OISE/UT, 2003)

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Cleansed of 'sin', former Bogota mayor seeks redemption at polls

October 27, 2000
Web posted at: 6:01 PM EDT (2201 GMT)

http://edition.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/americas/10/27/colombia.politics.ap/
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- Antanas Mockus -- the eccentric former mayor of 
Bogota who once tossed a glass of water in a presidential debate opponent's 
face and got married in a circus tent full of tigers -- is back.

And he says he's toning down his act.

In a comeback recalling his oddball attempts to bring civility to this 
abrasive Andean capital, Mockus is in a tight race to recover his old job 
in mayoral elections on Sunday.

The mathematician and Lithuanian immigrants' son sent his campaign into the 
homestretch last month in trademark Mockus style -- with a public spectacle 
that was part brainy civics lesson, part goofy publicity stunt.

Saying he felt ashamed about abandoning the mayor's job to run for 
president in 1998, Mockus donned a dark suit and stood in a knee-deep 
fountain as an Indian leader dumped a bowl of water over his head.

"I forgive you because you have character," a man in the crowd shouted to 
the damp Mockus, water dripping down his wire-rimmed glasses and Abraham 
Lincoln-esque beard. "I'm cured," another spectator piped in.

The cleansing ceremony -- to Mockus both an apology to disillusioned 
supporters and a protest against the forced baptism of Indians during the 
Conquest -- served notice that Bogota's philosopher-politician is back.

The gimmick energized a lagging campaign. After trailing, polls now put 
Mockus either tied or slightly ahead of his main rival, former foreign 
minister Maria Emma Mejia.

But supporters expecting the same zany Mockus as during his 1995 to 1997 
term -- strutting about as "Super Citizen" in red and blue tights, and 
posting mimes at stoplights to chide reckless drivers -- may be disappointed.

Mockus remains determined to make good citizens out of the nearly 7 million 
inhabitants of this overburdened city, with its hellish traffic, burgeoning 
population, and high crime and murder rates. A top proposal of his new 
Visionary Party is for city residents to "arm ourselves with love."

But aside from wearing a suit into a fountain -- and donning a green 
cricket costume to one campaign event with children -- the 48-year-old 
candidate is trying to project a more sober image this time around.

Mockus proudly notes, for example, that he has participated in dozens of 
forums and debates without ceding to the temptation to hurl water at others.

When he did so during a 1998 presidential debate -- dousing interior 
minister Horacio Serpa to illustrate, according to Mockus, the therapeutic 
benefits of "symbolic violence" -- the message was lost on his irate opponent.

Mockus has also refrained from dropping his trousers as he did as Rector of 
the National University -- the stunt that first made him famous.

"I hope, and the people who support me hope these types of actions will be 
reduced to a minimum," Mockus said in an interview Sunday. In the future, 
he added with a grin, such tactics would be employed only when "absolutely 
vital."

On the campaign trail, Mockus is talking a bit less abstractly, and more 
about tangible proposals to ease traffic, stabilize city finances and 
extend basic services.

If elected, he will have a tough act to follow.

The current mayor, Enrique Penalosa, had earned broad praise for fixing 
roads, building parks and libraries, and beginning construction of an 
orderly public bus system. While Mockus clowned, his critics contend, his 
successor got things done.

Mockus devotees disagree. They like his honesty and quirkiness, and believe 
building community is as valuable as laying down cement.

"It's one thing to fix the house, and another to work on the family," said 
Magdalena Baron, a ward-level Visionary Party candidate described in her 
pamphlets as an avid practitioner of Zen and Aikido meditation.

While Baron handed out literature last weekend, a speeding bus clipped an 
elderly merchant nearby, knocking him flat and sending his box of candies 
and cigarettes flying.

Then, as if to show Mockus' philosophy was taking root, the bus driver got 
out, apologized, gathered up the injured man, and drove him to the hospital.