Segregation
Sociospatial segregation is a major challenge for socioeconomically inclusive development in cities in the Global South, and especially in Bogotá and Cape Town. Both cities suffer from high economic inequality and its manifestation in space is the focus of URI.
Cape Town, with its post-apartheid settlement structure – still divided along racial lines - has clearly marked patterns of sociospatial segregation, reproducing spatial structures of the past. Bogotá is a spatially divided city, supported by a segregating infrastructure provision system that makes sociospatial mobility hardly possible.
URI aims at the micro scale of sociospatial segregation in both cities: How does infrastructure provision support or challenge segregation patterns in Cape Town and Bogotá? How does the rise of the gated communities shape a new landscape of micro segregation? How does insecurity contribute to segregated neighborhoods? Based on these questions, URI is developing policy recommendations and innovative design projects that are scalable and multipliable seeking to overcome sociospatial segregation in Bogotá and Cape Town and beyond.