Academic Turns City Into a Social Experiment

This article chronicles the experiences of Antanas Mockus, mayor of Bogotá, Colombia from 1993-2002. This former university mathematician and philosopher turned politician took a new approach to creating civic pride and curtailing the numerous social ills of his city of 6.5 million. Mockus turned Bogotá into a social experiment in which he set out to address the endemic problems of 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."

At a 2004 speech at Harvard he argued in his presentation that the most effective campaigns combine material incentives with normative change and participatory stake-holding. He believes that, "the distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task," and he says that "knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humour, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change." Mockus indicates that his thinking is informed by 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.

The result was a series of social initiatives designed to change the way Bogota's population thinks about their identity as citizens and members of society, which included:

• Several "Women's Nights", where the men were encouraged to voluntarily stay home and look after the children while the women went out for a safe and carefree night on the town.
• A water conservation campaign which combined economic incentives with advertisements in which he personally appeared in the shower, turning off the water while lathering up - the result was a 14% decline in water consumption.
• A campaign in which he asked people to pay 10 percent extra in voluntary taxes. To the surprise of many, 63,000 people voluntarily paid the extra taxes.
• A campaign in which he asked people to call his office if they found a kind and honest taxi driver; he then organised a meeting with those drivers who advised him about how to improve the behaviour of mean taxi drivers.
• A campaign to paint stars on the spots where pedestrians had been killed in traffic accidents.
• Social mobilisation to protest against violence by inventing a "vaccine against violence," - asking people to draw the faces of the people who had hurt them on balloons, which they then popped.
• A campaign which embraced the concept of community policing. Mockus 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.

The success of his approach and these various interventions is reflected in the reduction of homicides from 80 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1993 to 22 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2003 and a drop in traffic fatalities 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 had been killed in traffic accidents. Mockus is also considering the possibility of launching a presidential campaign - and perhaps being in charge of a "42 million student classroom."