REACT Cities
About Bogotá
Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, has around eight million inhabitants (Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística [DANE], 2025) and lies at roughly 2,600 metres above sea level on the Andean plateau. It is a city made up of many cities, home to people who have arrived from every corner of the country and from other nationalities. Known as the city of opportunity and diversity, it is also a place where inequality is lived every day.
At REACT, we come to listen. We will talk with young people about how, in their everyday lives, they care for the social fabric, create, organise, propose change and imagine a different future. We are taking the time to get to know leaders, collectives, cultural spaces and organisations already working in the city, in order to build relationships with them based on trust and reciprocity.
Emerging Themes
Educational and labour exclusion, informality and overqualification affect young women and young people from working-class neighbourhoods in particular ways (Sánchez Torres, 2021; UNDP, 2022). In the city with the highest relative access to higher education in the country, qualifications do not always translate into stable livelihoods, and the gap between expectations and opportunities generates frustration.
Juvenicide refers to more than the physical death of young people: it describes a structural process of precarisation, stigmatisation and unequal exposure to violence that erodes the conditions for a dignified life and future (Amador-Baquiro & Muñoz, 2022). In Bogotá, institutional violence and the criminalisation of protest run through everyday experience, as the 21N protests (2019) and the 2021 National Strike made evident.
Bogotá has long been home to a wide range of youth-led collectives working in community action, culture and communication. These collectives are recognised for their track record and their capacity for social transformation and influence through care, popular pedagogy, artistic expression and digital activism. They operate from neighbourhoods, cultural spaces, informal economies and digital environments (OJB, 2020).
Youth in Bogotá are shaped by diverse and intersecting experiences, marked by gender, territory, identity, sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts, and educational and work trajectories. These give rise to their subjectivities, their ways of living, their sense of what it means to be “young” and their varying capacities for agency. Youth participation in Bogotá is built from a combination of the everyday, the territorial and the political.
Public conversation in Bogotá is marked by strong ideological polarisation and by stigmatising narratives, both within and beyond social media. Digital environments are places where young people get informed, voice disagreement and organise, but also where these tensions play out. Building trust in this kind of context means working with careful language, honouring bonds and relationships built gradually and understanding that reciprocity with the collectives and organisations that make up Bogotá’s social fabric is fundamental.
