Former mayor Enrique Peñalosa and Harvard’s Alisha C. Holland explore the public good in urban design

Cambridge, Massachusetts (May 14, 2025)—What makes a city fair and livable for all? The former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, Enrique Peñalosa, joined Harvard professor Alisha C. Holland, an expert in Latin American social policy and governance, for a conversation hosted by the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. Holland, the Gates Professor of Developing Societies in Harvard’s Department of Government, guided Peñalosa through reflections on how cities can deliver better public goods—parks, transit, schools, and streetscapes—that elevate quality of life across entire urban populations.

Peñalosa made the case that cities often amplify inequality because land, services, and public investments are unevenly distributed. Traditional metrics like the Gini coefficient measure household income inequality, but they miss how public goods can level life experience. A child in a low-income household, for example, can enjoy a much higher quality of life if they have access to excellent public spaces, transit, and schools. In Peñalosa’s view, cities are powerful tools to spread improvements by delivering universal access to shared services that uplift everyone. A good city, he argues, creates not just material improvements, but shared well-being and belonging—a sense that all residents are part of a community of equals.

Bogotá’s experience offers global lessons. Peñalosa described how the city was transformed through public investments: reducing car dependency by creating a bus rapid transit system and hundreds of kilometers of bike lanes, recovering land for public parks, and redesigning streets for pedestrians rather than cars. Sometimes politically risky, these moves demonstrated that prioritizing the collective good can pay off in measurable, long-term improvements in city life.

The changes in Bogotá proved a success: the city saw a marked shift in commuting habits between 2000 and 2015, according to the World Resources Institute and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Even as the city’s wealth and number of cars grew, the share of private car trips declined from 17% to around 13% of total trips, public transit remained dominant at over 60%, and bicycle use rose from under 1% to more than 5%. The city’s public green space tripled as it added more than 1,100 parks, reclaimed spaces adjacent to canals, and expanded greenways and public pedestrian areas, all of which augmented access to recreation especially in lower-income neighborhoods. As Peñalosa wrote in his recent book, Equality and the City, “Beyond income equality, there are other powerful forms of equality, many of which a good city can construct.”

Holland asked Penalosa how he pursued his agenda in the face of political opposition. She highlighted the paradox of leading democratically while acting decisively to advance mayoral priorities, noting that public participation and civic engagement are critical to the legitimacy and success of city leaders’ proposals. Peñalosa responded that leaders must be committed to doing the right thing to serve all city residents, even in the face of opposition. “If all citizens are equal, there is an extremely powerful consequence and need that public good prevails over private interest,” Peñalosa said. “This is not just poetry. It has very powerful implications.”

Pursuing his agenda aggressively was essential, Peñalosa asserted, in order to turn his government into an engine for broad-reaching public well-being. “If you have four years as mayor and you want to change the city where there were no sidewalks, no bike, no public transport… you have to choose whether you want to do the things that you think are correct or you want to be nice and loved. If you want just to be nice and loved, then you will not do anything.”

The event’s speakers suggested that city leaders everywhere can learn from Bogotá’s advances. The challenge is not only to design efficient transportation or green space, but to ensure city investments touch every neighborhood and resident. In a time of growing urban populations, Peñalosa’s message was clear: cities can and must deliver improvements that benefit the whole community—not just the few.