The municipal government of Cali, Colombia, recently announced plans to rent out unoccupied spaces under inner-city elevated avenues and highways for commercial use. This reconversion and privatization of public space can be seen as a small yet revealing part of the recent urban renewal that has destroyed much of the city’s architectural patrimony and popular culture in the name of modernization.

In 2015, to pave the way for Ciudad Paraiso, an urban oasis of shiny new apartment towers and a luxury mall in the commercial center of Cali, three traditional working-class neighborhoods were demolished. Ten years after the tractors did their dirty work, however, only a single residential tower has been built (though not finished) while a huge parking lot marks the spot where thousands of people used to live.

In 2024, after successfully hosting COP16 and realizing the city’s potential for “green tourism,” the local government got to work “renewing” the center of Cali. Without any investment to improve the quality of life for residents or locals, the city center was “beautified” by running informal vendors off of the streets and prostitutes out of the parks. 

In Cali, as in cities throughout the world, urban renewal and “beautification” has a long history that is directly tied to European ideas of modernization. In the 1940s, Cali, the third largest urban center in Colombia with only around 180,000 inhabitants, still mired in “feudal urbanism,” could barely be considered a city. The city’s infrastructure had been designed exclusively to meet the needs of the local agricultural plantation owners and industrialists and thus the rest of the city was left to its own devices, with marginalized neighborhoods spreading haphazardly up and over the hills that surround the city to accommodate the masses of factory and farm workers. 

When Bogota and other major cities in Colombia decided to contract a European city builder to help guide them into the future, Cali was loathe to be left behind. Cali’s 1947 Future Plan, drawn up by the Viennese architect Karl Heinrich Brunner, one of the first generation of European urban planners, was a comprehensive study of the city with the aim of organizing its long-term growth and urbanization.

As Brunner noted, Cali has a river that runs through it like the best European cities, and “is admirably well-located and its topography corresponds to that of a modern city.” Brunner believed that of all the cities in Colombia, Cali most fit “the character of a Californian city, that is, picturesque, modern, sunny. A city that embodies my greatest ideal for the whole world: the model large city-garden.”

In Brunner’s Manual of Urbanism, published in 1939, he sought to “contribute to the establishment of the consciousness of American urbanism” by combining politics, sociology, urban engineering and urban art. Trained as a pilot, Brunner had learned how to take aerial photographs of cities, and this provided him with a privileged view of the task at hand. 

Brunner started from the conviction that the already existing urban structure of Cali should be preserved but with new green areas and new infrastructure added to meet the needs of an expanding city. Brunner was able to carry out this vision of a future city in Bogota, where he designed several walkable, residential neighborhoods with curved parkways and gardens, as well as a major avenue that still functions nearly one hundred years later.

In Cali, however, Brunner’s design for a modern, futuristic city was met with resistance. Not only did his plan not align with local real estate and business interests but the local oligarchy saw no reason to spend large sums of money to modernize and democratize the city for all its inhabitants.

Brunner, the victim of “anti-foreigner prejudices,” as he saw it, and accused of taking on private contracts while employed by the government, was fired. His Future Plan for Cali, meticulously drawn to a scale of 1:5000, along with his watercolors, aerial photographs and hand-drawn landscapes of the city were shelved and eventually lost. After dedicating 15 years of his life and work in Colombia, Brunner returned to Vienna where he became one of Europe’s most distinguished city planners.

In 1950, ten years after Brunner’s departure, Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect, one of the most prominent proponents of European modernism, was brought in to create a new Future Plan for Bogota and other Colombian cities, including Cali.

Le Corbusier, associated at that time with Paul Lester Wiener and Josep Luis Sert in Town Planning Associates (TPA), with headquarters in New York City, believed architecture and urban planning should be modeled on the standardized, assembly-line automotive industry in order to better service a growing international market. Corbusier & TPA, one of the most important global architecture franchises of its time, sold its model of modernist, hi-rise apartment buildings, commercial centers, and straight, multi-laned inner-city highways to several cities in Colombia and the rest of Latin America.

Brunner’s ideal of a garden-city and his respect for already-existing urban centers was not shared by his successors. Le Corbusier and TPA aimed to construct a shining new city in Cali on the smoking ruins of demolished inner-city neighborhoods. At the heart of the TPA Plan for Cali was a giant commercial center that would be connected to all parts of the city by major roadways and pedestrian bridges. In his book Can Our Cities Survive? (1942), Josep Luis Sert asserted: “These commercial centers are the element that distinguishes small places of rural character from true cities.”

However, being that there was no government office in Cali that could supply TPA with the precise information it needed to create its Future Plan, deadlines were not met and the future of the Future Plan was compromised. To make matters worse, a change in the administration brought in new politicians that were indisposed to TPA’s plan. In 1953, having already been paid for, the TPA’s Future Plan for Cali was shelved before construction could begin.

The two visionary Future Plans for Cali, drawn up by some of the most prominent European city builders, would have remained mere sketches on paper had it not been for the Juegos Panamericanos, the world’s second largest sports event, which selected Cali as its site for its 1971 event.

Radical changes in the city’s infrastructure had to be undertaken in order to meet the Juegos Panamericanos’ strict requirements. To construct a modern city in the center of Cali, several large, older constructions (a military base, a giant old hotel), as well as whole residential neighborhoods, were razed to the ground. In their place, huge concrete constructions and infrastructure rose up above the low-lying city.

Before skyscrapers and malls, cities in Latin America were judged as modern based on their infrastructure, especially the bridges, tunnels and inner-city highways that allowed motorized vehicles to carry middle-class citizens at an ever-faster clip into the bright future.
A Roadway Plan for Cali, designed in 1969, drew upon, directly or indirectly, both Brunner and Le Corbusier’s previous work. As envisioned by both of these European futurists, the modernization of Cali’s inner-city roadways was to be achieved through the construction of elevated bridges, overpasses and tunnels to connect new highways to La Quinta, Cali’s main north-south avenue. 

La Quinta, built in 1690, is often described as Cali’s most beautiful avenue, its name and importance evoking comparisons to New York City’s Fifth Avenue. The wide avenue stretches straight for almost eight miles, from Carrera 1 to Carrera 100, and was originally designed to connect the sugar and coffee haciendas in the south to the political and economic power in the city center.

In 1969, in preparation for the Juegos Panamericanos, la Quinta was finally fully paved and given stoplights and traffic signs, an attempt to end the urban chaos that had reigned up until then. For the inauguration of the Juegos Panamericanos, and boasting a series of new winding, clover-like overpasses and curved concrete interconnections to new elevated highways, la Quinta was dubbed Cali’s “Modernization Way.”

Today, la Quinta serves as the cultural lifeline of the city, with the main public hospital and public library, bull ring, soccer stadium, and largest public university, as well as many of the traditional Salsa discotecas, all located along the avenue. Although the overarching concrete multi-lane highways and inner-city roadways that feed into la Quinta still function, they have long since served as shining symbols of modernization. Many of the empty spaces under the overpasses have become sites of abandonment and social disintegration and are ominous, malodorous spaces that serve as fumaderos (places to smoke weed), metederos (places to smoke basuco), cagaderos (places to shit), and desnucaderos (places to have sex) for the city’s large homeless population.

These architectural dead zones on La Quinta, however, also provide space to alternative cultures and economics, as they are urban sites where indigenous people can sell crafts, informal vendors sell fruit, and pirate taxis offer their services. The acoustics of these semi-underground spaces and the graffiti covering the walls make them perfect settings for salsa, rap and reggae dance parties.

La Quinta has always been a center of protest, with marches organized by indigenous groups, unions and students travelling along this avenue. The greatest concentration of protests held during the National Strikes of 2019 and 2022, called in response to severe economic reforms imposed upon the working class, took place on this avenue. During these protests, and to shut down traffic and to keep protestors safe from violence at the hands of the riot police and paramilitary groups, barricades constructed from tree trunks, metal objects and tires, often lit on fire, were erected on La Quinta (in part why Cali earned its nickname The City of Resistance).

During the National Strikes, the semi-underground spaces along the length of la Quinta served as meeting points for protestors, as sites for soup kitchens and improvised dorms, while the wall space was used for political graffiti and street murals. These empty spaces were also the sites of the most violent police attacks, leading to the murder of several peaceful protestors (murals located in these spaces memorialize fallen comrades).

European city builders were optimists who firmly believed that the lines and geometric forms they traced on paper would give rise to shiny, happy cities all over the planet. The plans they drew up decades ago, however, did not foresee how the social downside (mass migration, poverty, inequality) of 20^th century neoliberal economic policies in Cali could derail their utopic visions of futuristic cities, nor could they imagine how the non-functional spaces of their brutalist designs would be used as sites of resistance against the abuses and inequalities of modernity.

Instead of the wonders of a garden-city, European modernity left behind only brutalist constructions and ugly concrete bunkers in the city of Cali, with modern roadways literally passing over the heads of people struggling to make a living down below in spaces that never see the light of day. Although it promised an increase in the quality of life for the people in Cali, designs created to end urban chaos and to impel the city into the future ended up displacing thousands of working-class people and demolishing whole neighborhoods, thus revealing the destructive side of European modernization.

The obsession with modernizing and “beautifying” Cali nonetheless continues. To rid the city of its dark, smelly spaces of resistance, the local government in Cali is currently searching to find a way to commercialize the dead zones under the overpasses, especially those located on la Quinta. Illuminating these dark, empty spaces in order to install chains of convenience stores will, however, in no way solve the problem. Adapting these spaces for the use of marginalized communities, especially young working-class people, by creating skate parks, cultural centers or community orchards, however, would be a step in the right direction towards creating a true American garden-city.