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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PEÑALOSA’S CONFERENCE IN GUADALAJARA

In 2003, Enrique Peñalosa visited Guadalajara for the first time
to give a talk titled “Una infinidad de pequeñas cosas” (An Infinity of
Small Things). Peñalosa’s talk in Guadalajara in 2003 was the trig-
gering event that resulted in fifteen study tours of local politicians,
36
[36] Empresario is a difficult word planners, empresarios, bus company owners, ngos and journalists
to translate into English; it could be to learn from Bogotá. In 2004, inspired by Bogotá’s Ciclovía, the may-
translated as both entrepreneur and
business owner. Therefore, I kept the or of Guadalajara inaugurated Vía Recreactiva in Guadalajara, Latin
Spanish original. America’s second largest car-free street program which draws about
250,000 participants to walk and bike in the city streets every Sunday.
A couple of years after, the governor of the state of Jalisco inaugurated
Macrobús, a brt line that moves about 125,000 people per day in
Guadalajara. Macrobús not only looked shockingly similar to Bogotá’s
TransMilenio brt, it had, indeed, a Colombian as head of the system.
But what exactly is the connection between the mobilization of
Bogotá’s policy ideas by Peñalosa in 2003 in Guadalajara and those
policy outcomes? And how can we analyze that connection? An analy-
sis that assume this relationship to be a linear policy knowledge trans-
fer between Bogotá and Guadalajara’s mayors will fail to illuminate the
different actors, practices and spaces that needed to be assembled and
mobilized for a policy idea to actually be learned and adopted in anoth-
er city. There are, after all, plenty of examples of great ideas that never
leave conference rooms. Indeed, brt has been happening already in
Curitiba or Quito since the 1970s. Why adopt them now in Guadala-
jara? Why was the Bogotá example so appealing? Similarly, an analysis
that hurries to assume that this policy transfer is happening because
of an all-encompassing global force that is moving all cities towards a
particular way of organizing urban space and transportation systems
will also fail to understand the different local and transnational actors
that need to collaborate in order to introduce a new urban planning
policy in a city’s agenda. In the following sections, I pay particular at-
tention to the practices through which Bogotá policies were mobi-
lized and learned in this forum, the physical and spatial characteristics
where these practices took place as well as who benefitted from the
urban governance re-arrangement that the learning and face-to-face
communication that took place during the forum facilitated. To do so
I rely on a combination of research methods between 2011 and 2014
that include: 1) in-depth interviews with more than thirty policy ac-
tors involved in the mobilization of the Bogotá model in Guadalajara;
2) archival research and content analysis of documents, conference
proceedings and newspaper articles about Bogotá policies produced
by Guadalajara journalists and the organizations Guadalajara 2020
and Colectivo Ecologista Jalisco; and 3) participant observation in

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