Enrique Peñalosa Londoño is a pragmatic politician who combines idealism with a firm grasp on reality. He was twice elected mayor of Bogotá, the fast-growing capital of Colombia, and fought special interests to transform it for the better. In his first term (1998–2000), while the country was bedeviled by drug violence and guerrilla warfare, Peñalosa focused on the pursuit of happiness—which he defined as “the ability to walk safely, meet friends, and share in creative activities.” He’s perhaps best known for developing TransMilenio, a bus-based transport system (BRT) that operates like a train without tracks on dedicated routes. It now covers 70 miles and has a daily ridership of 2.5 million. Of equal importance are his less costly incremental improvements, including protected bike paths and parks, now numbering more than 1,500, in densely populated districts. Sidewalks have been widened and cleared of parked cars and vendors.

His most daring initiative was to expropriate, for a fair price, the polo fields and riding track of the exclusive Bogotá Country Club to create an 18-acre public park. That may sound like the class-driven policies of Castro or Chávez, but Peñalosa, who was born in Washington, D.C., in the early 1950s, got over his youthful flirtation with socialism while studying at Duke University. He is reconciled to the economic inequalities of capitalism, but determined to improve the quality of life for every citizen.

Just as he borrowed and refined the concept of the BRT from the Brazilian city of Curitiba, Peñalosa’s ideas have been adopted in other locales, sometimes with his counsel. He is currently advising the authorities in Addis Ababa, the depressed capital of Ethiopia, and has offered insights to local and national governments around the world. He also lectures and serves on several important planning committees.

For Peñalosa, remaking cities is a dream within reach—achievable not decades from now, but in our lifetimes. He outlines the hurdles, and how to clear them, in the recent book Equality and the City: Urban Innovations for All Citizens (University of Pennsylvania Press), a revised English translation of a study first released in Spanish, in 2021. It is a call to action, essential reading for planners and urbanists around the world, as his strategies have been tested and applied at scale.

Consider his take on transportation. “To see expensive cars idling in traffic while buses pass swiftly alongside them amounts to democracy at work,” Peñalosa writes. Buses on dedicated lanes are cheaper than subways for cities to operate and can carry more passengers, especially in densely populated areas. (Though Peñalosa admits to owning a car, he uses it very rarely, preferring to cycle around Bogotá on its 560 kilometers of protected bikeways.) He decries the emphasis on motorways and parking lots for deforming cities, and deplores the ways emerging societies are repeating the mistakes of the West. In his opinion, the urbanization of Latin America in the late 20th century offers a catalog of what not to do.

Equality of access to streets, greenery, and water is a recurring theme in Peñalosa’s thinking. While mayor, his proposals to open up the riverfront and build a hiking trail through the mountains that surround Bogotá were blocked by opponents using specious environmental arguments. Peñalosa denounces the hypocrisy of those who put a few trees ahead of the greater good, and argues that public respect for nature will increase as more people are able to experience it firsthand.

What about crime? When Peñalosa presided over Bogotá, the construction of new public schools run by the university, libraries, and sports facilities in underserved neighborhoods likely contributed to a sharp drop in murders, from around 88 per 100,000 people in 1993 to around 14 in 2019 following his second mayoral term. That’s about half the rate of Washington, D.C. (The second Colombian city of Medellín, once terrorized by drug gangs, has also become much safer and boasts many of the same improvements, including spectacular, though costly, cable-car lines linking rundown mountainside districts to its center.) Peñalosa argues that public space needs to be not only accessible, but secure enough to use. He redeveloped two high-crime voids at the heart of Bogotá—one as a park, another as a hub for creatives—and ten skateboard parks provide an outlet for the energy of youths who might otherwise have funneled it elsewhere.

Peñalosa was groomed for his life’s work in childhood. “When I was about 10, the older boys at school used to shout insults, or even have at me with their fists, because my father was the first director and the public face of a national agrarian land reform institute,” he writes. “Part of his job was to expropriate large tracts of idle land from absentee landlords and redistribute them to subsistence farmers [...] Thus, from an early age I was more or less bullied into thinking about the merits of agrarian land reform and, more broadly, about inequality.”

Like Peñalosa’s approach to city-building, his book has an immediacy and a human dimension that most urban-planning studies lack. He cites a maid who asked if she might ride the TransMilenio to work, because it was an hour faster than the car her thoughtful employer was sending to pick her up. He meets a woman who was building houses, one at a time, in an illegal settlement, and realizes she is providing a vital service to her neighbors. Later, as mayor, he legalized many of these settlements, making their inhabitants eligible for city services.

“A city reflects the values of the society that makes it. Creating our city is rather similar to making our lives. It shows how its residents wish to live,” Peñalosa insists. “But the city also constructs values, attitudes, and ways of living.” The responsibility of city-making also extends beyond its citizens, as he notes early in the book: “National governments would do well to remember that their major cities are not only the locomotives of progress for the country but also the principal source of funds to support their poorer regions, which are mainly rural.” He sees little chance of arresting urban growth in existing metropolises and anticipates that African cities, such as Lagos and Addis Ababa, may become the world’s largest in the next few decades. His only answer is to plan their expansion in a rational way and to improve the quality of smaller cities in order to help absorb the flight from rural poverty. Public land banks should be established to discourage private speculation, he advises, and cities should purchase rural land to create parks and in anticipation of future growth.

Having visited Bogotá and Medellín and seen firsthand how livable they’ve become, I’m impressed by Peñalosa’s achievement and influence on home ground. It’s less certain how effective he can be as an advisor. The world is full of politicians making extravagant promises and planners drafting idealistic solutions. What’s lacking is leadership that is committed to overcoming inertia and special interests, as various delays, de-prioritization, and project founderings (seen, for instance, in the current state of the TransMilenio) following Peñalosa’s mayorship attest. In New York City, a congestion tax that could ameliorate congestion and subsidize public transit is urgently needed, but it has been “indefinitely paused” and blocked. Progressives have urged São Paulo and Los Angeles to develop their rivers as linear parks to serve communities with no open spaces, but they are still unsightly drainage channels. And I’m dismayed by Peñalosa’s acceptance of explosive population growth in the emerging world as inevitable. There, the most pressing needs are to educate and empower women and combat the forces of reaction before the cities become even more squalid and unmanageable than they are today.

Every settlement in the world has its own distinctive culture and potential, while sharing problems with many others. The value of this book is to show that those obstacles are not insurmountable. As Peñalosa writes, “Cities can foster at least two kinds of equality: quality-of-life equality and what I call democratic equality. And they can foster an environment in which nobody feels inferior or excluded.”