The first guest speaker invited by the City of Santo Domingo to its Santo Domingo 2015 Congress, Enrique Penalosa turned his talk into an ode for turning Santo Domingo into a walking city with parks and public spaces.
“While today it is normal to give preference to cars in a city, in the future we will see this as a savage phase of civilization,” he told his audience.
He urged the construction of bicycle routes, saying that wealthy cities such as Copenhagen and Zurich had these. He said that the bicycle is a symbol of human dignity and democracy because for a price of US$20 a resident can buy one and is then equaled to the person who buys a US$50,000 vehicle. He commented that in Bogota they built 350 kms of bicycle routes that today mobilize more people than the metro of Medellin.
Enrique Penalosa was emphatic that cities need to go back to the days when they were walking cities. He highlighted that cities need to decide where they are going to give preference to people or cars. He said this is not a matter of money, arguing that when Central Park was built in New York, that city was poorer than Santo Domingo. He said that cities have responsibilities even with those that are not yet born, and should be planned for the long term.
He said the construction of parks can reduce crime and commented how works in Bogota to create public spaces reduced crime from 87 per 100,000 to 24 per 100,000 people, without having to add new jails and police. He explained this is so because the potential delinquents are spending time in the parks with their children, not in bars drinking.
He mentioned that during his administration as mayor, Bogota built 35 kms of lineal parks.
“If we want tourists to come to Santo Domingo, Santo Domingo needs to have sidewalks that are three times what they are today,” he urged asking if the city wanted to be a New York or a Houston? He then mentioned that people who visit Disney only spend 3% of their time at the attractions, and 97% in the public spaces and walkways, stressing its success was in its walkways.
Penalosa urged Mayor Salcedo not to fear businessmen who would protest the conversion of streets into pedestrian malls, saying that in the medium term they would be thankful when business picked up.
“Sidewalks are cousins to parks, not to highways,” he stressed, adding that overpasses demote the value of avenues, and are futile because they become congestioned after only five or ten years. This is the case of the overpasses built on the 27 of Febrero and John F. Kennedy Avenue during the 1996-2000 presidency of Fernandez by today’s Metro Minister Diandino Pena.
Penalosa said that builders need to factor in underground parking so as not to rob the city of sidewalk space and showed several slides in his presentation where cars had engulfed sidewalk areas in Santo Domingo.
“Humans have the right to mobilize in the city without getting killed,” he stressed.
“A civilized city is not the one that has more cars, but the one where children on tricycles can get around,” he concluded.