Manual for Designing Urban Imaginaries Colombia

What does it mean to reimagine the cities of tomorrow? How do we create urban environments that empower the many, rather than enrich the few? The Manual for Designing Urban Imaginaries Colombia is grounded in experimentation and aims to confront one of humanity’s most pressing challenges: the complexities of transformation in an urban age.

Situated at the nexus of urban research, design, and activism, the present volume focuses on Colombia’s rapidly urbanizing areas, where decades of armed conflict and forced displacement from neighboring Venezuela have given way to new waves of social and environmental issues. In such a challenging sociopolitical context, this manual—emerging from research by building at the ETH Zurich under the frame of the Colombia Urban Transformation Program—explores the spaces where architectural practice and design thinking meet the hopes, needs, and perceptions of communities. The concept of the “urban imaginary”—denoting the desires of the collective—is evoked as a means of developing strategies for marginalized voices, so as to shape the future of their built and natural environments.

The manual demonstrates that true transformation is possible when alliances are forged, when diverse actors meet at a common table to negotiate, deliberate, and build solutions together. It also underscores that design and multiple forms of knowledge—scientific, cultural, and lived—must converge if we are to address the paradox of hyper-diversity and inequality that defines so many urban contexts.

For anyone navigating the complexity of an urbanizing Earth, the Manual for Designing Urban Imaginaries Colombia is a call to action. It reminds us that each and every street corner and urban periphery holds the potential to inspire transformation, and that reimagining urban life is not just an architectural endeavor—it is a deeply human one. Though grounded in Colombia, the manual’s lessons extend to global areas grappling with displacement, inequality, and rapid urbanization. Ultimately, this book is about embracing the most expansive and generative territory of urbanization: the human imagination.

• Edited by Hubert Klumpner
• Edited by Diego Ceresuela-Wiesmann
• Edited by Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou
• Designed by Ruedi & Vera Baur
• Contributions by Armando Silva
• Contributions by Lucy Bullivant

This timely book offers a dynamic vision for urban transformation amidst, and beyond, multiple crises that the world faces today. It shows how peace and sustainability are built not only through treaties and agreements, plans and policies, but through schools, culture, sports, communities, and sustainable homes brought to life through digital innovation and participatory governance. Creatively structured across the two different geographies of Colombia and Switzerland, it provides an innovative guiding framework that leverages sustainable, inclusive urban transformation as an approach to achieve shared economic prosperity.

— Anacláudia Rossbach, Executive Director, UN-Habitat

This is not simply a book about architecture, but about people. At a time when such a transformative perspective is urgently needed, this manual reminds us that cities are real, living, inspiring, and magical places that still have to be carefully designed. Hubert Klumpner and Diego Ceresuela-Wiesmann are two of the architects whose work and ideas engage radically with local culture, resulting in projects deeply rooted in local culture from the reggaeton in Medellín to the carnival in Barranquilla. Their work gives tangible form to prototyping an architecture rooted in and sustaining a distinctly Colombian way of life. A book for architects and for anyone imagining the cities we hope to inhabit.

— John Lin, Codirector, Rural Urban Framework (RUF), Hong Kong

The essential lesson we learned from our experience in Colombia with students is that we have to approach any place or project with an open mind, free from our standards. That we have to admit we don’t know; that we have to observe, understand, and be willing to learn. To learn from the inherent ingenuity of communities that, with minimal resources, have created functioning, self-sufficient spaces. To learn from another climate, another culture, another view of the world. And to adapt. There, as in Africa years before, when we were young architects, we learned profound lessons in a “low-tech,” environmentally responsive, resource-smart, high-generosity architecture, where spatial freedom is achieved through intuition and resourcefulness, through creative improvisation rather than costly technology. And with kindness and a good mood.

— Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal, Architects, ETH Zurich design studio Colombia, 2019–20

“Urban Imaginaries” archives and documents are set to be recognized by UNESCO within the Memory of the World Programme in Latin America, stepping into the transformative realm of design. This manual captures that powerful spirit, inspiring visionaries to protect and build upon Colombia’s urban legacy for generations to come.

— Laura Sánchez, President, UNESCO Memory of the World Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean