The rising poverty rates, internal displacement, market-oriented development, and social inequalities are some of the many factors that shaped the binary configuration of the so-called formal and informal urban fabric of Bogotá. Urban informality emerges as the answer to a lack of opportunities and spatial offers, evidencing the inability of the existing planning structures to embody and decode the complex conditions, dynamics, and vulnerability gradients that these environments entail. Bogotá’s upgrading program, despite being crucial instrument in the transformation of informal areas, has proven to be insufficient to overcome the fragmentation between formal and informal urban dynamics, in which the generic and rigid approach has impeded the achievement of a structural change and local empowerment in a long term perspective. The thesis proposes an alternative assessment and planning framework, as an opportunity to improve the current planning methods within a new long term perspective, that embraces and increases the adaptive capacity of the diverse vulnerable groups and systemic interrelations in the current structures of Bogotá. This, by redefining the current overview of risk and to vulnerability, as potential tools to improve the local conditions from a co-evolutionary socio-ecological approach. The proposed Framework is therefore not a definitive and static project. In turn, it is a dynamic tool to reveal the diverse challenges but also the amount of endogenous opportunities in the local informal environments. By redefining the role of nature and the role of formal and informal actors as co-agents of change in the development process, the proposed model aims to transform the segregated dynamics of the city, empower the local and most neglected communities, reinforce bottom-up approaches and provide alternative possibilities for more resilient socio-ecological systems that in turn are prepared to an uncertain future.

This project displays an explorative attempt at redefining the megablock planning concept. The Greater Bay Area (GBA), as the site of interest, is undergoing rapid metropolization, with a risk of resulting in the formation of indistinguishable, generic urban structures. The fast development and the migration process have defined a region with multiple identities and diverse groups of people living in it. The social and spatial implications of the metropolization process reflect a segregation between the actual planning system and the diverse people that live in this region. The proposal aims to transform the megablock, a traditional, structural form of planning that is a form of de-contextualized, top down planning based around an economic, private-driven market, into a planning tool that enables the cohabitation of multiple lifestyles that creates social networks of interaction, activates spaces of the existing context and relates them with new developments. Therefore, the redefining of the megablock intends to find how rapid urbanization and the enhancement of distinct local and external identities can go hand-in-hand in a multiplicity of urban contexts, creating a balance between quantity and quality and creating a process of place making that allows the enhancement and strengthening of the notion of identity in a local, urban and regional scale. The Megablock becomes a sustainable prototype for future urbanization and a morphological spatial structure that re-establish a spatial order and framework for the transitions and relations between diverse places and people.