{"id":29596,"date":"2018-09-01T03:00:42","date_gmt":"2018-09-01T07:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/?p=29596"},"modified":"2019-09-11T02:10:31","modified_gmt":"2019-09-11T06:10:31","slug":"hearing-future-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/2018\/09\/01\/hearing-future-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"Hearing from the Future of Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat I like about this landscape is that it’s not painted\u2026.I can move around into it and feel it. I think about all the things I can find there. But, after I leave this picture, something always changes, and I do too.” \u2014Gabriela Villate, 7 years old.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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“This is my drawing. I watch as the mountains come up close and then move back.” Photo: Fundaci\u00f3n Cerros de Bogot\u00e1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

People see a face <\/strong>in the landscape, one which is directly related to their daily lives, to their well-being and to their sense of belonging to a place. This is the idea of the landscape as a “face, or geographical form of space” (Fernandez-Rodriguez, 2007).<\/p>\n

What happens when we \u201cfreeze\u201d the landscape on pieces of paper? To find the answer, for the past eight years our foundation, Fundaci\u00f3n Cerros de Bogot\u00e1<\/a>,<\/em> has been inviting children from Bogota and the surrounding region to paper our walls with their landscape drawings. (Bogot\u00e1 is a humid tropical city located at 8,700 feet above sea level, on a highland plateau in the eastern range of the Andes.)<\/p>\n

Last year alone, children from diverse backgrounds sent us more than 2,000 drawings of Bogot\u00e1’s mountains and their surroundings.\u00a0Some of the drawings are included in this essay, but you can see many of them in the video below.<\/p>\n

In pondering all of these children’s drawings and listening to their stories about their interests, we began to realize that these children would be our greatest allies in bringing about the changes we have been dreaming about.<\/blockquote><\/figure>Their drawings interpret the landscape from a multitude of perspectives, including the aesthetic, the spontaneous, the experiential, the critical and the residential. They reveal how the landscape plays a permanent role in forming children’s awareness of their habitat, how it lends meaning to their world while acting as a mirror of their psychological states of well-being or despair, serenity or anxiety, safety or danger, happiness or sadness. Through these drawings it is clear that the landscape possesses intangible values that influences everything from a city dweller’s sense of self-identity to their cultural expression (Zuluaga, 2015).<\/p>\n