It’s wet season, but this morning’s downpour does little to deter the rhythm along La Carrera Séptima, or Bogotá’s Seventh Avenue. Cyclists and pedestrians weave past ambulatory vendors with carts of avocados, ginger sweets, and phone cases, their sales pitches rising above the din of the street. Toy cars, lightbulbs, and hand-beaded jewelry glisten with raindrops, arranged neatly on tarps that demarcate vendors’ territories. Police officers approach a recycler gathering bottles; a tourist bargains for a jacket; two women find each other in the middle of the road, embracing as their coats become speckled with the intensifying rain.

La Séptima is the most emblematic road in Bogotá, traversed by more than two million people each day. Along this single road — part marketplace, part protest route, part transportation hub — Bogotá’s history unfolds. For nearly a year, I traced its rhythms as a pedestrian, commuter, inhabitant, and researcher. Through all its incarnations, one image endured: the road as a living body. It is Bogotá’s backbone, its vital artery, its heart. It bleeds, bears scars, and demands care.

Diagnosing Disorder

The human body has long served as a metaphorical blueprint for understanding and correcting the city’s perceived chaos. Since the colonial era, metaphors of circulation, congestion, and contamination have enabled planners to diagnose urban ‘dysfunction’ and prescribe interventions.

Paved by Indigenous laborers in the 1600s, La Séptima emerged as the city’s “vital heart,” an anthropomorphized concentration of colonial power. But as the avenue was endowed with life, its former inhabitants were denied theirs. Afrodescendant and Indigenous communities were relegated to the city’s peripheries, or “bowels,” only permitted to inhabit the road as laboring bodies. These corporeal metaphors were not just rhetorical flourishes, but instruments of a colonial logic that naturalized hierarchy, structured access to space, and legitimized domination.

This grammar of exclusion persisted well into the twentieth century. After the 1948 Bogotazo, a period of immense violence that left La Séptima “bleeding,” planners from the Global North described the city center as a “patient awaiting surgery,” a passive body in need of expert cure. Through the depoliticized language of hygiene, order, and care, entire neighborhoods were demolished and displaced. Urban disorder was pathologized, and massive interventions were reframed as vital surgery rather than technocratic control.

Today, La Séptima continues to mediate visibility, access, and stratification. The street is still diagnosed as a site of congestion and social disorder. It is cast as a fragile being in “critical condition,” while informal vendors and unhoused people are described as “evils that obstruct modernization.” However, contemporary planning has traded the invasive surgeries of past eras for urban acupuncture, or small, localized interventions designed to regenerate civic life. The language is gentler, but the underlying impulse remains the same: healing the street through discipline. The Bogotá Humana project (2015) proposed to make La Séptima “the most human street in the capital,” but this humanness involved expanded surveillance and policing, displacing those who called it home. Subsequent initiatives, such as the Plan de Revitalización del Centro Tradicional (2015) and the Operación Espacio Público (2025), pushed this logic further as the city sought to “recover its heart” through “care” that resulted in arrests, seizures of property, and heightened surveillance.

Beneath the tender vocabulary lies a familiar politics of control, where care becomes a technology of governance. The road is humanized at the expense of its inhabitants, legitimizing coercive interventions in the name of healing rather than fostering a sustained, reciprocal commitment to those who give it life.

A Politics of Vitality

The pathology that afflicts La Séptima, and many cities in the Global South, may be less material than epistemic. It lies in the inherited compulsion to cure, solve, and pacify disorder, mistaking vitality for disease. Contemporary planning practices continue to treat our urban spaces as patients to be disciplined, rather than as living ecologies sustained by friction and heterogeneity. But if metaphors can reproduce exclusion, they can also open space for imagining other futures.

In October 2025, the Secretary of Social Integration hosted a fair for informal vendors along La Séptima, providing childcare, elder support, legal recognition, and new infrastructures of mutual aid. This initiative gestures toward an alternative politics of vitality — one that recognizes vendors as inherent to the urban metabolism rather than impediments to it. Similarly, organizations like the Unión General de Trabajadores Independientes (UGTI) and the Asociación Cooperativa de Recicladores de Bogotá (ARB) engage in daily work with informal vendors and independent recyclers to protect their livelihoods. Instead of sanitizing perceived disorder, these organizations work to nourish the vital, reciprocal, and marginalized systems that are necessary to city life.

Borrowing from AbdouMaliq Simone, these interventions, and many more throughout the Global South, invoke a new metaphor: people as infrastructure. Here, the labor, care, and improvisation that sustain urban life are prioritized, rather than the concrete arteries endowed with metaphorical vitality. Indeed, acknowledging the agency of infrastructure need not come at the expense of our own.

Today, planners need to reject the moralizing logics of care and cure, and the colonial grammars they carry, and embrace disorder and informality as integral to the city’s ecology. Thus, the most meaningful urban interventions may not be material at all, but relational, driven by the logic of sustaining people as the city’s most vital infrastructure, rather than infrastructure as its most vital flesh.

By evening, the rain begins again, and La Séptima glistens beneath the streetlights. Steam rises from food carts; conversations blur; the crowd swells. The street’s pulse quickens, animated by the human infrastructures that refuse cure. These metaphors ask us to linger in the unruly rhythms of the street and recognize that agency is multiple, disorder is vital, and care must be continually reclaimed.