From Bogotá with Love: A Philosopher in the City

Nov 08, 2025 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Georgetown and Bogotá face different oceans. One stretches toward the Atlantic, the other breathes the salt of the Pacific. Between them rise the Andean mountains, and between them too lie centuries of difference -of language, landscape, and history. Yet these two cities, so far apart, share something deeper than geography. Both are human places struggling to find harmony between their physical growth and their civic soul.

In the 1990s, Bogotá was a city in despair. Violence was rampant, corruption commonplace, traffic anarchy daily. The people had retreated into distrust and private survival. It was a city not unlike others across the developing world: big in population but small in hope. Then something astonishing happened: Bogotá elected a philosopher as mayor.

His name was Antanas Mockus, a university rector with a Lithuanian name and a Colombian heart. He was not a businessman, soldier, or party politician. He was a thinker, an educator who believed that ethics, imagination, and humour could rebuild what decades of bureaucracy and police could not. When he entered office in 1995, the experts predicted failure. Instead, he gave the city back its faith in itself.

Mockus’s idea was simple yet profound: laws alone do not civilize a people; culture does. He called his programme cultura ciudadana — “citizen culture.” It meant using every tool of art, philosophy, and common sense to restore civility, respect, and shared responsibility.

When he saw that traffic police could not control reckless drivers, he sent mimes into the streets to mimic and mock those who broke the rules. Laughter proved more powerful than fines. When he noticed that citizens no longer cared about each other’s behaviour, he distributed red and green cards so that anyone could signal disapproval or approval to strangers. Within months, surveys showed that people felt safer and more connected.

One day, he appeared on television, towel around his waist, teaching Bogotá how to bathe efficiently and save water during a drought. People copied him. Water consumption fell by forty percent. He invited the city to switch off its lights for an hour to see the stars again, and suddenly, millions remembered that they shared one sky.

He asked the rich and poor alike to contribute a voluntary ten-percent “love tax” to fund social works. Tens of thousands paid it willingly. Later, when crime began to decline and civic pride rose, the world took notice. Homicides dropped dramatically; tax revenues increased; public trust returned. These gestures were theatrical, even poetic, yet they were also practical politics. Mockus treated the city not as a machine to be repaired but as a moral organism to be re-educated. “When the law, morality, and culture point in the same direction,” he said, “you can change the world.”

Civicness as a Kind of Poetry

What Bogotá learned under Mockus is that good governance is not only about laws, asphalt and concrete — it is about meaning. A city must not only function; it must feel right. When people begin to believe again in decency, humour, and shared space, they sweep their streets, respect crossings, and protect its animals and trees. The poet becomes an ally of the engineer; the teacher becomes a builder of bridges.

This lesson could not be timelier for Georgetown, a city rising once again with economic promise but facing the familiar challenges of disorder, litter, noise, and civic neglect. Our leaders speak often of laws and infrastructure, and rightly so. Roads, houses, drainage, and transport are essential. Yet, as Bogotá discovered, no amount of fines and asphalt will keep a city clean if its citizens do not feel ownership of it. The deeper work before us is moral and cultural. We must learn again the old virtues that once made our villages and towns so gracious — the polite greeting to a stranger, the quiet respect for public space, the refusal to litter, the instinct to volunteer. These are not small acts; they are the bricks of civilization.

Imagine a Georgetown that embraces its own cultura ciudadana. Imagine the Mayor and City Council launching a “Respect the City” campaign not through scolding but through creativity: murals, street theatre, music, and humour that remind us who we are. Imagine our schools teaching civic empathy alongside mathematics –  how to listen, how to apologize, how to work together. Imagine each new community development project coming with a local “civic covenant,” a pledge of care signed by residents.

In Guyana we often say that people must “change their attitude.” True. But attitude does not change by decree; it changes through example and imagination. Mockus proved that leadership can be playful and profound at once — that a mayor can dance, cry, and joke his city back into life.

The Moral Infrastructure of Development

Guyana’s development conversation today is rightly focused on oil revenues, energy transition, and modern infrastructure. But there is another kind of infrastructure we must not neglect — the moral infrastructure that holds a society together when fortunes shift and ambitions grow.

Without that foundation, prosperity breeds only indifference and waste. With it, even modest progress shines. Bogotá’s story reminds us that civicness is the invisible scaffolding of democracy. It is what allows strangers to trust one another enough to form a nation. We do not need to copy Bogotá’s methods exactly; Guyana has its own rhythms and humour, its own spirit of self-help and village pride. But we can take inspiration from the principle: that citizens are not problems to be managed, but partners to be inspired.

Let our schools host an annual Festival of Citizenship, where students, artists, and local councils celebrate creative acts of civic renewal — cleaner parks, restored monuments, community gardens, or murals of unity. Let the Ministry of Education adopt a Civic Culture Curriculum, using stories from our history and the wider world to teach children that manners, honesty, and humour are forms of power. Let the media reward the good news as much as it exposes the bad.

Learning from a Philosopher

Antanas Mockus once said he governed Bogotá as if it were a classroom, not a battlefield. His chalk was laughter, his textbook was ethics, his students were millions of citizens. When asked why he used art instead of fear, he replied, “Because respect cannot be imposed — it must be learned.”

That line should be written above every public office and city gate in Guyana. Respect cannot be imposed; it must be learned, practiced, and made joyful. There are moments in a nation’s life when what it needs most is not another grand project or towering edifice, but a change in the way people think about themselves and about one another. Guyana stands at such a moment now. The cranes and concrete are moving, the highways lengthen, the lights spread into the hinterland — yet something deeper and quieter remains to be built: our civic culture, our shared sense of belonging, our understanding that the country itself is a work of art in which every citizen holds a brush.

Let the oil wealth pave our roads, but let imagination pave our hearts. Let us build not only bridges of steel but bridges of trust. Let us become, once more, a people whose laughter, decency, and care for one another are our proudest monuments. For as the philosopher-mayor of Bogotá taught the world: to change a city, first teach it to smile again.

Respectfully,
Dr. Walter H. Persaud

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• Bogota, Dr. Walter H Persaud, Letters, Philosopher

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