During my childhood I always felt secure and happy about living in a gated community, a closed condominium, a 'conjunto cerrado'. My apartment - just another one of 300 family accomodations packaged in 30 buildings disposed in an area of 41600 m2 - had the view of our enormous and beautiful park, its two little woods and gardens, its different playgrounds and basketball courts. I even felt angry when the municipality decided to 'open' it, to make it accessible to the others, to the neighbors,  to the whole city. I could not go outside anymore: it was a public space.

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Richness can be associated to a high cultural and social resources, to a developed intellectual dimension, to the possibility of having a recognizable status in a dominant social class. But accordingly to Edward Soja (Secchi, 2013), richness is also deeply linked to the spatial resources, to the possibility of dwelling a part of the city that provides the opportunity of enjoying urban social, cultural, economical and political life. Likewise, poverty is not only the condition of a reduced income and a scarce patrimony, but the impossibility of taking benefit out of essential services and goods resources for survival, because their spatial resources excludes the most basic citizenship rights. According to Bernardo Secchi (2013), the identities of rich ones and poor ones are mobile and uncertain,  placed in conflictual and contradictory territories. Between richness and poverty is placed the mutability and turbulence of the city and its endless possiblities.

In Bogotá - not only in residential areas -  it is evident how the situation clearly enlighted by Secchi in La città dei ricchi e la città dei poveri (2013) configures several characteristic sotiospatial relations in urban spaces: have-more persons apply strategies of selective exclusion through different dispositives - most of them of spatial nature - in order to protect their resources and situation of comfort and set distance from those who do not belong to their social group. The fear of the unknown, of the stranger, of the difference, has established several policies of exclusion, control and division. Consequently, certain social groups have been stigmatized obsessively. Have-more persons tend to stay inside, to get locked, to remain untouchable to what they fear and do not want to get to know, to what traditionally has been stigmatized as dirty and dangerous.

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But according to Secchi, fear itself is not the only cause of this exclusion. Specific policies of the territory are responsible for having defined, delimitated and applied several devices in the city, following the interests of the most powerful urban actors, stakeholders and urban promoters of an economic and political market system that is constantly transforming urban spaces. What is inacceptable in a territory of rich ones, gets completely ignored in a territory of poverty, mostly when the question is to configure the limits that divide different social groups.

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In Bogotá, the most evident strategy of the policies of separation is the socioeconomic stratification and the subsequent urbanization of the city through the heterogeneous individuation of zones that belong to each stratus. This heterogeneous zones, correspond to specific spatial and infrastructural goods, resources and services, and can become additionally subdivided in gated communities, where families of similar socioeconomic proveniences share secured spaces guarded 24 hours/day; spaces that exclude every stranger and make them invisible, untouchable, unreachable. This way of living in the city causes, in my opinion, that the inner spaces in general -not only that of condominiums, but also of social clubs, bars, restaurants, malls, schools and universities, for example -  and not public spaces, become the places of social meeting par excellence. Those who are not able to have economic access to enjoy this inner spaces, have to inhabit outdoor public spaces that paradoxically, instead of being those who host and give security to people with less possibilities of well-being, are not much frequented and  receive less economic resources. Even if it is not possible to generalize, a tendency is somehow recognizable  in which inner spaces - mostly private and closed, where high class members meet and recognize each other constructing cohesion - constitutes the Bogotá of the rich, whereas outdoor public spaces the Bogotá of the poor.

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'La Séptima', located in the historic center of Bogotá  - whose urban hispanic configuration is that of  open squares, public buildings and spaces - is not a pedestrian axis archetypically dwelled as a 'permanence' by them who usually inhabit high qualified inner spaces; it is a crossing place of transit between the different  public and private spaces of the city centre. Most of the people that transit 'La Séptima' during weekdays, do not go there in order to enjoy attractive spaces, but with the intention of arriving to their work places. On Sundays or holidays,  a businessman/woman (who normally arrives to the city centre by car) does not go to 'La Séptima' to do shopping or ride his/her bike. Those who dwell intentionally this pedestrian street, those who do want to inhabit it, are those without a social club, without the possibility of paying movie tickets, those who search entertainment and recreation for their families in the outdoor urban practices, in the street, in the public spaces that instead of being perceived as 'the space for all, rich or poor' are comprehended as the spaces of the 'popular', of the plebe, of the informality, of middle-low classes, of the invaders.