The Council on Urban Initiatives at University College London hosted a dialogue exploring Bogotá’s innovative Care System and its role in enabling the equitable distribution of unpaid domestic work across genders. The Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne interviewed the Secretary for Women’s Affairs in the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá. She showcased how the city is investing in public services and infrastructure to transform its care economy.
Watch the full interview here.
Context
Introduced in 2020, Bogotá’s Care System was designed to equitably redistribute unpaid domestic care work, ultimately giving women more time and autonomy over their own lives. To alleviate the heavy burden of caregiving, the city has established more than 11 dedicated “Care Blocks” and deployed 2 “Care Buses” to reach broader communities.
Key insights
During the interview, the core elements of the Care System were unpacked. Bogotá’s journey to establish the Care System was built on the following steps:
- Centering caregivers: placing caregivers—specifically, unpaid ones—at the heart of the system and understanding what they need from their city.
- Addressing “time poverty”: recognizing the disproportionate burden of unpaid care work placed on women and identifying time poverty as the critical systemic issue to be solved.
- Defining municipal support: from a local government perspective, identifying the services needed to alleviate this burden: education, well-being, and income generation.
- Deploying targeted services: organizing 92 services tailored to the specific needs of both caregivers and care receivers.
- Embracing agile policy: using an iterative process of continuous ideation, prototyping, and testing.
Core elements of the approach include:
- Co-creation: working directly alongside local women to shape the services.
- Open innovation: actively bringing in diverse voices and new ideas from academia, the public sector, and beyond.
- Data-driven design: leveraging multiple sources of knowledge, including literature reviews and rigorous data analysis.
- Service mapping: mapping existing care services across the city to see what could be creatively retrofitted or reoriented.
- The “3-R” framework: establishing a guiding criterion to recognize care and caregivers, redistribute care (especially between men and women), and ultimately reduce unpaid care work entirely.
Source: Council on Urban Initiatives
To find out more about how cities are driving transformative change, explore the “Shaping Urban Futures“ report by the Council on Urban Initiatives, which features a detailed case study on Bogotá’s Care System.