Colivings in Bogota
- Sky Tallman, AICP
- Mar 22
- 9 min read
Updated: Mar 27
This article was originally published in the APA International Division's InterPlan.
I arrived in Bogota, a city of eight million in which I knew hardly anyone, and moved into my apartment in Plura, one of the City’s premier colivings. Immediately, I was integrated into a local community of nearly a hundred with established social and professional networks that spread across the city. Bogota is an exciting city full of cultural and social amenities, and no shortage of places to network and meet new people and make professional connections, yet having a social network built into my building made me feel at home before setting foot in my neighborhood. A coliving is a sort of neighborhood within a neighborhood; it is a rejection of the old notion that the nuclear family is the basic building block of society, and the embodiment of a society with many types of building blocks. How we define the line between public and private is expressed in the architecture of what spaces we share, and the coliving is just another way in which the boundaries between private, semiprivate, and public spaces are rearranged to incubate a community. It is housing as an amenity.
The concept of coliving has been gaining popularity in Europe, Asia, and Latin America since the 2010s, and has only slowly been gaining traction in the US, but it is something American cities and towns should take note of. Cities trying to attract an educated and mobile workforce to stimulate their economies know that the amenities and quality of life their town has to offer are critical selling points. It is the lifestyle that mobile highly educated workers are looking for as they consider the benefits of relocating to your town. As generational values change, many young professionals are looking for a lifestyle that includes a strong sense of community and convenience without paying astronomical housing prices. In a cohousing, an individual or couple might have a small apartment, but the space that makes up their home includes the common living and working spaces. Second and third spaces are are extensions of the home. It is cheaper than single-family housing and helps mitigate the crisis of loneliness, which, in the words of Kimberly C. Driggins, requires “a robust social infrastructure — the network of physical and social structures that build relationships and foster thriving communities.”1 Loneliness is a problem of fragmented social networks and fragmented urbanism, and as we look for design solutions to strengthen communities and opportunities to boost the creative and economic dynamism of neighborhoods, Colivings could be part of the solution.
Across Bogota, there are a growing number of colivings at different scales and with vastly different characters. I spoke with the owners of two; at one end of the scale, there is Plura, a coliving with four locations at relatively large scales, and at the other end of the scale, there are those like La Tremenda Casa, which has only seven rooms for long-term residents. What they have in common is the intentionality of the space as oriented toward building community, common spaces that include both coworking and social gathering, and an administration that takes care of everything from selecting new tenants to programming cultural events. Social spaces in colivings try to reflect people’s desire for interactions, but not forced interactions, and the need for transitions between public and private spaces. The goal in design is to create opportunities for community, but to protect people from overexposure to social interactions. The character of each coliving reflects that of the neighborhoods in which they are located – in the Santa Barbara neighborhood, there are more families, a lowkey vibe and a slightly older demographic, while in the San Felipe neighborhood, where I lived, there is a slightly younger demographic and the rooftop fiestas can carry long into a Saturday night.
Plura’s founder, Juan Carlos Paris, told me over a cup of coffee in the ground floor cafe of one of his colivings that his project started as a plan to build student housing, but during a trip to Hong Kong in 2016, he saw the co-living boom starting to take off and changed the direction of his project. Coliving has a lot in common with student housing, but caters to a different audience and provides a slightly different kind of service. The audience for coliving tends to be youngish professionals who are geographically flexible with their work – the kinds of people who set up their offices in coworking spaces and who are looking to build community.
While housing as a service is what distinguishes colivings from other cohousings, what is offered varies considerably. 35% include a coworking, 84% a shared kitchen. They are designed to offer a hierarchy of spaces between public an private. Cohousing is a housing type that offers intermediate independence, even when individual economic conditions may not make fully independent living an option.
Paola Alejo, the founder of La Casa Tremenda, studied economics and in an attempt to help stabilize the living situation for her grandparents she started a business in the upper stories of their house that has evolved into a coliving that brings together residents with hip hop artists and muralists. This coliving is located in an inner suburb of what was once an informal neighborhood, in which most of the homes were built by the hands of the people who lived in them, without permits or plans and the infrastructure to serve them came later. Today it is a working-class neighborhood, and Paola has made her coliving a center for the music and art scene in her neighborhood with regularly programmed events for hip hop and other local artists. The doors to the Casa Tremenda aren’t generally open to the public, yet most of the artists and musicians in the area have attended concerts or other events on the rooftop, making the coliving a meaningful node in the creative landscape of the neighborhood. And her grandparents still live in the ground floor.
While many of Plura’s Coliving residents in San Felipe had the impression that their collective connection to the neighborhood didn’t go much beyond the building, local shop owners say they notice the traffic from Plura residents and feel that it has made a positive impact on the area. Many of the residents select this location because of the draw of the up-and-coming art scene in San Felipe.
Historically, the maximum height of buildings in central Bogota was twice the width of the street. In 1979, this was changed to allow a blanket maximum height of five stories around the city center at a time when most neighborhoods were only one or two-stories tall. There was a brief period of time in 2014 - 2016 when the city, under mayor Gustavo Petro (now president) liberalized the regulation of height with Decree 562 in order to stimulate infill and the production of housing near the city’s central areas that already had the most built-out infrastructure. The short-lived rule regulated height as a function of infrastructure carrying capacity, imposed staggered setbacks at increasing heights and charged impact fees to support city services. Taller buildings were required to contribute cash or public space in proportion to the added value of the additional height compared with what would have previously been allowed. While the rule was in effect, the average height of permitted buildings tripled. Interestingly, the introduction of taller buildings did not produce gentrification; the rents in newer buildings were similar to existing rents in the neighborhoods in which they were built.
With the changing of the guard and the reelection of Enrique Peñalosa as mayor, the city reintroduced height restrictions and now takes a varied approach depending on zone or neighborhood type. The window of unrestricted heights led to tall buildings sticking out above their context in various parts of the city. Plura Coliving in San Felipe is one of those. The San Felipe neighborhood had an aging and shrinking population for a few decades and is currently reinventing itself as an artist neighborhood with an assortment of studios and galleries, restaurants and cafes, along with mechanics and auto repair shops. Most of the neighborhood is two or three stories, with a few buildings around six or eight stories – Plura is over 90 units in 12 stories of coliving including a lively rooftop bar and lounge that looks out over the neighborhood below, and is helping to play a role in the revitalization of the neighborhood.
In Bogota, one of the densest cities in Latin America, the question of density just doesn’t evoke the kinds of reactions one might expect in the United States. Indeed, the low-lying suburbs of informal settlements have higher densities than many of wealthier areas with high-rise apartments, so the association between multifamily dwellings and poverty that flavors conversations around density in the United States, doesn’t dominate the conversation in Bogota. Preserving neighborhood character is still an important feature in planning documents, but it doesn’t translate into the same kind of resistance to any sort of change. Part of this may be because their use of zoning tends to be much more black and white – either you are allowed to do a certain project in a certain place or you are not. The flexibility of conditional uses that invite NIMBYs to the table at public hearings is not part of their system.
Coliving for Economic Development
Coliving is an efficient use of space and architecture, which makes it a potentially affordable housing solution, but on the market, it is not just housing, but a service. A coliving is a little bit more than your typical apartment building; mine included a large co-working space, a movie theater, a number of social spaces, including a rooftop lounge and bar and a ground-floor cafe, a gym, and a spa. There were also a few rooms and spaces residents could check out for social events or to host classes.
As a business model, Paris said that the added common areas and social and co-working spaces add 20 – 25% to the cost per unit of construction over what it would cost to build apartments, but the amenity value of the coliving commands about 40% higher rents than similar apartments. Because of the greater role of administration in a coliving (two administrators per building, plus a small cleaning and maintenance staff), smaller projects with new construction may not pan out – Paris estimates that around 70 units is the threshold for viability. Without the removal of height restrictions, this project would never have been possible! For conversions of existing buildings, or passion projects by entrepreneurs such as Alejo, can be made into sustainable business models on a much smaller scale. La Casa Tremenda has only seven rooms for long-term residents and one that operates more like a hostel with multiple beds for short-term stays.
The average resident stay is between 6 and 8 months, depending on the coliving, but I met several residents who had lived there for as long as three years. In just over 50% of the colivings in Bogota, the minimum stay was between 5 - 6 months, while 26% allowed stays as short as 1 - 2 months.1 Among the Plura colivings, the median age ranged from 31 to 38 years, and while there was an international component, the majority of residents are Colombians. This was also true at La Casa Tremenda, where Alejo estimates about 70% of her tenants are Colombian. People come for all sorts of reasons, she told me, but they usually come for a particular phase in their lives or to accomplish a specific goal. Some, like myself, want to integrate into social networks in a new city, others sought community after a difficult breakup, a change in career or wanting to build a professional network were other common motivations, while many are drawn to it as what they see as a new type of modern lifestyle. While coliving may have had its predecessors in the hacker houses of Silicon Valley at the dawn of remote working in the United States, it is becoming increasingly popular in Europe, Asia and Latin America. In the United States, the concept has been employed, not only for young professionals, but also as a model for senior homes that can efficiently build in services in addition to offering a sense of community.
Your city might not yet have quite the pull of a dynamic downtown and burgeoning cultural scene that gets national attention, but if its the type of place that young professionals would migrate to if they only had a chance to get to know it, consider how a coliving might help attract a young, educated workforce. With flexibility on lengths of stay, the opportunity to have a place to live and work and to effortlessly plug into an existing social network, and reasonable rents, a diverse range of creatives and professionals could be attracted to test the waters and build professional networks and opportunities for themselves in your community. Coliving may be one of the types of products and lifestyles trending in the market, but it could also be an economic development tool to revitalize a neighborhood, stimulate a local art scene, or attract new talent and ideas to your downtown.
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