Acknowledgements

The virtual exhibition “The City’s Currents: A History of Water in Twentieth-Century Bogotá” is a collaboration of the Environment & Society Portal and the Línea de Historia Ambiental, the Environmental History Research Group of the department of history at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. The exhibition was researched and authored by historians Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés. However, it would not have been possible without the collaborative work of a multidisciplinary group of graphic designers, architects, cartographers, musicians, translators, and editors to whom we express our gratitude.

We are deeply grateful to Christof Mauch, Kimberly Coulter, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, Eliza Encheva, Stephanie Hood, Emilie Perault, Marielle Dado, Brenda Black, and Susanne Darabas from the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. Their guidance and infinite patience has enabled us to complete this virtual exhibition, which ended up being longer, harder and more complex than we first expected.

This virtual exhibition took up some of the topics and sources of a previous web project we prepared for the Virtual Library of the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, the main Colombian public library. It is entitled “Por los tubos de Bogotá: Usos del agua en la historia de la ciudad.” (“Throughout the Pipelines of Bogotá: Water Uses in the History of the City”). We thank the former director of the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Margarita Garrido Otoya, and virtual library coordinator Alejandro Martín Maldonado, as well as the current director, Alexis De Greiff, for allowing us to return to this modest web project to further research the topic.

Mónica Páez Pérez and María José Castillo Ortega, graphic designers from the Tangrama studio, shared with us profitable methods of designing infographics to communicate data, processes, and problems related to the environmental history of Bogotá. William Sarria Calderón used his expertise in the production of architectural renderings to draw the facades and axonometrics of worker houses that we could describe from the information found in primary sources. Andrés Felipe Nieto Quintero helped us by designing some of the wire frames for the chapters, and also taking the photograph of the exhibition’s authors. Finally, the musician Arlington Vaca composed and recorded an original piece in the traditional musical genre of pasillo to add background music to the silent video about the construction works of the New Aqueduct of Bogotá.

Colleagues and friends contributed generously with advice, comments, reviews, and suggestions. We want to thank our colleagues from the Línea de Historia Ambiental, especially Vladimir Sánchez, Juan David Delgado, Carolina Castro, and Katherinne Mora. We are particularly grateful to Sebastián Díaz Ángel, who gave wise advice regarding the dynamic use of historical maps of Bogotá, and provided a bridge between us and the digital map collection of the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia. We also thank Herman Castro and Lucas Osorno Ferro for their translation work.

Finally, we want to express our sincere gratitude to the people, companies and institutions that understand the importance of common access to historical sources for non-profit purposes and gave us permission to publish photographs, paintings and videos in this virtual exhibition. We are grateful to Marina González de Cala, Jorge Enrique Angarita Zerda, Margarita Rodríguez Rodríguez, Mario Cuéllar Bobadilla, El Tiempo Casa Editorial, Revista Cromos, Mabe Colombia S.A.S., and Unilever Andina Colombia Ltda. We also thank the Fundación Patrimonio Fílmico Colombiano, the Museo de Bogotá, the Instituto Distrital de Patrimonio Cultural, and the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia and its director Consuelo Gaitán.

Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo and Stephanie Garcés

How to cite

Gallini, Stefania, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés. “The City’s Currents: A History of Water in 20th-Century Bogotá.” Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions 2014, no. 3. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. http://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/node/6295.

ISSN 2198-7696 Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions

2014 Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés
This refers only to the text and does not include any image rights.
Please click on an image to view its individual rights status.

The City's Currents: A History of Water in 20th-Century Bogotá

This exhibition explores the role of water in the struggle of Colombia’s capital to become a modern city. For Bogotá, complying with the standards of sanitary reformers and the governing elite was a social, technological, and environmental control endeavor. The exhibition examines everyday and gendered experiences of water, such as washing clothes or bathing, as well as urban infrastructural interventions including the domestication of rivers for water supply and wastewater disposal systems.

Stefania Gallini, Laura Felacio, Angélica Agredo, and Stephanie Garcés

About the author

Gallini, Stefania

Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia

Stefania Gallini is an environmental and Latin American historian at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, where she coordinates the Environmental History Research Group of the Department of History. She graduated with a degree in political science from the Universitá degli Studi di Milano (1995), took a master’s degree in area studies at the University of London (1998), and was granted a PhD in Latin American history from the Universitá degli Studi di Genova (2002). She is author of the book Una historia ambiental del café en Guatemala: La Costa Cuca entre 1830 y 1902 (Guatemala: AVANCSO, 2009), which in 2010 was awarded the Elinor Melville Prize for Latin American Environmental History by the Conference of Latin American History. In the same year she spent time in Munich as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society working on an ongoing project on waste history in Bogotá. She is a founding member of Latin American and Caribbean Society of Environmental History (SOLCHA) and joint president from 2012 to 2014. She is also active in the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) and International Consortium of Environmental History Organizations (ICEHO). Besides environmental history and Latin American history, digital humanities is her third area of interest. She has published on these areas in academic journals and has edited books in Latin America, the US, UK, and Italy.

Felacio, Laura

Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia

Laura Felacio graduated with a degree in history from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2009), and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in urbanism at the same university. She has been a member of the Environmental History Research Group of the Department of History at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia since 2009. Her research interests include environmental history, urban history, and social history. She is author of articles in Colombian academic journals, such as “La Empresa Municipal del Acueducto de Bogotá: Creación, logros y limitaciones, 1911–1924” (Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 38, no. 1 (2011): 109–40), “Memoria, territorio y oficio alfarero: La memoria colectiva en los barrios del Cerro del Cable” (Revista Nodo 6, no. 11 (2011): 77–98), and “La huelga de las telefonistas: Condiciones, problemas y manifestaciones de las mujeres obreras a comienzos del siglo XX en Bogotá” (Ciudad Paz-ando 5, no. 1 (2012): 31–48).

Agredo, Angélica

Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia

Angélica Agredo is a historian from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2014). Her fields of interest are environmental history and the history of science, technology and medicine. She has been associated with the Environmental History Research Group of the Department of History at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia since 2012. Her undergraduate dissertation, entitled “Naturaleza hostil y ferrocarriles: El abandono del sistema férreo en Colombia. El caso del Ferrocarril Troncal de Occidente en el invierno de 1973,” obtained the award “Best Undergraduate Dissertation in History, Version XXIII, 2014” by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. After graduating with honors, she received a full scholarship to study at King’s College London where she is currently attending the master of arts program in Science, Technology and Medicine in History.

Garcés, Stephanie

Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Colombia

Stephanie Garcés is a historian from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2014). She has been associated with the Environmental History Research Group of the Department of History at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia since 2012. Her work is focused on the development of digital humanities and the use of new tools for web researches on this field. She manages the blog De Reformas y Soldados, which focuses on the relationship between war and religion during the modern age.

You are here

Acknowledgements

How to cite

The City's Currents: A History of Water in 20th-Century Bogotá

About the author

Browse the exhibition