Although it has been in the center of political debates for years, the growing Social Housing deficit in Colombia, particularly Bogotá, has not yet found a permanent and sustainable long term solution. The internal conflict has forced millions of people to migrate into larger cities and, while the center of Bogotá presents a low population density, the less accessible and less service-supplied outskirts are overcrowding with newcomers. This research strives to understand the dynamics that have shaped the city profile allocating low income households on the peripheries while lowering the population in the city center. It will propose architectural tools to be applied within the Bogota’s current Mayor’s plan for the city center re-densification trough social housing.The research will be supported on the description of urban phenomena such as the city growth towards the periphery, internal forced migrations and social housing allocations dynamics. It will also explore case studies for contemporary Social Housing in urban centralities,as well as the social principles described in the Mayor’s Plan.The research identifies key tools to propose affordable and sustainable quality Social Housing that would become a platform for social interaction and sets the bases to invert a negative process and reduce the gap of housing inequality in Bogotá.

This study is about the experiences of teachers and students in the production of memory about past violence, and how they struggle to articulate these memories with present concerns and their expectations about the future. In doing this, they rely on some social discourses such as learning lessons from the past which has the potential to offer a better future free from violence and other social problems, an idea commonly attributed to the philosopher George Santayana (1095). To find information about this I conducted research where the voices of the participants are highlighted, and their ‘framings’ of the past related to dominant ideas and a range of literature about collective remembering. The goal is both to explore experiences, and to reflect on theorizing about the role of the past and of memory construction in the lives of educative actors. One of the key findings is that when they refer to aspects of the past, these actors do so to relate this to their present politics of everyday life. In consequence, it is shown that memory interrelates with the past, the present and the future and can be described as walking a thin line between these three temporal dimensions. Those interviewed also considered that their work could contribute to sustainable peace, but also insisted that structural violence required reforms beyond a peace agreement, to tackle root causes of social injustice, by reducing poverty and exclusion. The contribution of this research brings the voices of these relevant social actors to the forefront with the understanding of the contradictions, which impose an unusual context where the production of memory has to coexist with different forms of mutually reinforced violence.