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Mar 7, 2007

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." --Henry David Thoreau

Turning A City Into A Social Experiment

Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job of Colombian National University. A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for another big challenge and found it as the new mayor of Bogota, Colombia. With an educator's inventiveness, Mockus turned Bogota into a social experiment. At the time, the city was choked with violence, lawless traffic, corruption, and gangs of street children who mugged and stole. People were desperate for a change, for a moral leader of some sort; the eccentric Mockus, who communicates through symbols, humor, and metaphors, filled the role. Not surprisingly, his seemingly wacky notions have a respectable intellectual pedigree: his measures were informed by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Douglass North, who has investigated the tension between formal and informal rules, and Jürgen Habermas' work on how dialogue creates social capital. A detailed profile follows.