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With 70% of construction already complete on Line 1 of the Bogotá Metro, the city could have simply named its 16 stations and moved on. Instead, the Bogotá Metro Company launched a campaign: “Name Your Neighborhood Station.”

From March 24 to April 24, 2026, residents across seven districts — Kennedy, Puente Aranda, Los Mártires, Antonio Nariño, Santa Fe, Chapinero, and Barrios Unidos — are invited to propose names for the stations that will define their neighborhoods for generations. The names, the Metro Company says, should carry strong connections to local history, notable figures, or cultural elements that define each community. Not marketing. Not sponsors. History.

This is not a trivial decision. A metro station name is infrastructure that outlasts every administration, every mayor, every policy. It becomes the address people give to strangers. The name a child learns before they learn to read a map. The shorthand a city uses to describe where it is.

Bogotá understands this. The campaign is not just civic participation — it is a statement about what kind of city Bogotá intends to become. The metro is not being built for visitors or investors. It is being built for the people of Kennedy and Chapinero, and the city is asking those people to leave their mark on it before it opens.

Line 1 is expected to transform mobility across the capital — an elevated corridor connecting districts that have historically been underserved by the city’s transport network. The construction, currently at 70% completion, is running on schedule. The physical infrastructure is taking shape along major corridors, with columns, beams, and elevated sections already visible across the city.

But the city has decided that the infrastructure alone is not enough. A metro without identity is just a rail. A metro with names chosen by the people who will ride it every day is something closer to a city writing its own next chapter.

(Source: Colombia One, Bogotá Metro Company — March 24, 2026)

New York — New York’s subway stations were named by committees and real estate developers a century ago, and the names have been largely immovable since. Fulton Street. Canal Street. Atlantic Avenue. They carry history, but not the kind that was chosen — it was inherited. The city has tried, occasionally, to rename stations for contemporary figures, usually through costly political processes. What Bogotá is doing — asking residents to name their stations before construction ends — is something New York missed its chance to do in 1904 and will never get back. For New York transit planners working on the Second Avenue Subway extension or the Interborough Express, the Bogotá model is the window that is still open.

Seoul — Seoul’s Metro system has been expanded dramatically over the past two decades, and station naming has generally followed administrative logic: district names, intersections, landmarks. The result is functional but anonymous. What Bogotá’s campaign surfaces is a question Seoul’s rapid transit expansion has rarely asked: what if the name of a station carried the memory of the neighborhood as it was, not just the address of the intersection where it sits? Seoul’s newer lines — particularly those running through historically significant neighborhoods like Seongsu and Euljiro — could benefit from the kind of civic naming process Bogotá is piloting right now.

Medellín — Medellín’s Metro was built in the 1990s and became the backbone of the city’s transformation. Its stations — Industriales, Suramericana, El Poblado — are named for the neighborhoods and institutions they serve, carrying the geography of the city’s reinvention in their names. Medellín understands better than most cities that transit infrastructure is not neutral: it amplifies what it touches. Bogotá’s citizen naming campaign takes that logic one step further — not just naming the station for the neighborhood, but asking the neighborhood to name itself. Medellín’s Metro succeeded because the city made residents feel it belonged to them. Bogotá is making that belonging official before the first train runs.

Austin — Austin is in the early stages of building its own light rail network through Project Connect. Station names have not yet been finalized across many of the planned corridors, and the communities these stations will serve — historically Black and Latino neighborhoods along the eastern corridors, in particular — have long histories that deserve more than administrative naming. Bogotá’s model is directly applicable: open the naming process to the communities that will be most affected, before the infrastructure is complete, while there is still time for the name to mean something before the station opens. Austin has this window. It should use it.

Dallas — Dallas’s DART system has been expanding its reach across the metroplex for years, with station names that are largely functional — intersection-based, district-based, unremarkable. As Dallas prepares for its FIFA World Cup moment this summer, the city is learning what it means to be seen by the world. What the world sees when it arrives at a station named “West End” or “CityPlace/Uptown” is a city that hasn’t yet decided what it wants to say about itself. Bogotá is making that decision deliberately and publicly. Dallas, with a new generation of transit infrastructure in planning, should be paying attention.

Tokyo — Tokyo’s station names are among the most recognizable urban words in the world — Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, Harajuku. They carry decades of cultural meaning far beyond their function as transit stops. But Tokyo’s newest station environments — Takanawa Gateway, Oimachi, Yaesu — are being designed as mixed-use destinations with names chosen by developers and administrators. What Bogotá’s process offers is a counter-model: what if the communities that will actually inhabit these new station districts had named them first? The station becomes the destination faster when its name already belongs to the people who live there.

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Current runs on one city, one story, every day. But the map is still being drawn.

We are looking for contributors who live and work inside the cities they write about — one story from your city, told the way only a local can tell it. We are also looking for readers who want to add their voice to other cities' stories — benchmarking, similar cases, collaboration ideas, a connection worth making. If a story from Medellín reminds you of something happening in your city, tell us. That response is the whole point.

Right now we are building across the Americas and Asia. But the dream is longer than that — from America to Afro-Eurasia, local to local, city to city, one real connection at a time.

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