A Socio-Spatial Approach to Enabling Social Entrepreneurship. Examining the Role and Accessibility of Places of Support in Bogotá

Abstract: Social entrepreneurship integrates a focus on tackling social issues with economically sustainable business activities, thereby also presenting a new form of private sector engagement in development work. This mixed-method case study contributes to the nascent body of academic literature by examining the role and accessibility of the social entrepreneurship support ecosystem in the context of Colombia’s capital Bogotá. Employing a socio-spatial approach, this study collects primary data from online interviews with seven places of support (PoS) in Bogotá to understand how they enable social entrepreneurship before geographically mapping the city’s support ecosystem in relation to Bogotá’s socioeconomically stratified residential blocks. This research is informed by existing literature and guided by an analytical framework which integrates Bourdieu’s theory of capital and Porter’s cluster theory from the field of economic geography. The findings show that support for social entrepreneurs is focused on social and cultural capital acquisition as PoS are aware of their convertibility into economic capital. However, access to the ecosystem of PoS is highly clustered in Bogotá and limits access of those living in socioeconomically lower stratified areas of the city. These findings can benefit further academic exploration of social entrepreneurship and urban planning efforts in Bogotá alike.