The purpose of this article is to describe the history of urban planning in Colombia, based on the definition of four fundamental stages that group the characteristics and their evolution in the country. Each stage denotes a set of characteristics that were establishing the practices and the most connoted conditions in that country, according to the national or international tendencies in front of the urbanism processes. Also, there are evidences related to social processes, which do not exclusively define growth or urban expansion as a physical fact, but as an articulation of a number of social variables in the construction of the urban fabric. D.R. © 2019. Estudios Demográficos y Urbanos Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivar (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 Internacional