TlsPhotovision: THE MEDELLIN TRANSFORMATION

A multi-level success story to learn from

Sometimes I feel almost ashamed and quite ignorant, coming to a new country, or a new city, just to discover that my previous knowledge has been totally inadequate. Arriving in Medellin, Colombia, this was definitely the case. I knew from my travel preparations and a bit of research that the city was pretty safe and the drug-war was something of the past. Little did I know however, that Medellin had been named the world's most innovative city in a competition organised by the non-profit “Urban Land Institute”.

The Institute compiled a list of 200 cities based on eight criteria ranging from culture and livability to education and infrastructure and said Medellin, once a stronghold for Pablo Escobar and the drug cartels, had seen one of the most remarkable urban transitions in modern history. Exploring the city today it`s hard to imagine this once was the worlds most dangerous city, where 6000 people were murdered annually from 1990 to 1993.

When giving the innovation award to Medellin in 2013, the Urban Land Institute praised the city´s civic spaces, libraries, and art galleries, as well as its infrastructure which includes a giant escalator and a cable car allowing the residents of the poor neighbourhoods on Medellin's steep hillside to easily commute to the city centre, in the valley.

Medellin's mayor Anibal Gaviria said to BBC news on March 1, 2013 that the award was "a reason for joy on the part of every aone of the 2.5 million inhabitants of our city." He also commended former mayor Sergio Fajardo for launching many of the projects that were praised in the competition.

However, Medellin has not been able to escape from its tragic and violent past entirely. Poverty, organised crime, gangs, drug-traffic and killings still exist, though Medellin has become a city to visit safely and to live a decent life for the majority of it´s population. This is thanks to the efforts of the mayors and their administrations and thousands of participants, stakeholders, architects, artists, community leaders and inhabitants. In fact even the former drug lords like Pablo Escobar made positive contributions to the transformation process in the 80-ties and beginning of the 90-ties through political initiatives, negotiations and deals with the local authorities.

So how could all this happen?

The short answer certainly cannot be the entire truth about the twenty five plus years of transformation, but here´s some key points:

Medellín’s success story is a story of the interaction between key players on either side of the divide. On one side the mayors Luis Perez, Sergio Fajardo and Alonso Salazar, and on the other side the drug lords Pablo Escobar and Don Berna, combined with radical thinking, innovation in urban planning, wide involvement in new forms of governance and effective implementation.

It might seem a little odd to involve and to credit some of the world’s worst criminals in the story of Medellin’s transformation, but the fact is Escobar and his cartels helped set the conditions for urban change to happen. In 1982, Escobar launched his "Medellin without slums" program" – a political campaign to provide a “life of noble dignity” for the urban poor who, in Escobar’s words, had been living in an “inferno of garbage” (The Guardian) Based on his political engagement, Escobar was elected to Colombia`s house of representatives in 1982, before his involvement with drug trafficking had him discredited and expelled. "Medellín Without Slums" was the first effort to make change for the poor from within. Through it, Escobar – who was shot and killed by security forces in December 1993 gave the city’s comunas a political voice to demand change (The guardian).

Influenced by European regeneration models Medellín’s 1995 and 1999 strategic plans set a new agenda for the city Participatory planning and wide involvement became a key. In 1998, it became constitutional law in Colombia that every municipality had to develop a masterplan, and that planning could not happen without social participation.

To reach their goals, Mayor Fajardo surrounded himself by a team of experts and specialists at his Urban Development Corporation (EDU), working with architects, planners, engineers and sociologists to collectively manage Medellín’s change. On many projects, the design team worked with community representatives who was spokesman and link to the community in which interventions were being proposed.

Together with Fajardo the architect Alejandro Echeverri was one of the key players in the transformation process. He wanted the city connected ant to establish a mobility system consisting of metros, trams, cable cars, bridges and escalators were planned to keep the city moving and link previously disconnected neighbourhood. These were accompanied establishing libraries, community buildings and cultural centres in the local communities – places for people to come together, play interact and learn.

According to the Guardian, “Architecturally, one of Echeverri’s major successes was striking a balance between the embedded and the iconic – integrating spaces, places and systems into the social fabric of the city on the one hand, while also creating buildings of international quality which would be photographed again and again”.

The local "comunas" - and neighbourhoods.

Medellin is divided in 16 local communities "comunas", each with several neighbourhoods, "barrios". The most visited comuna by tourist and people from outside Medellin is probably "Comuna 13", known for it`s street art, wall paintings - "murales" - and escalators going up and down the steep hillsides through the centre of the comuna. Even though the "comunas" have many differences they share some of the same transition history regarding how the violence was brought to an end in the nineties, how the wide involvement of architects, community leaders, NGOs, artists and others contributed to the development of infrastructure, public facilities, services and public spaces.

Comuna Moravia on the Garbage Mountain

One morning the second week of my stay in Medellin, Giulia Ragni, a young Italian (now Germany based) architect takes me on a visit to "Comuna Moravia", where she is working with a project, planning the rehabilitation and development of a building to become a centre for artist and art related activities.

Today we are going to meet Cielo Holguin (40) who is a "community leader", one of about 100 informal representatives and spokeswomen (and men) in this community. Cielo meets us at a small building site where people from the neighbourhood, supported by a group of German architects, have set up meeting facility made of bamboo and concrete.

Cielo greets us with a warm smile and tells us to come and sit. Giulia has already told her who I am and the purpose of my visit to Medellin and Colombia. I thank her for taking time to see us and tell her that I would like to know more about comuna Moravia´s history and how the drug war came to and end and was replaced by a new era of peace and prosperity.

Cielo tells us she has lived all her life in Moravia. She has ten siblings, but now she lives with only her mother and twin sister. Her father died when she was a small child. At the age of 19, after she finished high school, she got involved in a project run by a Colombian NGO, working with poor families to prevent conflicts and domestic violence. The NGO were using a wide range of methods and interventions, family visits, workshops and meetings in the local community. Cielo explains that domestic violence even today is a serious problem in this area. When many people are living together in small houses, with limited space and privacy, conflicts are often inevitable. Beatings and physical punishments are also to some extent commonly accepted.

The involvement with the NGO was a great inspiration for Cielo, and the main reason why she chose to spend her life working for her community. In the family project she learnt strategic planning, how to engage families, organise meetings and workshops, and to speak in front of en audience about values and conflict management and prevention. With the support of her younger brother and a friend at the university she was also able to get a university degree in family development and support.

At the age of 24 (she was not quite sure exactly when it happened) Cielo became a community leader. This is an informal, non elected position and something one becomes as a result of taking responsibility in community development activities and in this way gain trust and support from the local community. To be a community leader is not a job Cielo tells us. It´s a position that makes you a spokeswomen (she´s one of about 100 community leaders in Moravia) for the community and a someone people can turn to for advice and ideas about how to solve problems and develop their community. It also gives a lot of opportunities like attending conferences and seminars, both in Medellin and in other countries like Germany where she has been twice.

Cielos story about the the past and present in Moravia, is a story about two different worlds. In the sixties a railway line was running straight though the area exactly where the street below our meeting point runs today. Poor people started to arrive from the countryside, and set up their small houses along the railway line, hoping to find jobs in the city. In the seventies the local government decided to place a landfill in the area above and around the railway line. The railway was soon shut down when the Colombian railway company was bankrupt and the landfill started to grow to become a mountain of garbage where all sorts of waste from Medellin City were dumped. The number of people living on and around the garbage mountain were growing fast and soon reached around 50 000. A small town. Due to extreme poverty and lack of job opportunities, people where digging in the garbage for things they needed to survive, for food, clothes, building materials and things they could sell, like metal waste an anything that might be usable. It became a society of recycling. People were even building their houses with materials they could find on the garbage mountain.

The people on the garbage mountain. Photo from an article
about the 70´s and 80´s by Giovanna Pezzoti

In the eighties a lot of things went from bad to worse in Moravia, as it did in most of Medellin. This was the era when the the drug cartels grew strong and astronomic amounts of drug based money were floating around and affecting all levels of the society. Due to extreme poverty, young men from Moravia were easily recruited by the cartels. Many became professional gunmen and assassins. It was well paid and fast money. It was a way to provide for a poor family, to get a house, a car and food on the table, though for many of the young men the taste of a wealthy life became short, as many were killed in armed confrontation with other criminal gangs and the police. Cielo remembers she was playing in the street one day when the shooting started all around her and a man fell dead right beside her. Shot in the head.

The early nineties (90-93) became a major turning point for the community. The first initiative from the Medellin Government to stop the violence killing thousands annually, happened here in Moravia, says Cielo. Projects were started with negotiations in a small village not far from Moravia, between the government, the army and the paramilitary groups, "la guerrilla de los milicianos y paramilitaries", who were controlling the area. The goal was to disarm the paramilitary groups by offering immunity from prosecution and imprisonment. Members of the gangs were also offered rehabilitation programs, money and jobs. Some of the gang leaders later even became important community leaders, Cielo says with a smile.

And the peace process was a success. The paramilitary groups were gradually disarmed (and Pablo Escobar killed in 93) and the process of reestablishing a functioning civil society could begin.

Moving to 2004 a decision was made by the Medellin government that most of the Moravia area had to be abandoned due to pollution and environmental issues. In 2006, as a part of the Medellin City Master plan, the relocation of major parts of Moravia was confirmed. In about 3 - 5 years from now (2018), more than half of Moravia´s existing population will have to move. The central area and the main garbage mountain has already been abandoned by the majority of it´s inhabitants and the garbage is covered with a thin layer of soil and has become a flower park. But many of Moravia´s residents do not believe in the governments arguments for their relocation, and believes it is rather Moravia's strategic location, close to the metro and the city centre that makes it highly interesting for property investors, developers and people with a lot of money. Still around 150 inhabitants who are living on top of the garbage mountain refuses to leave their houses. They don`t trust the local government and is highly critical to the lack of communication with the locals about the relocation. "The truth is, here they have only come two or three times to meet with the community, you already know: they paint castles in the air, all very easy, all very nice, and maybe yes, the project will benefit us but I do not understand why they insist on hiding the cost that it is going to have for us ", explains Rosalba García, inhabitant of the neighborhood (Elkin Cardona, http://barriomoravia.blogspot.com/). Despite the government plans, the fact that the area is poor by most standards and might not provide the healthiest living conditions, the Moravia neighbourhoods have continued to improve, year by year. Today Moravia has a modern cultural centre, a health centre, playgrounds, sports facilities and a flower park on a garbage mountain (!), And not the least, according to Cielo, Moravia has become a a place where people have their friends and family and feel they belong.

When I ask Cielo about the planning process for the relocation of Moravia's residents, she becomes quiet and it seems as little of the success story from the past have been used for this process. A group of German architects has written a book, an alternative plan for Monrovia named "Manifesto Moravia" just about to be published. The influence of the book and its consequences for the future of the people of Moravia is yet to be seen.

The garbage mountain in the central part of Moravia is now a flower park, but the area is certainly not very healthy as a living area, and most people has moved. Around 150 people however, are still living in their houses on top of the mountaun and refuse to leave.

A street in central Moravia

The flower garden on the Moravia garbage mountain

A home on the Moravia garbage mountain

Julian, Loida Rosa Caro and their family refuses to leave their property on the garbage mountain.

The writings on the walls tell that many people in Moravia are strongly against the

governments plans to relocate much of Moravias existing population

to new multi-store appartement buildings 18 kilometers away

If you want to read more I highly recommend this article in the Guardian by Alex Warnock-Smith, founding director of Urban Projects Bureau: Story of cities #42: Medellín escapes grip of drug lord to embrace radical urbanism.

Link:

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/13/story-cities-pablo-escobar-inclusive-urbanism-medellin-colombia

If you plan to visit Medellin as a tourist, take a look at this web page: https://medellinguru.com

Comuna 13