Medellin's plan to bury it's highway

'Chaos? This is open-heart surgery': Medellín risks a massively expensive plan to bury its highway

A city known for its urban innovations, Medellín’s newest plan is its boldest and costliest yet – to relocate its central highway artery and open up the river

A visualisation of Medellín’s plan to bury its highway and build a park. Photograph: Alcaldía de Medellín

The body of water that runs through Medellín can be called many things: an open sewer, a barrier, a crime alley or even a highway median strip. Anything but a river.
The city, however, is determined to change that. For years, the city had a reputation as the most violent city in the world. But in the last decade it reinvented itself through innovative urbanism, with projects like cable cars and outdoor escalators credited with successfully overhauling depressed and crime-ridden neighbourhoods. Its new plan, though, is its largest, boldest and – by far – costliest urban intervention yet.
Parks of the Medellín River (Parques del Río Medellín) aims to completely transform the surroundings of the river, turning a highway into a public space and, with luck, sparking urban renewal. More than £1.1bn, 20km of riverbanks and 15 years will be needed to complete this ambitious project. It is the highest bet the city has placed. If it goes wrong, it could overshadow all the previous urban hits that brought the city fame.
The first step of the plan is the most controversial: to bury a 392m stretch of highway along the river and build a park on top. It will mean Medellín’s main highway will close for 11 months, cost £43m of public money and require the cutting down of large trees. Many citizens are enraged, saying it will cause chaos.
“Chaos? How could that not happen?” asks Catalina Osorio, the project’s social deputy director. “This is open-heart surgery for the city, and everyone is involved. We are touching what we never wanted to touch: the most frightening place of Medellín.”

Medellín from above, showing a visualisation of the proposed buried expressway (to the right of the river). Photograph: Latitud

Particularly vocal in opposition are the residents of Conquistadores, a quiet, wealthy neighbourhood that would be the starting place for the project. Locals fear that noise, crime, street vendors and unregulated parking will invade the neighbourhood.
When the works began, a group of Conquistadores neighbours blocked the highway in protest. They felt the project would hurt the value of their apartments. “That is my patrimony, what I worked all my life for,” says Hernando Medina, one of the protesters. Among their main concerns is that new pedestrian bridges will connect them with the east bank of the river, where the highway will be buried and a large boulevard built instead. There are economically depressed neighbourhoods nearby, and the bridges will be located less than a kilometre away from a place by the river where dozens of homeless people dwell. “We don’t need a park here,” says Olga Ruiz, a resident of Conquistadores. “People will come down from everywhere.” Some protesters have suggested building a wall to separate their neighbourhood.
Medellín always had a troublesome relationship with its river. The city is located in a narrow mountain valley, and the river often floods violently. The riverbanks were pastures until the 1950s when the river was channelled, the highway built and the city’s development skyrocketed.
As industrial areas mushroomed along the axis of the river, residential areas began growing up the steep slopes of the Aburrá Valley. It is difficult to provide utilities and public transportation in these places, and landslides have killed hundreds, rich and poor alike.
Meanwhile, the river became a frontier that separated paisas – the inhabitants of Medellín – from themselves. The highway blocked access to the river, which became invisible to the city. Paisas only go down to the river in December, when a section of the highway is closed for people to walk and enjoy enormous arrays of Christmas lights.
To correct this historic problem, a new metropolitan urban plan was adopted in 2011, which later gave birth to Parks of the Medellín River. “The project is not an end, but the means to materialise the zoning plan,” says Juan Pablo Lopez, the project’s operating director. He claims the parks will attract dense residential developments near the river.
After four years, an international urbanism design contest and tenders for engineering designs and construction, the project was given the green light. Still, many paisas don’t see the project as a priority, considering the more pressing social issues in Medellín. Lopez admits they did a bad job selling it. “We were unable to show the project as a complete city strategy, showing infrastructure instead,” he says.

Historic projects seem to be just the standard operating procedure in this town

Janette Sadik-Khan

Medellín’s highway also serves as the main national road, so heavy cargo transportation in western Colombia will be affected by years of partial closure. “Parks of the River will condemn us, for decades, to a heart attack of the metropolitan economy,” says Johel Moreno, former president of the Society of Engineers and Architects of Antioquia. He is afraid the river won’t serve as the transportation axis it was conceived to be 60 years ago, and the park will rule out the possibility of an elevated highway.
Technical aspects also concern Moreno, who remembers the problems faced during the construction of the Big Dig in Boston: water leaks, billion-dollar cost overruns and years of delays. “If that happened in Massachusetts, in the first world, what would happen here?” he asks.
Moreno’s vision is contrasted by experts like Janette Sadik-Khan, New York’s former transport commissioner, who is remembered for pedestrianising Times Square. “When it comes to massive infrastructure projects that actually have immediate, important impacts on the lives of its citizens, Medellín is showing the world how it’s done,” she says. “Historic projects seem to be just the standard operating procedure in this town.”

Medellín’s proposed Plaza Rio. Photograph: Alcaldía de Medellín

Sadik-Khan thinks the project will continue to “power the economic engine that has transformed Medellín”, thanks to the real-estate investment opportunities that come with it. The mayor’s office is creating a company to boost urban renewal across the river in partnership with two of Colombia’s largest utilities companies.
This new company would invest in civil works and manage the new urban developments. In exchange, it will receive long-term income from urban tolls, real-estate development rights and taxes from capital gains, allowing Parks of the Medellín River to be financially sustainable.
This financial scheme was inspired by Rio de Janeiro, which allied with one of Brazil’s bigger pension funds to build Porto Maravilha: an ambitious urban project that became famous for the implosion of 4.8km of elevated highway over the last two years.
Medellín and Rio could join Madrid, San Francisco and Seoul in the group of cities that have rethought their highways for the sake of public space. The experience of these cities could shed new lights in urban debates worldwide, and help cities decide what to do with their freeways.

Project engineer Robert Nilius shows visitors through a tunnel under downtown Boston in 2002. The Big Dig was plagued by accidents and cost overruns. Photograph: Michael Dwyer/AP

These debates often go on for decades. The Gardiner Expressway, a six-lane elevated highway that runs through downtown Toronto and effectively blocks access to much of the Lake Ontario waterfront, requires hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs. There are proposals to bury it and build a boulevard, but city authorities are reluctant to let go of their highway. Success in Medellín could inspire other cities, such as Toronto, to action.
With a year to go before the completion of the first stage of Parks of the Medellín River, the city is anxious. Success or failure now will define the future of the project. In the best-case scenario, it will be yet another reasons for paisas to feel proud of their city. In the worst, it could ruin Medellín’s reputation for being at the forefront of innovative urbanism.
“They gave us these instant photos that were so beautiful,” says Blanca Ruiz, an elderly lady who was present at the launch of the project. The detailed renders show glossy projections of the new parks and spaces next to the river. “I am keeping the pictures to see what the park comes out like.”