Urban planning, innovation and social inclusion are transforming Medellin
By Jeimmy SierraThe Colombian city of Medellin, which will host next week's Cities for Life forum, is an example of how a metropolis can emerge from the darkness of a violent past into a bright new future by means of urban planning, innovation and social inclusion.
The capital of the northwestern Colombian province of Antioquia was stigmatized in the past for the drug-trafficking violence that branded it one of the most dangerous cities in the world, but today has been reborn as a forward-looking modern city.
The escalators of the Comuna 13 neighborhood, the library parks, the Articulated Life Units, or UVA, the Moravia Cultural Center and the integrated system of mass transport are leading projects in the makeover of a city that in 20 years has become a model of urban regeneration.
This is the reason why Medellin was catalogued in 2013 as the world's most innovative city in winning the City of the Year contest organized by The Wall Street Journal and Citigroup. Now it is preparing to welcome the Cities for Life forum starting Monday, a symposium of creativity and innovation that will bring together delegations from more than 70 countries.
The director of Medellin's Administrative Planning Department, Jorge Alberto Perez, told EFE how the city went from being "practically unworkable" to become a city built to sustain life and set a standard for the world, and which in 2014 was visited by 550,000 tourists.
"With infrastructure, planning, urban design and an immense capacity for collective resilience, this city put together a process for overcoming its crisis, and that in turn has taken it to a completely new level," he said.
The transformation began in the 1990s in the midst of violence, with projects downtown like a new plaza with an open-air exhibition of sculptures by famed Colombian artist Fernando Botero and a cultural park as the entry hall to the Antioquia Museum.
A "new idea in public spaces" was defined with the construction of major parks like Pies Descalzos and Los Deseos along with the Plaza Cisneros, followed by a mass transport system that included the Santo Domingo Metrocable, all of which signified a turning point and a moment of change for Medellin.
The famous Metrocable system of mountainside gondolas, which benefits some 12,000 people, is a "strategy to include and tell a community that was basically shut out, that 'you are part of us and we are part of you,'" Perez said.
Other constructions including cultural centers and schools brought a whole new life to the poorest, most neglected neighborhoods with the introduction of cultural, sports, educational and recreational resources.
In 2011, the violence-torn Comuna 13 neighborhood became the world's first urban district with open-air escalators as a solution for its inhabitants' difficulties in getting to and from their dwellings, which meant climbing the equivalent of 28 floors. The innovative escalators immediately got rid of 350 cement stairs.
In recent years public bicycles have been integrated into the Medellin subway with the "Encicla" system, which has more than 20,000 users. There is also a pedestrian walkway network and the soon-to-be-completed Tranvia de Ayacucho, the first tram in Latin America with pneumatic wheels.
The general manager of the Urban Development Company (EDU), Margarita Angel Bernal, told EFE that Medellin is in "constant transformation" and that has allowed it to go "from fear to hope" to become a "city for life."
That transformation has been achieved with works like library parks, outstanding among which is the Biblioteca España in the Santo Domingo neighborhood, which represents a new model of inclusion for the inhabitants of that city.
Among the innovative projects is the transformation of Moravia, a violent neighborhood where a city dump was turned into a garden spanning 30,000 cubic meters (320,000 cubic feet).
There is also the Circumvallation Garden of Medellin, part of the metropolitan green belt, created with the intention of controlling and limiting urban expansion with pedestrian walkways, bicycle paths, environmental conference rooms and open-air gymnasiums.
Shantytowns have been transformed by the UVA - 21 giant water tanks have been modified to create meeting places and recreational settings "where the whole community can enjoy spaces that in other times were closed to the public," Angel said.
Building on the city's reputation for innovation is the ambitious Parks of the River project, an urban renovation along the Medellin River with a system of expressways.
"We want Medellin to grow within itself and to attract more urban life in order to create a more sustainable, more competitive society that just works better," Perez said. EFE
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