Urbanismo Social: El Caso de Medellín, Colombia

"...the most beautiful for the humblest..."

A civil engineer by training, Federico Restrepo-Posada was involved in boosting investment in social programmes as the former director of planning (2004-2007) in the municipality of Medellín, Colombia. Among his current work, he serves as adviser for the replication of the experience of the economic and social transformation of Medellín. Drawing on this experience, Restrepo-Posada shares his insights into what worked and why in this presentation, which was delivered at the July 17 2018 event Raised Hands - People, Cities and WASH: Global Alliance for Social and Behaviour Change Communication - Informed and Engaged Societies.

Opening slides illustrate the issues Restrepo-Posada confronted when he was called to Medellín. There were settlements of immigrants who were looking for opportunities in the big city or who had been expelled by armed conflict. These people came to occupy what he calls "impossible spaces in the city". Images in the presentation depict these "slums without defined tracings, full of paths of endless stairs...of precarious housing made of multiple colors and fragile materials" surrounded by "electricity cables that emulate cobwebs in the middle of primitive forests." Restrepo-Posada discusses what he calls "the price of uprooting", which entails "the rupture of their family and cultural roots". What resulted in the overcrowded settlements were "immense problems of coexistence and urban violence" due to lack of services, social facilities, and public spaces. In the absence of State intervention, Medellín's urban dwellers suffered from "abuse, mistreatment and extortion from combos, criminal gangs and from illegal speculators of the land."

However, it was, there, in those "impossible city environments", where immigrants were able to enrich Medellín "with their resilience and their ability to resist in a strange territory...with their culture, their art, and their popular knowledge." There, these dwellers accommodated themselves and built another city in the periphery; in fact, a new model of public intervention emerged and was applied. This model involved not merely a transformation from politics but, rather, "a political transformation to form citizens and build up citizenship in order to break down with the patronage structures of power." What did it take to make this happen? The creation of trust environments, says Restrepo-Posada. This model proposes respect and recognition for citizens' actions and "promotes the recovery of self-esteem, talent, pride and dignity of people in those peripheries." Certainly, the transformation involves social, territorial, and economic shifts, but, to reiterate, the central element is trust.

Specifically, with the goal of transforming politics, in 1999, 50 people (students, artists, academics, businesspeople, and non-governmental organisations, or NGOs) crafted a new management model based on the following principles:

• Ethics
• Rigor for the identification of problems
• Planning so that it is not necessary to improvise
• Transparency for the incorruptible management of the public
• Collective sense to look at the territory as a multidimensional project
• Public communication for paedagogy and social accountability
• Rigorous management of public resources

On this model, the investment priority is where the problems are, and not where the votes are. Governance here involves strengthening participatory planning and budgeting systems, social control mechanisms like citizen oversight, and local TV stations and community media, including TeleMedellín and TeleAntioquia.

In line with this approach, the concept of Integrated Urban Projects (IUPs) centres around dignification of urban interventions - aesthetics and architecture - in recognition of the dignity of people. To illustrate, on subsequent slides, Restrepo-Posada provides several images  of IUPs, such as parks, libraries, and transformed streets. Some are before-and-after photos. According to Restrepo-Posada, the IUPs have allowed "neighborhoods like those in the periphery of a violent and intimidated Medellin, which castrated its future and absorbed in its tragedies" to resurface "from their fears and frustrations to engender their own future, overcome Fear and recover Hope."

Hope can be difficult to measure or quantify, so Restrepo-Posada shares several figures (e.g., graphs) illustrating change, such as the annual homicide rate, 2000-2016, which has dropped by 85%. However, he concludes, there is still a lot to be done.

Click here for the 69-slide PowerPoint presentation.