Medellin, Colombia offers an unlikely model for urban renaissance
Say Medellin and one name will immediately pop into the mind of anyone vaguely familiar with this city: Pablo Escobar.
The infamous drug lord and his legacy of gang violence turned this Latin American metropolis into one of the most dangerous places on Earth, where narco wealth existed side by side with abject poverty.
If ever there was a divided city, this was it.
But over the past decade, Medellin has achieved an urban renaissance that offers lessons Toronto would do well to study, says a doctoral student in geography and planning at the University of Toronto who recently completed her dissertation on the Colombian city.
“Toronto isn’t the only one that can be thought of as a divided city. It’s not the only city dealing with financing transit,” said Luisa Sotomayor. “A lot of the cities in the developing world have been very creative. The challenges are so big that they end up with all these urban innovations.”
Now, instead of topping a list of cities with sky-high murder rates, Medellin is being feted as the Innovative City of the Year by the Wall Street Journal.
Through a renewal policy dubbed “social urbanism,” the homicide rate has plunged by nearly 80 per cent, education rates and incomes are up and, perhaps most emblematically, transit times from the hillside barrios to downtown have been cut from more than an hour to 10 minutes, thanks to construction of the world’s first commuter gondola.
Instead of being filled with skiers, the brightly coloured cable cars skip over the gridlock, whisking workers and students up and down the steep valley slopes. And if you only need to get part way up or down the hill? Well, you can take the outdoor escalators, constructed as part of a push to improve mobility and reconnect the isolated and low-income parts of the city.
In barrios with a notorious history of sicarios, or child assassins, the city has built “library-parks,” each one designed by a different avant-garde architect. The idea was not only to bring municipal services into these underserved areas, but also to reclaim their reputations, so they would be known for their “emblematic spaces” and not their past horrors.
“All these neighbourhoods have crazy stories from the ’90s, because these were the areas where drug dealers would train and would hire the sicarios,” said Sotomayor. “So the mayor said: Let’s turn these places of violence into places for renewal and life.”
Physical transformation of the public space is only the most visible of the government overhauls in Medellin, which focused its efforts on mobility, early childhood education and job creation.
“It’s not one thing; it’s a lot of things working together that have made a difference,” Sotomayor said.
Dozens of schools and nurseries were built to ensure the next generation was being cared for, while at the same time freeing up mothers to work. Municipal offices were opened in the slums, where only a decade ago police wouldn’t dare roam. The offices offer business supports and microloans to encourage people to take a stab at entrepreneurialism.
Medellin’s turnaround was set in motion by Mayor Sergio Fajardo, who was elected in 2003 as a political outsider with ties to the non-profit and business community. Sound familiar?
Fajardo was able to use his private-sector connections to build public-private coalitions and get his ambitious plans up and running. He took an evidence-based approach, using the United Nations Human Development Index to identify the neediest neighbourhoods and to measure the success of government intervention.
His vision was largely financed by the local utility company, which is owned by the city. While providing power and water and even cellphone service to its citizens, the Empresas Publicas de Medellin funnels its profits into city coffers, supplying 30 per cent of the municipal budget.
“It’s actually one of the better service providers in the country. They have really good relations with their customers. It’s a source of civic pride for the city,” Sotomayor said. “And, it’s very profitable.”
Medellin’s success has been widely studied and draws urbanists and government officials from around the world. It has already inspired Caracas, Bogota, La Paz and Rio de Janeiro to build urban gondolas to their favelas and hilltop shantytowns. London, England, also opened an urban gondola over the Thames in 2012, though it has been criticized as a tourist attraction that does little to ease congestion.
If a violence-raddled city in a middle-income country can so quickly turn around its fortunes, what’s preventing Toronto, a peaceful city in the developed world with astounding wealth, from solving its modest problems?
Sotomayor says it’s politics. Because politicians in Canada are always thinking about re-election, they can’t focus on doing the right thing. In Colombia, where mayors are prohibited from seeking a second term in office, they’ve got four years to get their vision implemented. This short timeline, Sotomayor says, means they move faster and get things going from day one.
While the gondolas might be the most eye-catching aspect of Medellin’s transformation, municipal financing through public utility ownership and term limits played an essential, invisible role.
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