Abstract:A study on how the relatively poor residents of Comuna 13, especially young people, have adapted to changing socio‐economic conditions since the Colombian government reasserted control over the Medellín neighborhood after Operation Orión in 2002.
“…argue regarding recent social and environmental transformations in Colombian cities:Changes in a city's infrastructure, such as buildings, transportation, or green space … can be reasonably easy to examine through maps, landscape surveys, photography, and other methodologies. In contrast, teasing out changes in a city's culture or identity can prove a little more challenging (Drummond et al ., : 148).…”
Cities in Latin America in particular have been investing in new transportation networks such as bicycle systems, metros and bus rapid transit (BRT) technologies in recent years. These infrastructures are promoted as cures for trenchant social and spatial divisions as much as for traffic gridlock and vehicular pollution. This article unpacks the theory that infrastructures might mend cities that have been fragmented into disparate parts by uneven capitalist development. I argue that this ‘infrastructural solidarity' thesis relies on a troubled imagination—shared across urban design and strands of urban theory—that infrastructures are static, formal arrangements that concretize relations and enforce social cohesion or fragmentation. This article draws on qualitative research on the TransMilenio BRT system in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as on the work of Bruno Latour, suggesting that the political life of infrastructure is better revealed when such systems are understood as dense knots of shifting relations with complex temporalities. Arguments for the value of this type of actor‐network theory (ANT) reading often skew towards the esoteric, but the TransMilenio case shows how sorting through infrastructural ontologies actually matters in terms of how urbanists—academic and practicing—conceive of and work towards just and functional cities.
“…argue regarding recent social and environmental transformations in Colombian cities:Changes in a city's infrastructure, such as buildings, transportation, or green space … can be reasonably easy to examine through maps, landscape surveys, photography, and other methodologies. In contrast, teasing out changes in a city's culture or identity can prove a little more challenging (Drummond et al ., : 148).…”
Cities in Latin America in particular have been investing in new transportation networks such as bicycle systems, metros and bus rapid transit (BRT) technologies in recent years. These infrastructures are promoted as cures for trenchant social and spatial divisions as much as for traffic gridlock and vehicular pollution. This article unpacks the theory that infrastructures might mend cities that have been fragmented into disparate parts by uneven capitalist development. I argue that this ‘infrastructural solidarity' thesis relies on a troubled imagination—shared across urban design and strands of urban theory—that infrastructures are static, formal arrangements that concretize relations and enforce social cohesion or fragmentation. This article draws on qualitative research on the TransMilenio BRT system in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as on the work of Bruno Latour, suggesting that the political life of infrastructure is better revealed when such systems are understood as dense knots of shifting relations with complex temporalities. Arguments for the value of this type of actor‐network theory (ANT) reading often skew towards the esoteric, but the TransMilenio case shows how sorting through infrastructural ontologies actually matters in terms of how urbanists—academic and practicing—conceive of and work towards just and functional cities.
“…Described as the "Medellin Miracle" particularly in the areas of social urbanism and mobility, there are several features in the Medellin context associated with its "perceived success" which are part of the landscape of an integrated and adaptive society [20]. Success in Medellin from a social perspective is associated with a range of factors: cultural aspects of the entrepreneurial class (Antioquian people with a strong work ethic, Catholic, close-knit community) associated with a strong business elite and a sense of duty, decentralised governance structure of Colombia, public trust, regional pride, high returns on human development, disciplined business culture and well-educated elite that serve in the public sector [31,34].…”
Section: The Transformation and "The Medellin" Miraclementioning
The demand for infrastructure and utility services is an acute challenge for countries in middle-and low-income countries undergoing high levels of urbanization, demographic shifts, and civil and political reorganization. The demand for utilities occurs alongside a trend toward increased financialization of the local state. A challenge for meeting demand for utility services is the shift toward increased financialization where the delivery of public purpose is challenged. This chapter aims to highlight governing arrangements that aid in understanding how public purpose can be delivered through utilities using the case study of Medellin, Colombia. Through examples of public infrastructure projects and the delivery of water by its utility-company, Empresas Publicas de Medellin, the paper discusses how this company achieved alignment of essential services with public purpose through adaptive governance structures that mitigate adverse effects of financialization and promote the integration of economic, environmental, and social goals. While this case does not propose a transferable model of governance, it highlights arrangements that enable a more mixed, adaptive, and nuanced understanding of how adverse effects associated with total financialization might be abated.
“…The city has, in recent years sought to overcome sociospatial and economic inequalities through several infrastructural initiatives. These include a peripheral transport network, cable car system and an outdoor escalator that helps to integrate the deprived hillside neighbourhood of Comuna 13 (cf., Brand & Dávila, 2011;Drummond, Dizgun, & Keeling, 2012). While levels of multidimensional poverty in the city have lowered overall in recent years (Medellín Cómo Vamos [MCV], 2016a), rising living costs have led to an increase in reported experiences of poverty in the city's poorer neighbourhoods (MCV, 2016b).…”
In this article we describe some innovative methods for observing the possible impacts of roads, junctions and pathways (movement infrastructures), on community life in terms of their affordances and hindrances for social connectivity. In seeking to observe these impacts, we combined a range of visualization research methods, based on qualitative points-data mapping, graphic representation and urban morphological analysis at local and global geographic scales. Our overall aim in this study was to develop exploratory methods for combining and visualizing various kinds of data that relate to urban community formations in contrasting urban contexts. We focused our enquiry on the perspectives of adolescents in two urban contexts: Liverpool, UK, and Medellín, Colombia. While they contrast in their geo-political and cultural characteristics, these two cities each present polarized socio-economic inequalities across distinctive spatial patterns. We found that adolescents in these cities offer generally localized, pedestrian perspectives of their local areas, and unique insights into the opportunities and challenges for place-making in their local community spaces. We gathered the communities' local perspectives through map-making workshops, in which participants used given iconographic symbols to select and weight the social and structural assets that they deemed to be significant features of their community spaces. We then sampled and visualized these selective points data to observe ways in which local community assets relate to infrastructural affordances for movement (in terms of network integration). This analysis was based on the theory and method of Space Syntax, which provides a model of affordances for movement across the urban network over various scales of network configuration. In particular, we sought to determine how city-scale movement infrastructures interact with local-scale infrastructures, and to develop methods for observing ways in which these interactions have positive or negative consequences for community formations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
