Cápítulo 13 - Proximity, Crime, Politics and Design. Gerard Martin PDF

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Proximity, Crime, Politics and Design

Medellín’s Popular Neighbourhoods and the Experience
of Belonging
Gerard Martin and Marijke Martin
To explore the heuristic value of the concept of ‘belonging’, this chapter

reconstructs the experience of belonging in relation to housing conditions,
crime, citizenship and urban reform in popular neighbourhoods in Medellín
(Colombia) over the last fifty years. While Medellín shares such experiences
with other large Colombian cities, local conditions differ sufficiently so that
our findings and conclusions are context related and should not be overly
generalized. Today in Colombia, after a series of national reforms, urban
renewal policies increasingly share pro-poor objectives to decrease inequal-
ity, improve quality of life and create more attractive and safer popular
neighbourhoods.
The Medellín ‘social urbanism’ reform model (2004–12) operates under
a demand-driven, participatory and integrated approach, notably in some
of the city’s historically most violent neighbourhoods, many of them with
informal roots. Robust evidence shows that this has led to improved public
service delivery, quality of life and government legitimacy. However, dwell-
ers of popular neighbourhoods (70 per cent of Medellín) often produce a
more tempered narrative about the impact of these reforms. To make sense
of this paradox, we reflect on historical dynamics of belonging, as related to
transformations in the built environment, socio-economic developments,
the impact of violence and fear, urban reforms, and changes in proximity
between dwellers and the state. After introducing some relevant contexts and
notions, and a brief historic sketch of Medellín’s informal housing dynamics,
this chapter then traces aspects of belonging in these neighbourhoods at
three periods in time (the 1960s to the mid 1980s; the mid 1980s to the
1990s; and the 2004–12 period of social urbanism).
Medellín’s Popular Neighbourhoods
Medellín’s current popular neighbourhoods or barrios populares developed

from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century onwards, following
a mix of formal (public and private) and informal patterns. In 1910, eight
– 43 –
44 | Gera rd Ma rt i n a n d M a ri jke M a rt i n
informal settlements were said to exist (see F. Botero 1996: 353), but in the
1950s the city administration had already identified forty-one ‘pirate urban-
izations’ and in 1965 about a quarter of the city’s population lived there,
while three to five dwellings were added daily (Calvo and Parra 2013: 50).
Since then, the rhythm has slowed down somewhat, but even today about
25,000 primarily rural migrants (some forcefully displaced by violence) settle
each year on the city’s fringe and add to the city’s endogenous population
growth.
Today, Medellín has about 2.4 million inhabitants, versus 850,000 in
the mid 1960s, with an annual population growth of 1.3 per cent, com-
pared to a maximum of 6.4 per cent in the 1960s. Seventy per cent of the
current housing stock in the city has informal origins (Ramirez et al. 1991),
a proportion that is comparable to other large cities in the region (Perlman
2010). Ten other municipalities, some located inside and others just outside
of the Aburrá Valley, add another million people to the agglomeration, many
of them poor and living in a mix of formal and informal popular neigh-
bourhoods, similar to those in the city proper. (We use ‘informal’, ‘irregu-
lar’, ‘pirate’, ‘spontaneous’, ‘do-it-yourself ’ and ‘clandestine’ as synonyms
to describe dwellings or settlements that partially or fully disrespect formal
rules of planning, urbanization or construction; are (partly) self-built; and
where dwellers may or may not own a property title.) In the 1970s, the city’s
planning department introduced a special category for pirate settlements
originating from land invasions – as this method implied per definition that
the dwellers did not own property titles. It also started to differentiate among
stages of pirate settlement: incipient, under development or normalized.
Tugurio (slum) was reserved for the most precarious housing, mainly at the
incipient stage of settlement.
Irregular neighbourhoods typically rose up along creeks and on slopes
concentric to the city centre, business districts, commercial areas, and higher
income residential sectors that came to occupy the flatter parts at the bottom
of this Andean valley, at about 1,500 metres above sea level. The Aburrá
Valley is drained by the Rio Medellín (formerly the Aburrá) and some sixty
streams that descend from its slopes, which at some points reach over 3,000
metres. Some of the streams are significant while others are rather small, but
all swell dangerously in times of heavy rainfall and tend to provoke deadly
landslides in the neighbourhoods they traverse. In 2010, eighty-eight people
were killed in a landslide in the informal neighbourhood La Gabriela, in
Bello, immediately to the north of Medellín but still within the valley.
Today, the valley is nearly completely urbanized, except for the highest
parts of its slopes, but the urban fringe continues to creep up. As a gen-
eral rule of thumb: the higher on the edges, the steeper, the more recently
built, the poorer and the more tugurio-like. The better view, cleaner air
Proxi m i t y , C ri m e, P o l i ti cs a n d D es i g n | 45
and cooling breeze are mostly taken for granted. A few of the poorest
neighbourhoods like Moravia and La Iguana ended up at the bottom of
the valley, the former on the banks of the Iguana creek – where it confronts
permanent risks of inundation – and the latter on a landfill (inactive since
the mid 1980s). Significant parts of the historic downtown have experienced
physical and social degradation, affected by outward migration of the well-
to-do. Medellín’s urban district is divided into sixteen comunas (wards), and
each comuna into an average of fifteen barrios (neighbourhoods) (for an
official total of 249 barrios). From a distance, the dozens of popular hillside
neighbourhoods that form comunas 1 to 6, 8, 9 and 13 morph together in
an organic pattern of one- to four-storey, mostly self-built, housing struc-
tures, with churches as their only apparent landmarks. The 77 per cent of the
local population qualified by a national socio-economic rating system as the
low (bajo) and lower-middle (medio bajo) classes live here for the most part,
while none of the upper-middle (medio alto) or upper (alto) classes do so –
respectively 19 and 4 per cent of the population. In the 1980s and 1990s,
these neighbourhoods were commonly referred to as Las Comunas, a soon
contested generalization, given its connotation as dangerous and violent.
Today, without distinction of their formal or informal roots, they are most
commonly referred to as barrios populares.
Once inside these neighbourhoods, their most distinctive feature is bus-
tling life. Pharmacies, barber salons, butcher shops, bakeries, restaurants,
bars, hardware shops and informal vendors abound. Most people walk; cabs
and privately owned buses loaded with people manoeuvre through; kids in
uniform walk around as they come and go from school; many people are
at work, repairing, constructing, selling, carrying materials; others sit, eat,
drink, talk or just hang around. The primary and secondary public school
system, which caters mainly to the poor, has a double shift, with half the
students and teachers active from 6.00–12.30 p.m. and the other half from
12.30–7.00 p.m. In 2005, only 13 per cent of the households used private
cars, versus 34 per cent taking buses, 7 per cent using the metro, 6 per cent
taxis, and 5 per cent motorcycles. Thirty per cent walk as a primary form of
transportation; bicycles are hardly used for daily transport purposes. These
dynamic, populous places abound with ambiance and are radically distinct
from those in upper-middle class and high-income residential neighbour-
hoods (Comuna 14 and parts of Comunas 7, 11, 12, 15 and 16), where
hardly any cornershops exist and where few people are out in the street, and
when they are, they mainly move around in private cars.
Less obvious to the eye is the fear and distrust embedded in social life,
although fenced windows and doors provide an indication. Between 1975
and 2012 over 90,000 people were killed in Medellín, a situation so extreme
that it was unmatched to any other city in the region and possibly in the
world, excluding those that experience open warfare or genocide (G.Martin

2012). Medellín reached its paroxysm in 1991 with 6,439 murders and a
homicide rate of 381 per 100,000 inhabitants. Mexican cities such as Ciudad
Juárez and Tijuana have seen homicide rates of around 150 per 100,000;
Corsica, Europe’s most violent region, has a rate of 8 per 100,000, about 25
murders yearly. In 2012, after 8 years of social urbanism reforms, Medellín
still registered 1,251 murders; a homicide rate of 38 per 100,000. (Bogotá,
Colombia’s capital city, registered a similar amount, but with a population
three times larger.) Over the years, although the whole city was affected, the
popular neighbourhoods have been particularly vulnerable.
The fact that the same urban physiognomy can behold both dynamic life
and such deadly violence seems an enigma. Interpretations in which informal
urban fabric is qualified as ‘failed’, and its ‘structural’ problems thought to
be conducive to violence and crime, only add to the confusion. Influential
modernist ideology sustained early twentieth-century visions that regula-
tion and order should be imposed on these ‘deviations’,1 preferably through
large-scale ‘slum clearance’ or by replacing the informal fabric and relocating
residents to new housing estates under strict zoning and building codes
(Mumford 2000; see also Ghirardo 1996, Ellin 1999, Glazer 2007). Over
time, what has ‘failed’, at least in Medellín, is not the popular neighbour-
hoods but rather the modernist efforts to install their order, and for a variety
of reasons. Mainly, such ‘healing’ strategies were both highly ideologically
loaded and dramatically underfunded, and thus completely overwhelmed by
harsh realities, i.e. the urgent need for housing and the ‘efficiency’ of infor-
mal solutions in answering their needs). Also, the informal and illegal housing
practices offered great opportunities for speculators and political middlemen,
who obstructed reform and actively promoted the non- or only partially reg-
ulated settlements for their own interests. From the 1960s onwards, guerrilla
organizations, drug lords and even churches in search of popular legitimacy
would also come to promote or ‘support’ informal dynamics.
Romancing the Irregular
The anthropological and also architectural interest in the dynamics of

non-Western, organically grown urban landscapes and in ‘vernacular’ archi-
tecture actually arose as early as the 1920s, meaning that medinas (irregular
historic quarters) in cities such as Casablanca and Algiers and favelas (slums)
in Rio de Janeiro were studied and referred to in a rather ‘romanticized’
way. European architects started working as ‘expats’ in developing coun-
tries, including Colombia (Liernur 1998; Hofer 2003). Immediately after
the Second World War, and in the context of interest in large-scale urban
reconstruction in war-damaged Europe, modernist ideas rapidly spread to

the region, resulting in – among other venues – regulatory plans and archi-
tectural projects (Arango 2012). In Medellín and other Colombian cities, as
we will explain later in more detail, these plans and projects mainly offered
guidelines for infrastructural and zoning policies, considered the regular
parts of the cities only (and thus also and never suggested large-scale slum
clearance operations or urban renovation operations), and were only partly
implemented anyway. American-based urban planning firms would increas-
ingly take the lead in this field, but sticking to the modernist dogma – with
central notions such as multi-housing super blocks and strict separation of
urban functions – as Wiener and Sert did in their plans for Medellín, Cali,
Barranquilla, Bogotá and Tumaco (as far as Colombia is concerned).
At the same time, however, as the informal tendencies seemed unstoppa-
ble and uncontrollable in many developing countries, the modernist tabula
rasa approach encountered increasing academic criticism in Europe and the
United States as well, but for other reasons than those encountered in the
developing countries. In a number of Western countries, historic city centres
as well as newly built mass social housing projects had morphed into problem
neighbourhoods, defined by issues of poverty, ethnicity, decay, crime and
disaffection (Duivesteijn 1994; Wagenaar 2011: 472–80). Urban sociologists
and architects also began to study ‘architecture without architects’ practices
and informal popular housing typologies from the 1950s onwards (Rudolfsky
1964). These provided answers for the habitat-for-the-great-number ques-
tion to which the ‘angry young men’ of Team X dedicated themselves in
reaction to ‘outdated’ CIAM doctrines (Congrès Internationaux d’Architec-
ture Modern or International Congresses of Modern Architecture) (Risselada
and van den Heuvel 2005; Eleb 2010; Avermaete 2010). Architects like Aldo
van Eyck, George Candilis and Alison and Peter Smithson studied informal
urban patterns and everyday habits in non-Western regions as references for
the design of more human and associative housing estates and city quarters in
their own countries. In tune with growing awareness of the ‘right to the city’
and neo-Marxist orientations in the social sciences, the attention switched
to the squatter organizations, which in the 1980s were seen as exemplary
of ‘new social movements’ with potential to translate into political actors,
compensating for the lack of an ‘urban proletariat’. Many acknowledged the
importance of active citizen involvement with the built environment and of a
certain individual freedom to produce the city (Rudofsky 1964; Oliver 1969;
Scott 2000). In its most radical form, this produced manifests on the future
futility of architects, and the need to have citizens take full charge of their
built environment. The Dutch architect Carel Weeber’s 1998 call to ‘wild
housing’ (wild wonen) was an expression of it, later reformulated as ‘willed
housing’ (gewild wonen). It offered, and still offers, inspiration and a lifeline
for a supposedly over-regulated European and American planning practice,

where hope and reinterpretation have been invested in DIY practices to pro-
mote citizen involvement and belonging through deregulation (Deslandes
2013).2 This may explain why the informal housing dynamics of Medellín
and other Latin American cities have regained widespread attention recently.
Reflecting on favelas, Jean-Francois Lejeune argued in 2003 that ‘behind
the ugliness, the cruelty, and the violence, one can discover extraordinary
cities within the city’ (Lejeune 2003: 48). In 2011, Daniel Biau, in relation to
new UN habitat approaches, stated that ‘slums are the best way for less devel-
oped countries to provide cheap housing for poor citizens [and] are econom-
ically useful [while at the same time] the reflection of urban poverty’ (Biau
2011: 60–1). The ‘rediscovery’ of informal neighbourhoods as potential
urban laboratories now figures into research agendas of the broad interdisci-
plinary field of urban history (Hernández, Kellett and Allen 2010). Likewise,
the non-Western informal cities inspire alternatives for supposedly outdated
formal urban strategies in postmodern Europe and the United States.
This latest flirtation with the informal city reflects a more optimistic
vision than, for example, José Luis Romero’s in his influential 1976 book
Latinoamerica: Las Ciudades y las Ideas where he asserted that Latin America’s
largest cities were turning into ‘a juxtaposition of disconnected and anony-
mous ghettos’ (Romero 2001: 321–22). Nevertheless, Romero seems to have
underestimated not only the capacity of governments in progressively inserting
basic facilities and services in the ’ghettos’, but also people’s resourcefulness –
against all odds – to make these places ‘function’ and consider them their
own. At least some of the (Western) romanticists, at least, seem to have
misunderstood (and still misunderstand) to what extent the dwellers’ desire
towards democratic regulation and formalization has been present in these
neighbourhoods, and to what extent the irregular can exacerbate apparently
unrelated negative dynamics, as has been the case with gang violence in
Medellín. It is precisely because the much-lauded recent urban reform policies
in Medellín, known as social urbanism (2004–12) both explicitly acknowledge
these informal traditions and consciously insert new forms of physical, social
and legal regulation to (re)build bridges between the dwellers and the state,
that Medellín offers a compelling case to clarify these misunderstandings and
explore the dynamics of belonging (pertenecer), both as a concept and a sym-
bolic source of social regulation in these neighbourhoods.
We understand ‘belonging’ as an ‘emotionally-charged social location’
(Anthias 2006: 21). It implies historic dynamics of material and immaterial
boundedness to the physical and social environment, but also to processes
of formal and informal regulation. As such, it is a more comprehensive
notion than ‘sense of place’, which is mainly focused on spatial relations
(Leich 2002), and includes an institutional dimension. Most studies relate
‘belonging’ to a combination of spatial and mental bonds as associated to

the built environment only. Recently, the notion of belonging has been re-
actualized in a context in which the importance and relevance of places and
sites are severely questioned (see Reijndorp 2010 on Almere; Zukin 2010 for
a rethinking of Jane Jacobs’s ideas). If belonging can be studied and under-
stood as a symbolic source of social regulation, it also implies that urban
reform policies may want to try to source it for participatory approaches and
objectives of empowerment.
Of its psychiatric roots, our conceptualization retains that belonging can
positively contribute to mental health but in its more rigid or fanatic forms
can become a source for anti-social destructive and indeed violent logic of
social regulation as well. Examples are spontaneous lynch squads and more
organized forms of armed self-defence to control neighbourhood crime. In
Medellín, individual feelings and perceptions of belonging among dwellers
of informal neighbourhoods will most likely vary substantially, depending
on factors such as the family situation, the degree of informality and irreg-
ularity of their habitat,3 the amount of years lived in the city (about 40 per
cent is native to Medellín; Alcaldía de Medellín 2011), their degree of formal
or informal participation in the economy, and so on. However, given the
exploratory character of this chapter, we will pursue a broader argument on
how belonging of dwellers in the city’s informal neighbourhoods evolved
over time (1960s–2010s) in relation to the built environment, forms of
sociability, violence and fear, insecurity and institutional proximity.
Early Planning Efforts
The conquistadores discovered the lush Aburrá valley in 1541, but they
settled their town further north, and used the valley mostly to raise cattle.
Informal, low-intensive and dispersed settlements followed, while the indig-
enous population was concentrated in a so-called pueblo de indios in the
southern part of the valley. (On the pueblos, see Ouweneel, Chapter 13
below.) A more densely settled spot evolved around the Santa Helena creek,
in its central eastern part (now Comuna 10). Until canalization in the twen-
tieth century, the Aburrá flooded often, so settling on its banks was not
an option. Clay was dug and baked into bricks (still the dominant build-
ing material, especially for informal housing). A real cédula (royal decree)
(1675) formalized the Santa Helena settlements as Villa de la Candelaria de
Medellín, accompanied by some early forms of urban regulation. Further
regulations followed at the end of the eighteenth century. Other settlements
in the valley, like Envigado, were also formalized as municipal jurisdictions,
an unfortunate move as it would later hinder planning efforts for the valley
as a whole. (A metropolitan authority was created in 1980, but with lim-

ited power. It has picked up some steam lately.) Colombia’s independence
brought city status for Medellín (1823), and designation as capital of the
Department of Antioquia. Political instability resulted in domestic turmoil
during much of the nineteenth century, but around 1850 Medellín, with
about 10,000 inhabitants, was described as a charming cattle and agricultural
town (González 2007). Its gentle climate promptly designated it as ‘the city
of eternal spring’. Illegal gold mining and the spread of coffee production
south of Medellín partly contributed to its prosperity. In the early twentieth
century, textiles, tobacco, chocolates factories and breweries, among other
things, transformed Medellín into the prime industrial hub of the country.
Local elites and politicians had picked up on international trends of town
planning since the 1890s, resulting in sanitation projects, extension plan
competitions and ‘embellishment’ projects (González 2007). Engineering
schools and universities were founded, hospitals and schools created, public
infrastructures for water supply and electricity installed, railroads laid, a tram-
way introduced and a small airport built. Most of these were initiated and
realized by the elite-led civic group Sociedad de Mejoras Públicas (SMP),
which ‘imagined a modern, clean, orderly and beautiful city’, with strong
influence on the city council (Jaramillo 2006: 14).4 Basic public facilities
came to be managed by the Empresas Públicas de Medellín (EPM) and
Empresas Varias de Medellín (EVM), semi-public municipal companies that
were able to steer clear of too much political influence, and that continue
to play an essential role today. Medellín’s first extension plan (1913; called
Medellín Futuro), product of a competition organized by the SMP, mirrored
international urban tendencies, but only partly transcended its paper status, as
private interests resisted ceding properties and abiding by stricter regulations.
In the 1920s, the Belgian architect Augustin Goovaerts (1885–1939) was
hired to direct Antioquia’s new department for engineering and architecture.
He spent most of his time designing public and governmental buildings,
hotels, private houses and churches, but also worked on urban extensions,
in a combination of rational and more organic urban typologies. Some were
realized but many only partly so, as the private investors who developed them
typically ran into financial problems, in particular at the end of the 1920s,
with the world economic crisis. No corporate housing associations came into
being, and hardly any public money was invested.
The well-intended visionaries of the SMP looked on in despair, as infor-
mal housing mushroomed. Various factors conspired against the implemen-
tation of more ‘progressive pillars of urban planning policy’.5 The 1886
Constitution dictated a highly centralized form of administration (main-
tained until 1991), with a very limited role for local government.6 Private
urban boosters, among them prominent city councillors and members of the
SMP, were often able to make their private interests prevail over the public
ones. Like other Colombian cities, Medellín did not buy or reserve land for
future urbanization, and, thus, instead of systematically anticipating planned
urban interventions, was left trying to regulate or co-fund private urbaniza-
tion efforts. The tens of thousands of migrants, who arrived from the coun-
tryside to the booming city, were too poor to rent. Poor regulation, corrupt
law enforcement and a host of intermediaries made informal settling on the
urban fringe a low-cost and low-risk alternative. As other cities confronted
similar problems, the Colombian government introduced a law (1947) that
forced urban areas to both create municipal planning departments and to
draw a directory plan, as effectively happened in the larger cities, including
Medellín. The national effort towards more regulated and institutionalized
urban planning reflected the consultancy work (1934–48) of the Austrian
architect Karl Brunner.7 In Medellín, at the Pontificia Bolivariana University,
he was effective in the creation of the first architecture faculty. Another at the
local chapter of the National University followed suit.
The city, which now had about 350,000 inhabitants, created a Master
Plan Bureau and hired Paul Lester-Wiener and Jose Luis Sert of the New
York based firm Town Planning Associates to help it develop the required
directory and regulatory Plan (i.e. Wiener and Sert Plan, 1948–50).8 The
Plan mostly followed recent international town planning tendencies (Sert
was president of CIAM between 1947 and 1956), separating functions by
green wedges and prioritizing a differentiated mobility as the principal back-
bone of the city’s organism (Schnitter Castellanos 2007). It centred much
of its attention on relocating government offices from the historic centre
to a high rise ‘civic centre’ (a key notion in the modernist discourse at that
time), and assigned Otrabanda – i.e. Comunas 11, 12 and 15, on the then
still mostly vacant western bank of the Medellín river – as the principle area
for new residential developments. As for the valley slopes, the Plan suggested
urbanization of only the lower part of the north-eastern slope, closest to the
city centre (i.e. current Comuna 4, and part of Comuna 2). It also forbade
urbanization above 1,600 metres, and promoted conservation and transfor-
mation of the tens of mountain runs in longitudinal parks.
Disjunctions
Various conditions severely limited effective implementation of the Wiener

and Sert Plan. First, national funding was not provided, and local authorities
were too weak to take the lead. Second, there was demographic growth.
Between 1951 and 1991, Colombia’s population tripled from 12 to 36
million, including an increase of the country’s rural population from 7 to
16 million. This translated into the rapid growth of smaller and mid-sized
cities with assorted social housing problems. Furthermore, a civil war between
liberals and conservatives, known as La Violencia, left an estimated 200,000
dead (1948–64) and pushed tens of thousands from rural areas into Medellín
and other large and mid-sized cities. Others were pulled into urban life
attracted by better opportunities to study or to work than in the country-
side. Hence, Medellín’s population increased over the 1950–90s with about
400,000 people per decade, a rate three times as fast as that foreseen by the
Wiener and Sert Plan, which was thus rapidly outdated. Informal neighbour-
hoods proliferated over the eastern slopes (current Comunas 1, 3, 8 and 9),
the western slopes (current Comunas 5, 6, 7 and 13) rapidly surpassing the
1,600 metre line.
Third, blind to the reality on the ground, the modernist vision on housing
insisted that informal settlements had to be eradicated and replaced with
formal housing structures. The mere idea that the informal settlements could
be ‘formalized’ was inconceivable.9 President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress
(1961–67) – a Latin-American version of the Marshall plan, meant to boost
socio-economic development and thus diminish the potential for communist
influence – was very active in Colombia, and included a strong social hous-
ing component. Inaugurated by Kennedy himself in Bogotá, it could not
answer the necessities either. Fourth, Colombian institutional modernization
and public policy in general were negatively affected by the civil war and its
consequences. A military regime (1953–58), put into place by the liberals
and conservatives to end their civil war, prioritized large-scale infrastructural
measures (new airports, large avenues and highways, new schools). During
the following sixteen years of rigid two-party coalition (the National Front;
1958–74), the central state morphed into a clientelized bureaucracy, rela-
tively inefficient in answering to the demands of a rapidly modernizing soci-
ety. It eventually came up with a series of policies and programmes for social
housing, and numerous planned urbanizations were realized in Medellín
(especially in Comuna 6), but were by and large insufficient to stem the infor-
mal dynamics or to bend the bipolar social-spatial development of the city.
Local government was chronically weak. Mayors were appointed by the
president and arbitrarily changed, for whatever reason, rendering long-term
planning a chimera. Precisely when its population was increasing rapidly and
the city needed strong leadership, Medellín went through forty-nine mayors
(1948–88), with an average time in office of nine months, (G. Martin 2012:
50–52, 283–85). In the meantime, the Roman Catholic Church and tradi-
tional elites continued to stress conservative values as the most promising
form of social control and regulation, but were also rapidly losing ground
to secular influences, among others the television (Bushnell 1993). The
striking intensity of population growth and its consequences – a jump, rather
than a linear incremental process – led some to argue that the migrants and
especially the Afro-Colombians (typically called Negros, Afros or Morenos),
arriving from the pacific lowlands, were lacking in civility and work spirit.
It became the main culprit of the city’s supposed downfall. In an effort to
regain territory, the Church sent priests to work in the slums, but more than
one radicalized, supported invasions and pirate practices, or even joined
revolutionary armed groups (Calvo and Parra 2012).
In 1977, when Sert came back to Medellín for a 25th anniversary evalua-
tion of the 1950 Plan, he was shocked to conclude that only 10 per cent of
the plan had been executed and that many opportunities had been missed
(Schnitter Castellanos 2007; González 2011). The Plan had only produced
a single master plan for Otrabanda, a territory that over time transformed
into an extensive, mostly low-density upper-middle class residential area with
generous public spaces and greenery and essentially without social housing.
The planned transformation of the historic downtown (Comuna 10) into
a modern civic centre was only partly realized, but managed to destroy a
great deal of its former charm and built heritage. Sert severely criticized the
disharmonizing impact of twenty-storey apartment buildings, put up in the
middle of older low-rise residential areas. Effectively, well-to-do residents
were leaving the old city centre en masse for Otrabanda, and for the southern
parts of the valley that were still lush, where El Poblado and Envigado would
evolve over the next decades into dense, luxury high-rise residential areas,
mixed in with upscale shopping facilities, fancy hotels and restaurants, mostly
designed by local architects. Other great deceptions for Sert were some of the
national government’s social housing projects (e.g. in Comuna 6). He called
them ‘monstrous’, given the tiny size of the dwellings and lack of future
opportunity for the owners to add extensions, a problem that today, 40 years
later, continues to plague nearly all social housing projects in Colombia. Sert
concluded that anno 1977 solutions had been much more difficult and com-
plex to implement than 25 years earlier. Local voices, too, started to criticize
an increasingly dual city, with the rich in the southern and the poor in the
northern parts of town. Medellín’s famous writer, Fernando Vallejo, in El
Fuego Secreto (1987) had this to say about his city: ‘Medellín are two in one:
from above they see us and from below we see them …, or [Medellín] is one,
but with a broken spirit’.
DIY Urbanism and Dimensions of Belonging:

1960s to the mid 1980s
Surprisingly, maybe, the city did not fall apart. There were no riots, no
massive protests and the poor neighbourhoods did not descend on the city
in rage or for revenge. Various factors may explain this. First, basic public
service provision was rather rapidly extended to the informal neighbour-
hoods by the EPM (sewers, water, electricity) and ESV (garbage collection,
among other things). The coverage and quality of these services distin-
guished Medellín favourably from many other cities in the country and the
region. (Most of Medellín’s suburbs have come under the auspices of EPM
as well.) In addition, the 1950 Plan did indeed provide guidance for major
infrastructural developments, including bus terminals, central market facili-
ties and road infrastructures, which were all put into place. Also, whatever
the delays and insufficiencies in coverage and quality, the national govern-
ment did progressively insert health and school facilities, and provided for
teachers. Moreover, in the 1950s, the United Nations Educational, Scientific
and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) chose Medellín as Latin America’s
pilot city for a large national public library, built in a modernist style in the
1950s, in the Otrabanda sector; a one-room satellite was opened in a vacant
pre-existing structure in Comuna 4. Further, while the weak forms of gov-
ernment intervention and regulation provided fertile ground for the complex
social and political dynamics of DIY urbanism (Do It Yourself) in the infor-
mal settlements, for the same reason it was not good breeding ground for
radicalization. Evictions of illegal dwellers were sometimes pursued by public
force, but mostly failed, because city council members and other politicians
were eager to enlist these dwellers, many newly arrived to the city, as voters
and political capital. The politicians catered to the dwellers’ most pressing
interests, intervening to prevent eradication and to provide basic public ser-
vices and other necessities while obtaining their votes. The dwellers, in turn,
learned how to play these clientelist games and to defend their interests
through formal and informal channels alike.
All this relied, to a significant extent, on auto-construcción, a specific
form of DIY urbanism. This concept has become quite familiar, recently,
in academic and non-governmental discourses, to defend alternative urban
strategies in which formal and informal initiatives are supposed to blur and
reinforce each other, as well as to deepen citizen involvement in urban affairs
(see Harvey 2008). However, DIY can take diverse forms, and be pursued
for different motives and goals. In cities such as Berlin, Prague or Amsterdam
the concept mainly refers to a limited number of practices in relatively small
urban spaces that are put to alternative and mostly temporary use (squat-
ting, urban farming, festivals, ‘occupy now’ manifestations, etc.). When it
comes to cities in the developing world, the concept refers to radically dif-
ferent processes – ones that are at once more substantial and less temporary.
In Medellín, DIY urbanism involves over half of the city’s population and
neighbourhoods. It is first and foremost motivated by solving essential basic
needs (housing, water, electricity, sewers), and thus defines dwellers’ qualities
of life and day-to-day practices and representations. Here, informal settling

and self-built housing practices become an inherent part of the built envi-
ronment and its representations (Brillembourg, Feireiss and Klempner 2005;
Hernández, Kellett and Allen 2010), while it also has wide-ranging physical,
social and political implications for the city as a whole.
In Medellín, during the most intensive period of informal urbanism from
the 1950s to the 1990s, physically, even within a single neighbourhood,
housing ranged from the most precarious wooden structures to durable and
generous houses.10 Depending on savings, some families would rapidly con-
solidate their structure with second, third and even fourth floors, but others
would proceed much slower, not evolve at all, rent to others or sell. In the
dwellers’ eyes, this implied significant heterogeneity on the same street and
block, let alone the neighbourhood as a whole. Also, as a result of the lack
of planning, the sloped terrain, the extreme densities and little if any public
investment, public space was scarce and of poor quality in these neighbour-
hoods, and even more so as they became denser. Originally, houses had
backyards (solares), in particular in the somewhat more formal developments,
but many were later filled in with informal additions, leaving only the street
for social gatherings in open air. The principal spots for children to play and
for juveniles to hang out were sidewalks (often also built by neighbours with
materials provided by a city council member or another political boss), streets
(progressively paved over), street corners (la esquina), or a sandy soccer field.
In the older, partially planned and more consolidated popular neighbour-
hoods (e.g. in Comunas 4 and 5), through donations and auto-construcción,
distinct Catholic churches were built, often with a well-designed adjacent
public square. They became the most iconic structures and spaces of these
neighbourhoods, and centres for community life. In invasion-originated
neighbourhoods, with lesser resources and without a formally established
parish, ambulant Catholic missionaries and evangelical sects competed for
influence, and used far less impressive structures as temples, which explains
why some are commonly referred to as iglesias de garaje or garage churches.
Neighbours respect them anyway.
Most social life played out in the neighbourhood; vacations were spent
at home. That said, and as hardly anybody owned a car in these neighbour-
hoods, ‘public’ transportation was fundamental for work, to visit family in
other neighbourhoods, go downtown to shop or to go to the stadium in
Otrabanda). Hastily put into place by savvy businessmen (among them city
council members) and poorly regulated by local and national authorities,
public transport was expensive and not very comfortable. Socio-economically,
these neighbourhoods were more heterogeneous than one might expect.
Social mobility had many obstacles, but was actively pursued. Many dwellers
worked in the informal sectors of the economy, but just as many worked
Figure 2.1 Mother with memorial for killed son. Photo by Gerard Martin.
in construction, shops, hotels and restaurants, and as bus or cab drivers.

Children went to school much more systematically than in the countryside;
quality was bad, and many dropped out. On the other hand, some went to
the rapidly-growing public universities and were often the first in their fam-
ilies to do so. This second generation, much more than their parents did,
explored the city and tried to make it their own. Fashion, sport, film, music
(in particular hard rock, beneath salsa), but also drugs, child prostitution and
juvenile delinquency made their inroads.
Dweller associations to obtain services and amenities were most effectively
organized at the beginning, when a neighbourhood was still in its early set-
tling phase. They lobbied city council members or other political leaders and
middlemen to obtain cement, bricks, and other construction materials as well
as certain amenities and services. In the early 1960s, a national reform pro-
vided these local neighbourhood associations with a legal framework in order
to establish a more formal funding channel for the Alliance for Progress and
government programmes more in general. These Juntas de Acción Comunal
(one per neighbourhood) with their elected boards became the principal
community-based counterparts for such programmes, but at the same time
they ‘politicized’ and lost some of their initial energy and spontaneous rep-
resentation. Parents organized through other platforms to press for schools,
equipment, teachers and playgrounds. Most took the form of small but active
minorities, rather than social movements, and many dwellers free-rode on
their efforts. All shared, to a certain extent, a common knowledge and savoir
faire in interacting layers of informal and formal rules. Thus institutional
penetration was low, but not inexistent. All these neighbourhoods includ-
ing the tugurios, were eventually connected by EPM and EVM services and
even a substantial proportion of the dwellers, excluding the ones who tapped
illegally, became formal clients and consumers. Proof of their systematic pay-
ment of these services established rights that were used to prevent eviction,
negotiate alternative solutions or obtain property titles. Ownership continu-
ously increased – from 51 per cent (early 1950s) to 65 per cent at the end of
the 1980s (Gilbert 1994).
For all these reasons, the physical precariousness, poverty and institutional
neglect did not imply that the dwellers did not construct a sense of belong-
ing. Many were proud of the improvements they were making. A sidewalk or
contention wall, built during weekends of collective auto-construcción was
understood as progress, as was the arrival of basic services like water, electric-
ity or sewers, even though many tapped them illegally. However, the political
ideologies that dominated urban cultural and social housing studies in the
1970s and early 1980s often qualified popular neighbourhoods and their
habitants as excluded by the state, exploited by capitalism, and corrupted by
clientelist practices. Supposedly, this had guided the dwellers into a carry-on
pragmatism inspired by false hope and a lack of class consciousness. The
communist guerrilla organizations, increasingly active since the late 1970s,
attributed the absence of resistance and revolt in these neighbourhoods to
the dwellers being lumpen, and not proletariat.11 To stir them into action,
it was decided, revolutionary violence would be inserted in their world.
At about the same time, violence related to cocaine trafficking was also
penetrating the neighbourhoods.
The Impact of Crime and Violence on Belonging:

mid 1980s to 1990s
Even in the 1960s and 1970s when Medellín was not seen as a particularly
violent city, it did have its security problems (G. Martin 2012). Gangs,
often consisting of adolescents and young adults from popular neighbour-
hoods, were involved in armed assaults, drug dealing and extortion of small
businesses. Within the sprawling local contraband economy, various groups
hardened into organized crime around tobacco smuggling, with deadly turf
wars breaking out in the early 1970s. Guerrilla militias – small but violent –
robbed banks, kidnapped and perpetrated terrorist attacks. The national
police and municipal security departments reacted, but didn’t have the tools,
capacity, personnel or strategies for substantial opposition, and also suffered
from corruption. In the popular neighbourhoods, insecurity was one of the
areas in which DIY practices and ‘belonging’ manifested their darker sides.
Rich and poor alike showed low tolerance for beggars, the homeless, drug
addicts and other desechables (literarily meaning garbage or waste), who
were seen as profiteers and unproductive folks – threats to ‘progress’ and
property. Property might seem precarious in the poor neighbourhoods, but
dwellers’ investments in time and economies had been significant. Fences
(rejas) went up, but not as sophisticated as in the rich neighbourhoods and
so additional measures had to be taken. This led to permissiveness of ‘social
cleansing’ (limpieza social), perpetrated by corrupt public forces (hired, or
by their own initiative), vigilantes, neighbourhood gangs or guerrilla mili-
tias. Confronted with particularly heinous crimes, such as the rape of a
minor – sometimes based on nothing more than a rumour – neighbours
would even take the law into their own hands. All this was understood as
rather ‘normal’, and remained largely unobserved. Reporting and analytical
studies were scarce. But the impunity, the lawlessness and the permissiveness
of illegality it implied did provide a facilitating context for the type of crime
that would come next, various expressions of which would translate into a
dramatic assault on the social, economic and institutional fabric of the city.
Much more lethal forms of crime and violence took central stage during
the 1980s, which dramatically transformed feelings of boundedness and
forms of social regulation in the popular neighbourhoods and the city at
large. Medellín’s geographic location contributed to making it Colombia’s
principle drug trafficking hub, similar to what happened with South Florida,
the Bahamas, Rotterdam and certain other locations. Organized crime dra-
matically hardened and professionalized a series of clans, one of them led
by Pablo Escobar (1949–93), once they moved into the highly lucrative
cocaine business. With their stunning profits, the rest of the local crime
market was now worth peanuts, and also rapidly under control of these
clans (often referred to as the Medellín cartel). Their money, ruthlessness,
corruption, threats and systematic use of murder and other forms of vio-
lence further paralysed the justice and security apparatus and corrupted local
society. The drug money also transformed the existing guerrilla groups into
well-armed and well-funded fighting machines. Although mainly active in
rural areas, in Medellín, urban militias infiltrated and radicalized student
organizations, unions, neighbourhood associations and other critical civil
society groups, overtaking existing leadership structures through threat and
murder. These militias consciously chose the poorest neighbourhoods – to
profit from the institutional void, recruit adolescents and young adults, orga-
nize military training, and impose their ‘order’ and ‘justice’ with threats and
terror. Pre-existing gangs, vigilantes, social cleansing and paramilitary groups

were enlisted by the drug lords and transformed into their security apparatus.
Together with this proliferation of organized violence, all kinds of disorga-
nized violence also thrived, notably youth gangs for hire. Juvenile hit-men
(sicarios) and their nihilistic subculture soon became, together with Escobar,
the poster children for Medellín’s descent into hell (Salazar 1990).12
This was urban violence on a scale and of a kind never seen before, any-
where. Common citizens, the media and analysts struggled to make sense of
it all. Some understood it as the reactivation of a culture of violence, in partic-
ular the intolerance, traumas and deep scars left by La Violencia. Others saw
it as the counterpart of corruption, impunity and widespread permissiveness
towards the illegal (as long as it was ‘productive’); still others regarded it as
expressions of rage and anomie stemming from poverty, inequality, social
disorganization and the aggressiveness of the built comuna environment;
more radical voices preferred to see it as a sign of social movement and civic
insurgency. Some of these factors certainly contributed to the situation, but
its defining character was the cocaine trade and its extraordinary cash inflow.
It produced criminal networks so powerful that they seriously challenged
Colombia’s regime stability, well before the guerrilla groups were able to
do so, and only after the latter had made their own descent into the cocaine
business. With thousands of murders per year in Medellín alone (compared
to a couple of hundred before), these criminal networks overloaded and
paralysed the already weak justice administration and were deeply disruptive
and destructive of existing forms of social life. Fear, anxiety, mistrust and
withdrawal spread through the city.
Medellín’s informal popular neighbourhoods in particular were deeply
affected, as the vulnerable and poor had fewer resources to protect them-
selves. The unregulated but well-understood built environment of informal
streets, alleys, houses, roof terraces, creeks, street corners and doorsteps now
turned into a no man’s land. Militia and gangs restricted physical mobility
by imposing frontiers, no-go zones, curfews and other arbitrary regulations,
one day enforced with deadly sanctions and another day celebrated with a
generous block party. Crossing a street or hanging out with friends on the
corner, in a staircase of a house, or on the soccer field, now became activ-
ities that involved risks and had to be handled with all kinds of precaution
and fear. Drugged and armed gang members imposed their arbitrary rules.
Shop owners ceded silently to ever harder extortion practices, or closed their
shops for fear of being killed. Neighbourhood committees were infiltrated,
threatened and blackmailed. Gangs paid off police agents. Those who dared
to denounce and provide testimony about criminal acts risked their lives.
Instead of bringing order to a weakly regulated environment, as militia and
gangs claimed, they displaced and destroyed the bonds and relations that an
active minority of mostly well-meaning dwellers had succeeded in building.

Institutional weakness was even stronger on the rural peripheries (G. Martin
1996, 2000). Contrary to Brazil and Mexico, Colombia did not provide a
state-regulated process of rural land occupation and instead permitted a free-
for-all, easily exploited by speculators and hardmen, and later by guerrilla,
paramilitary and drug lords. Although EPM and EVM continued their service
provision, officials, teachers, health workers, policemen and other officials
operated under increasingly difficult conditions. Opinion polls systematically
showed insecurity now to be the main concern of Medellín’s population.
For other Latin American cities suffering from crime and violence in the
1990s, it was also observed that ‘practices of insecurity redefined relation-
ships with power, fellow citizens and space [while] habits and geographies
are modified, tranquillity or faith is lost’ (Rotker 2002: 12–13; she speaks of
‘citizens of fear’ and ‘cities written by violence’). Research about the everyday
experience with crime and violence in general became more common (Das
et al. 2001; for Colombia, see Pécaut 1996 and 2001; and Sánchez 2008).
As the violence, terror and trauma in Medellín were even more severe than in
other cities, so was the individual and social suffering. There is no doubt that
feelings of belonging were much more severely threatened during this period
than at any other time period here considered.
Bringing the State (Back) in: the 1990s
Among a series of wide-ranging reforms to bring the country’s violence under

control, President Cesar Gaviria (in office: 1990–94) created a well-funded
and ambitious initiative to bring institutions (back) into play, which prioritized
Medellín in particular. Maria Emma Mejia, a charismatic hands-on manager,
led the programme and built an interdisciplinary team around local talent and
public-private partnerships. In Medellín, some private sector groups, research-
ers, non-governmental organizations, human rights groups, artists, public
school teachers, neighbourhood committees, victims and youth groups had
already started to speak out against the crisis. While the national and inter-
national media were obsessed with Escobar, these local enlightened voices
insisted on overcoming ‘the absence of the state’, opening up opportunities
for disadvantaged youth, and improving the relationship between citizens
and police; they pleaded for participation and proximity. They contributed
to the creation of the presidential programme, integrating its implementing
team. Territorially, efforts focused on some of Medellín’s poorest and most
violent neighbourhoods (particularly in Comunas 1–4), and demographi-
cally on youth. The central idea was to ‘include’ (or ‘to make belong’) these
areas in the formal city by extending coverage and quality of services, by (re)
establishing bridges with public and private agencies, and by working with
neighbourhood organizations, the private sector and local government in
down-to-earth projects such as school renovation, sports facilities, health facil-
ities and youth employment. An innovative comprehensive slum upgrading
effort – the Programa Integral de Mejoramiento de Barrios Subnormales en
Medellín – was also part of the package (Dapena 2006), and was implemented
by the social housing department of the National University, but limited to
only a handful of neighbourhoods and relatively short-lived (1992–96).
Traditional neighbourhood leaders had not fully lost their savoir faire in
working with the clientelist networks, and they certainly tried to position
themselves first in line for the ‘handouts’ of this national project and other
initiatives. But neither the presidential programme nor the newer, younger
and more urban savvy generation of neighbourhood activists would give
them much room. The violence and trauma had, to a certain extent, worked
as an equalizer, and had done away with the respect for overly vertical and
hierarchical relationships; traditional leaders, at least in the neighbourhoods,
partly lost their leadership role. The new generation also had other needs and
ideas. They suggested murals, oral history projects, a youth club, more par-
ticipation and debate, and their requests were often positively rewarded. New
potential for belonging was thus operationalized both in relation to neigh-
bourhood issues and in relation to the new institutional provisions being put
into place under President Gaviria. After decades of keeping a low profile,
the local government also came back into view. National reforms led to the
direct election of mayors (1988); progressively longer periods of administra-
tion (1988) established at two years, then three years (1991) and finally four
years (since 2004); fiscal and administrative decentralization of education,
health and certain other services; and comparatively strong discretionary
power for Colombian mayors, at least on paper. Mandatory introduction of
city development plans (1991) and territorial plans (1997), citizen participa-
tion channels (1994), social control, and oversight of public contracting also
contributed to modernizing and democratizing local government. Another
major reform that contributed to re-establishing bridges between citizens
and the state was the forceful modernization of the National Police, during
the second part of the 1990s.
In Medellín, the first generation of elected mayors (1988–2003) came
from traditional political backgrounds. These six mayors were no visionar-
ies and did not implement an ambitious urban development strategy, con-
trary to what mayors Antanas Mockus and Enriqye Peñalosa did in Bogotá
between 1995 and 2003 (G. Martin and Ceballos 2004; G. Martin et al.
2007). Nevertheless, citizens gave them very positive evaluations overall.
First, although Medellín continued to be extremely violent, homicides were
diminishing and many people considered that the city had turned a corner.
Second, basic public services continued to be run rather smoothly and to

penetrate deeply in the informal and pirate settlements, thanks to the tech-
nocrat management of EPM and EPV. Third, the mayors realized a couple
of high profile public works. The metro, inaugurated in 1995 after ten years
of construction, was the first of its kind – and still the only one – in the
country. It fulfilled the demand for more efficient public transportation,
added a strong structuring element to the city and became immediately an
object of local pride, although it left the city with a crippling debt burden
(Leyva Botero 2010). Other public works meant to counter the decay and
insecurity of the historic centre (Comuna 10) and to restore the 1950s ideal
of a modern and recognizable civic centre, with the construction of five new
public squares, a public library, a music hall, and a convention centre (1997–
2002).13 Mayor Luis Pérez (2001–03) distinguished himself by building a
public transportation system in the form of a cable car line, connecting the
informal neighbourhoods of Comuna 1 and 2 with the metro system down in
the valley. It dignified and shortened transportation time, but was particularly
welcomed by the dwellers, as the first major public infrastructure work ever
brought to their neighbourhoods. Although territorially scattered and lack-
ing a comprehensive city development strategy, these efforts to strengthen
local government services did somewhat diminish the distance and disaffec-
tion between citizens and state that had come to characterize the situation at
the height of the violence and institutional dislocation a decade earlier (Rave
2008; Leyva Botero 2010; G. Martin 2012). While this may have helped to
re-anchor feelings of belonging, fear, violence and terror continued to hinder
the establishment of belonging as a meaningful source of social regulation for
these neighbourhoods and to the city in general.
Social Urbanism: 2004–12
The 1990s urban projects came under criticism by a group of young local
architects and city planners – some with fresh Ph.D. dissertations from techni-
cal universities in Barcelona. They were mainly based at the local Universidad
Pontificia Bolivariana, where they ran urban workshops, including El Taller
del Norte (Atelier of the Northern neighbourhoods) on pressing urban chal-
lenges. They argued that the new projects were mostly located in the formal
city, except for the cable car, and thus neglected the pressing problems of the
poor and violent northern neighbourhoods. The cable line had serious short-
comings, they argued, as it was connecting the informal city with the formal
one, but through the air only and not in terms of the urban fabric. What was
needed, according to these voices, was a vision and integrated approach to
remaking the city as a whole – to decrease the socio-spatial segregation gap,
to pull the informal city into the formal one, and to make Medellín a more
just and equitable metropolis (Arango, Orsini, and Echeverri 2011: 312–15).
The think tank also stressed the importance of a metropolitan policy for
agglomeration as a whole, not limited to Medellín only. Medellín’s Plan de
Ordenamiento Territorial (1999) was already partly influenced by the idea.
The city was confronting a resurgence of violence. Murders had been down
by 50 per cent over the 1991–97 period (although still hovering around a
stunning 3,000 per year). Analysts had proclaimed that with the death of
Escobar in 1993 closure had come to a dramatic period. Many hoped that
the city might just go back to its ‘normal self’. However, the special presi-
dential programme for Medellín was not continued after 1994, when a new
president was elected. Also, polarization between narco-paramilitary organi-
zations (many led by Medellín-based drug lords such as the brothers Castaño
and Diego Fernando Murillo, alias ‘Don Berna’) and the guerrilla led to a
new wave of terror and violence, in particular in the countryside, and resulted
in massive forced displacement towards cities such as Medellín. The clash also
led to a resurgence of killings in the city (1998–2002).14 This was particularly
evident in informal neighbourhoods within more recently ‘urbanized’ sectors
of town (Comunas 8, 9, 13), where many migrants were settling and where
the armed groups were trying to establish control.
Elected on his security agenda, President Álvaro Uribe (2002–10) imme-
diately ordered large-scale military operations against guerrilla militia in
Medellín’s Comuna 13. At the same time, he opened peace negotiations with
the narco-paramilitaries – as the guerrilla refused to negotiate. Following a
ceasefire with the paramilitary (2002), homicides in Medellín dropped 40 per
cent in 2003 alone (from 3721 murders to 2012). At the end of that year, a
polemic national process of paramilitary demobilization started, with the first
group of about a thousand fighters disarming in December 2003 in Medellín
(52 more groups and over 30,000 fighters would follow over the next two
years, including another 3,500 in the city). Also at the end of 2003, the local
elections were won by the politically independent and reform-oriented can-
didate Sergio Fajardo. He was known as a U.S. schooled mathematician and
professor at the elitist Los Andes University in Bogotá, but also as an opinion-
ated commentator on local affairs. Fajardo appointed civil society activists to
prominent local government positions. He provided the local administration
with a more transparent, participatory and rationalist bearing. As the son of
Raul Fajardo (1928–2012) – a prominent member of the first generation of
locally schooled, modernist architects – the new mayor was well positioned
to invite the critical group of architects and planners of El Taller del Norte, to
join his team and help to define an innovative urban development strategy,
now generally referred to as social urbanism. Fajardo also reorganized and
strengthened critical city agencies such as the Department of Planning and the
urban development firm Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano (EDU). His succes-

sor and political ally Alonso Salazar (2008–11) followed up with the creation
of the Social Institute for Housing and Habitat of Medellín (ISVIMED).15
During Fajardo’s and Salazar’s mayorships, the city’s investment priorities
were reoriented towards territories and populations with the lowest quality of
life indicators – i.e. the popular neighbourhoods – to help them rebuild their
spatial and social fabric and overcome the city’s ‘historic social debt’ towards
them (Fajardo 2008). Even though urban design and architecture were
put forward as important means to attain some of the goals, the approach
did not concentrate on mere physical interventions. Also, instead of sector
approaches (such as housing or infrastructure) or a top-down approach, it
engaged in thorough surveying of the spatial and social dynamics of the most
critical neighbourhoods, as a respectful basis and first step for any further
interventions. Neighbourhood scenarios were worked out in close concor-
dance with the citizens and so were the mayor’s central priorities for the city
(equality, quality of life, civic culture, overcoming the social debt and trans-
forming Medellín into ‘the best educated city’ (‘la ciudad más educada’)).
Subsequently, these scenarios were translated into multidisciplinary projects
led by working groups and accompanied by strong civic communication to
explain the politics, projects and interventions.16
The strategy of Proyetos Urbanos Integrales (PUI, Integral Urban
Projects) was designed and applied during the 2004–12 period to some
of the most critical areas of the city.17 A PUI typically covers about twenty
neighbourhoods and directly or indirectly impacts an average of 150,000
people. In 2012, two had been fully implemented, and four others were
underway or in their planning and consultation phase. For each PUI, citizens
participate in the assessment of material and immaterial contexts (including
citizen perceptions of space as related to insecurity) to develop a master plan
that covers physical interventions and social programmes. One of the most
important physical aspects of a PUI typically includes improving access to
public transportation, including the construction of cable cars, tramways,
new bus lines and pedestrian routes. A new 4.2 kilometre tramway, con-
tracted with funding and technical assistance from the Agence Française
de Développement (AFD) and Atelier Parisien d’Urbanisme (APUR), is
currently being inserted on an historic thoroughfare to connect the popular
neighbourhood of Comuna 8 with the metro downtown and with two new
cable cars, and will form a central structural element of the PUI for these
areas of town. Another central physical aspect of a PUI entails the upgrading
of public spaces, including the following: the recovery of the linear parks
among the often-invaded banks of the hillside creeks; the improvement
of street lighting, formalization of property titles and connections to the
public service grid; consolidation of habitat; removal of at-risk habitat (and
formal housing solutions, often inside the same neighbourhood, for those
who are obliged to move); strategic insertion of six- to eight-storey social
housing units; integral renovation of sports facilities to formal competition
standards; upgrading and construction of school facilities (from early child-
hood to higher education); and iconic new cultural facilities (libraries, a
cultural centre, etc.) designed in Medellín’s collectively esteemed tradition
of high-quality architecture.
The PUI strategy is not about just implementing amenities or public
space, but about trying to generate new opportunities and feelings of belong-
ing in their specific social context. Its aim of respectful spatial insertion puts
architecture at the service of urbanism (and not the other way round), not
only with the PUIs, but also with other less ambitious interventions around
the city. Architectural design and building materials are consciously chosen –
although not always through competitions – to guarantee that the new and
renovated schools, libraries and cultural centres will be aesthetically attractive
and that they will contribute to dignifying the poor neighbourhoods, inside
or close to which they were systematically built.18
Under Medellín’s social urbanism approach, all these physical interven-
tions are understood as vehicles to improve the coverage and quality of
municipal as well as national services: cultural programming, sports, family
Figure 2.2 Medellín seen from the hills. Photo by Gerard Martin.
protection, after-school programmes, access to justice, and policing. Also

to guarantee that a PUI will not get stuck in the planning phase, and will
be fully implemented within five years, selected components are initiated
as soon as possible while others continue in the design phase. This is also
meant to prevent loss of momentum and support among residents, whose
expectations of government are systematically low, based on their historic
experiences. Often, however, the residents – while extensively briefed on
the interventions – mainly limit their interest to those built closest to their
habitat, as well as to the most iconic ones (cable cars, libraries). They also do
not necessarily perceive how such interventions relate to the master plan, let
alone the city-wide reform agenda. On a more general level, however, most
dwellers are aware that the city is involved in some kind of a reform process
and that many public works are being undertaken.
Social Urbanism and Belonging
The social urbanism approach can hardly fail, given that the pre-existing
do-it-yourself dynamics of the popular neighbourhoods submitted to its
treatment are systematically taken into account and no top-down ‘solutions’
are imposed. Beyond any doubt, certain interventions – like recuperating the
creeks and transforming them in linear neighbourhood parks – are socially
conflictive operations, given the relocation of residents and removal of at-risk
habitat that they imply. Also, the insertion of a specific square, pedestrian
crossing or other intervention may, unsurprisingly, not work out precisely
as foreseen. The idea of open schools, to be used by neighbours after school
hours, had to be partly abandoned due to security concerns. However, given
that the PUI methodology includes a conscious effort to understand and
respect significant parts of the (pre-)existing neighbourhood logics, senti-
ments of place, mental maps and auto-construcción traditions, the approach
is one of context-sensitive urban repair rather than of radical renewal. While
social urbanism is certainly partly about introducing rationality and f ormality,
flexibility is maintained in explicit recognition of historical processes of largely
informal appropriations. An inherent part of this is to provide incentives to
dwellers to further improve their own houses, shops and businesses in the
context of the PUI or other projects.
When the new ‘city-makers’ speak about ‘dignifying’ habitat and neigh-
bourhoods, and the need to eliminate at-risk habitat, it implies recognition
of the vernacular, of the improvised aesthetics of these neighbourhoods,
and of their inherent logic of constant creation and re-creation. For exam-
ple, although national environmental laws require that both sides of a 10
metre stroke should be left free of private constructions, the reform-oriented
administration – when consolidating informal housing – often decided to

apply this rule with reason in order to accommodate the historically grown
situation.19 Such working methods, which pair formal choreographies with
micro-scale citizens’ concerns and interests, fit well with the traditional char-
acter of belonging in these neighbourhoods, as this always mirrored a hybrid
mix of formal and informal practices, be it in the spatial, social or institutional
realm. The PUI may be part of a strong political and professional framework
(managers, architects, quality teams, all covered by the mayor himself), fit
within institutionalized urban policies that impose more rules (sidewalks,
street signs, alignments, building regulations) and leave less occasion for spon-
taneous interventions; still, however, all sorts of margins are left (on purpose
or by accident) for the non-formal practices. This means that the acupunctural
approach inserts new layers of physical structuring and social regulation, with-
out fully eliminating the pre-existing ones, which helps to steer the incom-
plete historic urbanization process towards completion, thus enhancing the
individual and social processes of belonging, at least in a spatial dimension.
The fact that Medellín’s social urbanism (since 2004) has received so
much national and international interest and expert analysis goes beyond
fascination in contrast to the city’s struggle to overcome its traumatic vio-
lence.20 Many try to understand the methodologies behind the model. If
social urbanism was an easy trick, why did it take so long for the city to
get its act together? And why are so many other Colombian cities – which
confront the same national reforms and constraints – unwilling or incapable
to do their part? Some other large cities, like Barranquilla, and mid-sized
ones, like Monteria and Neiva, have been making progress, but theirs is still
more a series of projects than an integrated city-wide development strat-
egy. Social urbanism is, on the contrary, a highly sophisticated mixture of
political will and rigorous but creative processes. On a substantive level, it
reflects thorough rethinking and understanding of the city’s problems (e.g.
the contributions of academia and civic society from the 1990s onwards);
the political will to give systematic priority to the poor and disadvantaged;
and the capacity to lay this down in a clear vision for the future as well as to
translate the vision into a city development strategy with precise projects and
programmes. On a more procedural level, the model shows commitment to
a rational result-oriented city administration, including the introduction of
measurable benchmarks; a restructuring of its debt, professional accounting
and transparent public contracting;21 mobilizing of the appropriate technical
and human resources; the building of partnerships; and finally, the capability
to link the plans and policies with the three dimensions (and various aspects
of each) on which people construct their belonging (i.e. spatial, social and
civic). Obviously, all this presupposes democratic regime conditions, and
sufficient decentralization and resources to mobilize the necessary technical
and human assets. As a result, it is now evident that the PUI-consolidated

neighbourhoods and others with less ambitious but rather similarly styled
interventions, like Moravia, are increasingly assuming roles as sub-centres,
with supermarkets, bank branches, shops and other commercial services. At
the same time, through their functional aspects and symbolic meaning – and
thanks to improved policing and other forms of formal regulation – new
public spaces, cultural centres, libraries, schools, job-training centres and
other facilities are taking on aspects of public domain, where positive social
relations that go beyond mere family and friends are constructed (Hajer and
Reijndorp 2001: 11–12). Civic pride is often evident from the eagerness with
which residents talk about the functions and aesthetics of the new amenities.
The way in which all this contributes to new forms of sociability does
not only spring from its spatial dimensions. The new libraries and cultural
centres, for instance, are often most heavily used and appreciated for the
free Internet on dozens (sometimes hundreds) of online computers made
available, which are primarily consulted for Facebook and to play games.
Social and mental appropriations of these new amenities create the potential
for new social bonds. (It is also true, however, that residents become rapidly
used to new facilities and services, and criticism of waiting times, or broken
computers, is sometimes more easy to detect than appreciation.) New forms
of sociability result also from the explicit efforts to promote citizen partici-
pation, although these too do have their limits. Not unlike elsewhere in the
world, civic participation seems to be rather low in Medellín,22 although a
bit higher in the popular neighbourhoods. Due to various constraints (time,
knowledge, efficiency), it is also clear that it is impossible for residents to con-
tribute to all requests for participation that come their way. Nor does the fact
that venues for participation exist guarantee that the most relevant topics are
being discussed. In certain neighbourhoods, for instance, people may offer
their suggestions for the redesign of a small public square, but at the same
time silently consider that getting rid of the gang members that linger around
the square, and of the dealers that sell their wares there, may well be more
important. Even interdisciplinary teams, such as those put into place under
the PUI methodology, may have difficulty in revealing such issues, for fear
among the residents of retaliation by gangs or others.
Proximity and Belonging
Medellín’s social urbanism efforts to (re-)engage citizens and promote live-

ability cannot be cynically dismissed as an alibi to impose a top-down urban
renewal through technocratic procedures. Its constant references to common
sense, pragmatism, democratic procedure and context differ from the ideology
of strict modernist or functionalist approaches, as well as from paternalis-

tic miserabilism.23 Strong guidance and direction is evident, of course, but
was voted into place three subsequent times under transparent local elec-
tions, with mayors Alonso Salazar (2008–11) and to a lesser extent Aníbal
Gaviria (since 2012), continuing the reform process. Central ideas of social
urbanism are themselves a product of civil society demands, formulated since
the 1990s. On an everyday basis, the administration is also overseen by a
city council, whatever its shortcomings may be; socially controlled by well-
established forms of citizen participation; backed by a reform-oriented group
of local entrepreneurs, who play an important role as somewhat ‘hidden’ but
constructive city-boosters; critically followed by a dozen well-established non-
governmental organizations and academic research centres with interest in the
city; and technically assisted by various international donor agencies. Due to
a particular set of conditions, all these protagonists seemed to articulate their
work in the same direction, i.e. the priorities initially defined by Fajardo (for a
counter example, see the classic study on Mexico City by Davis 1994).
Not to forget the dwellers. In the past, they did not undergo poverty,
informality and clientelism passively, and neither do they with the current
reforms. Since 2004, the local administration has also developed strong com-
munication strategies to inform its citizens on how the city is moving forward
and what its main priorities are. Local television programmes, municipal
publications and the city’s website, fairs and festivities, exhibitions, local
newspapers as well as popular and more academic publications. Being better
informed about the city’s policies may have increased the credibility of the
public administration among citizens. Residents are also proud that the inter-
ventions in their neighbourhoods have received prestigious architecture and
urbanism awards, as has been the case with the habitat consolidation oper-
ation in the Juan Bobo creek, the PUI approach, some of the new public
libraries, some of the schools, and the social urbanism strategy as a whole.
The rationale for these awards has often been the manner in which these proj-
ects and policies have been respectfully contextualized, in physical, social and
political contexts, to improve and dignify quality of life. An interesting para-
dox is, of course, that this social and physical fabric sourced for and invested
in these new buildings and innovative approaches – is the product of DIY
informal building practices and auto-construcción. The dweller-builders,
however, have yet to receive their first architecture and urbanism award. The
Venezuelan architect Teolinda Bolívar, a student of Paul-Henry Chombart
de Lauwe, was one of the first to recognize the dwellers as constructores de
barrios y de ciudad or ‘builders of the wards and the city’ (Pedrazzini, Bolay
and Bassand 1996).
Another paradox is that although the social urbanism approach recognizes
and respects the DIY practices as intrinsic to the urban fabric, it inevitably
aims at progressively phasing out the most blatant forms of illegality and
informality. Regulations will increase with the arrival of new and better public
services. It seems increasingly unlikely that neighbours will be permitted to
add, on their own initiative, contention walls or sidewalks, as they would
have been in the past. Informal dweller-builders evolve into citizen-builders
and citizen-clients, given that they operate increasingly within formal rules. If
this is true, the illegal and informal voids will thus progressively be filled by
rules and relations between citizens and the state. This process of deepening
citizenship contributes in a fundamental way to feelings of belonging, at least
as long as these relations are democratically shaped. It is no coincidence that
in Medellín, too, citizens seem to request more proximity in their interaction
with public services and authorities, under influences that are global (the
Internet, mobile phones), national (the rights-oriented 1991 Constitution)
and local (the social urbanism reforms). This aspiration of proximity is coher-
ent with the idea of the citizen as a client, and goes beyond the idea of
enhancing participation and deliberation (as advocated in the 1990s) to that
of procedural impartiality and justice (Rosanvallon 2008). The latter refers to
the perception of being taken into account and not feeling that decisions are
simply being vertically imposed; of being treated equally; and of being con-
sidered with respect (on the role of respect in political relations in a popular
neighbourhood in Recife, see Vidal 2000). Being respected and recognized
in one’s particularity seems to have a positive impact on people’s self-esteem,
the legitimacy awarded to institutions, and the intention to obey their rules
(Tyler 2006 [1990]). It is also consistent with a larger role for sub-national
governments in social regulation and service provision. It may explain the
large support given to visionary mayors, such as Antanas Mockus in Bogotá
and Sergio Fajardo in Medellín, when they propose not only physical inter-
ventions, but systematically invoke the necessity of transparent, equal and
respectful forms of social regulation.
In Medellín, the quality of democracy has been changing since 2004 as
a result of the deeper penetration of institutions, and the way the residents
of these popular neighbourhoods relate to them. Both the national and the
local reforms have played a fundamental role in advancing formal and sub-
stantive aspects of equality. Electoral participation is likely to increase with
improvements in education. In Medellín, only 41 per cent of those with the
lowest education levels vote, against 77 per cent of those with the highest
education levels. It may come as a surprise that a 2008 survey shows that
72 per cent of those living in Comunas 1–4 (among the poorest of the city)
do not consider themselves ‘excluded’. Popular neighbourhoods still have
the highest concentrations of poverty and lowest quality of life indicators, but
in 2008 only Comunas 1 and 2 formally qualified as homogenously ‘low’ in
terms of socio-economic strata; Comunas 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 13 and 15 qualified as
mixed ‘low’ and ‘medium’; the others as mixed ‘low’, ‘medium’ and ‘high’.
In the ‘low’ strata, 56 per cent had cable television, 19 per cent owned a
computer and 11 per cent had the Internet (versus 70 per cent for ‘medium’
and 92 per cent for ‘high’ social strata).
Social belonging certainly also develops better in a less violent and further
democratically regulated situation. The fact that both the Colombian regime
and its way of governing are democratic does not mean that all spheres of
society are democratically regulated. The porous boundaries between the
legal and the illegal may have diminished somewhat, but they continue to
be an inherent part of the everyday experiences in these neighbourhoods.
Dwellers still have to manage a lot of ‘grey areas’ of social regulation, although
degrees differ among neighbourhoods, depending on the role specific legal
and illegal agencies play there, and the style and quality of neighbourhood
leadership. Somewhat paradoxically, this may also explain ongoing distrust
towards (reform) politics. Dwellers have been able to use a mix of legal and
illegal practices to advance their interests, as elites did in their own way. In
the informal neighbourhoods of Medellín, deepening citizenship in its politi-
cal, social and civic dimensions is not a linear process, but rather is expanding
and eroding under the influence of a variety of aspects, including crime, inse-
curity and fear (Holston 2008: 317; but ‘insurgence of a new formulation of
citizenship’ would overstate our case). The historically complex ‘regulating’
role played by violence in this context continues to pose challenges. After
the collective extradition in March 2008 of a dozen of the country’s most
prominent narco-paramilitary crime lords, including Medellín’s Don Berna,
turmoil in the underworld for control over cocaine trafficking and other
criminal markets provoked a new cycle of violence in the city (2008–11).
Murders tripled from 804 (2007) to 2187 (2010). It brought the homicide
rate back to where it was in 2003 – before social urbanism took off – and
stunned local authorities, because among the most impacted neighbour-
hoods were some that had already completed a PUI treatment, or other
ambitious interventions (G. Martin 2012).
Contrary to the reductionist and absurd (but not seldom repeated) inter-
pretation that qualifies Fajardo’s reform policies as ‘paramilitary modern-
ization’ – a term coined by F. Hylton (2010), who contrary to all evidence
considers that Fajardo and Salazar plotted the city’s pacification with Don
Berna – the new crime spike revealed that organized crime and criminal gangs
continue to have great capacity to operate in the city. It also made it clear
that some social urbanism apologetics had slipped into overly simplistic inter-
pretations (‘Medellín fights crime with architecture’). Mayor Salazar rightly
concluded that while the responsibility for the new crisis was mostly national
– he identified a corrupt and malfunctioning criminal justice system as the
main culprit – the city should develop its own anti-organized crime agenda
and lobby harder for national support. The newly elected President Juan
Manuel Santos (since 2010), Uribe’s former Secretary of Defence, has taken
such requests seriously and defined a series of measures after a thorough
assessment of the situation on the ground.
Today, more than at any time before in the last fifty years, public tolerance
of the use of violence seems to be withering. National and local victim-ori-
ented reparation and reconciliation policies and programmes (since 2005),
including the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation
(CNRR), have been fundamental to this. Medellín’s Museo Casa de la
Memoria (Memory House Museum), inaugurated in 2014, plays a critical
role in this field. Increased institutional proximity and respect, especially as
related to victims, does not imply that social, income or wealth distances
have been shortened. Neither have traditional politicians given up hope to
regain control of the city administration. (The case of Bogotá, where reform
has lost momentum since 2004, reminds us that periods of spectacular urban
innovation can rather abruptly come to an end.) Another risk factor is that
Colombia has experienced, over the last decade, a period of very healthy
macro-economic growth that has facilitated, under slowing demographic
growth, a widening of the middle class and a wide range of social support
programmes. Therefore, the quality of life improvement in Medellín over
the last decade cannot be exclusively attributed to the impact of the social
urbanism. Economically more challenging times may arrive. Only then will
we know how resilient the city has become.
Final Considerations
This chapter reconstructed the dynamics of belonging, as experienced in

popular neighbourhoods in Medellín, under complex conditions of both vio-
lence and reform. While other cities in Colombia and elsewhere in the region
sometimes seem to pursue similar types of reform, the Medellín experience
differs because strong criminal networks have played an extremely violent and
destructive part in the city’s social regulation over three decades. Its experi-
ence is also different from a series of European cities, where hope has been
invested in deregulation and DIY practices to promote citizen involvement
and belonging. However, while Medellín shares these latter ideals, social
urbanism is not about deregulation; on the contrary it’s about introducing
new forms of regulation and formality in a city where 70 per cent of the
existing constructions are of informal origin and not by choice, but by sheer
necessity.24
We have shown that the concept of belonging has an evidently heuris-
tic value in exploring the multidimensional implications of urban reform
processes for those who live them most intensively. Belonging steers away
from false dichotomies as inclusion-exclusion, and has a more dynamic con-
notation than identity, a concept that is not well suited to apply in these
neighbourhoods, where less than collective identity we find sentiments
of identification and feelings of belonging. It permits us to explore how
urban reform can strengthen belonging in certain directions and weaken it
in others, or do nothing at all. In the case of Medellín, the concept helps to
explain why residents of neighbourhoods affected by the reforms frequently
offer a much more fragmented narrative of the impact on their way of life
than one might expect, given the robust evidence of improved quality of
life and better public service delivery.25 Further empirical research on the
physical, social and political dimensions of belonging is needed, and could be
best performed by interdisciplinary teams, including historians of urbanism,
political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists (for
a good example, see Crimson Architecture Historians and Rottenberg 2007).
Longitudinal research that follows a series of families over time, and through
reform processes, would also be particularly insightful.26
Notes
1. The word ‘modernist’ here refers to modern planning methods and design practices as (to a
large extent) imported from the West, more specifically from the United States since 1945.
2. For example, Almere, the Dutch top-down new town par excellence, built in the 1970s, is
now a testing ground for deregulation and ‘informalization’ tendencies, with citizen input
in urban planning as an integral part of urban policies (cf. INTI (eds), 2012).
3. Even within a single ‘informal’ neighbourhood, one can find partially planned, invasion-based
or mixed forms.
4. Some of these local advocates of modern city planning, in particular Ricardo Olano, were
well informed about the ideas of Camillo Sitte, Ebenezer Howard) and the International
Town Planning Conference in London (1910), where architects – including some from
Latin America, but none from Colombia, as far as we know – met and discussed the future
of the city.
5. According to De Solà Morales the motivation of ‘clear distinction of the public domain with
regard to the private one [in order to] increase and to improve the public as superior to the
private’ is rooted in twentieth-century ideal models of a balanced city as target) and munic-
ipalisation as instrument. He describes the latter as ‘the ideological pillars of all progressive
city-planning policy’ (2009: 85–92).
6. State modernization stalled for mainly political reasons; see Bushnell 1993, and Pécaut 2012
[1987].
7. Karl Brunner (1887–1960) worked for several Latin American governments and cities,
including Bogotá and Medellín; cf. Hofer 2003.
8. Brunner, with his respect for context, was sidelined in the 1940s by local acolytes of CIAM
and by Le Corbusier, who was asked to make a plan for Bogotá (1947) and proposed
Wiener and Sert for the Medellín job. At that time, the Catalan Sert was general secretary
of the CIAM movement and, with the well-connected Wiener, he worked on city plans for
Bogotá, Chimbote, Lima and Havana, among others, and designed the Brazilian new town
Cidade dos Motores.
9. This discourse only changed from the mid 1990s onwards, partly as a result of the Habitat
II conference in Istanbul (1996); cf. Segre 2010: 165.
10. All empirical observations throughout this chapter derive from fieldwork by Gerard Martin
in Medellín (1985; 1991–93; 1998; 2002; 2008–12), and by Marijke Martin in 2008. See
G. Martin (2012) and G. Martin and Corrales (2009).
11. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined lumpen (from the German for ‘rag’) as a class of
unemployed that gains its subsistence mainly from crime, lacking class-consciousness and to
be ‘distrusted’ as ‘social scum’.
12. No Nacimos Pa’Semilla (published in English as Born to Die in Medellín, with an introduc-
tion by Colin Harding. London: Latin American Bureau, 1990) revealed the day-to-day
lifestyle of these gangs, and shocked the country into awareness. It was written by a young
journalist, Alonso Salazar, who would go on to become the second ‘social urbanism’ mayor
of Medellín (2008–11), after Sergio Fajardo.
13. Plaza de las Luces (with the new EPM library), Plaza de los Pies Descalzos, Parque San
Antonio and Plaza de los Deseos (with the new music hall). The latter square, built on
the imaginary frontier between the north (poor) and the south (rich), was an immedi-
ate hit with neighbouring families of the poor Moravia and Manrique neighbourhoods
(Comuna 4).
14. Presidents were Ernesto Samper (1994–98) and Andrés Pastrana (1998–2002); the latter’s
peace process with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) failed, but he was
successful in creating Plan Colombia with the U.S. Bill Clinton administration.
15. ISVIMED was created in 2008 by the second reform-oriented mayor Alonso Salazar. From
1990 to 2007, the city co-funded about 11,000 public housing solutions, versus 16,500 over
the 2008–11 period (including 2,800 for the families who were removed from the landfill in
Moravia). About 70 per cent were built directly by the city, and the rest under arrangements
with thirteen private construction firms, all working either within the various PUI, or within
the master plan for the Nuevo Occidente on the periphery of the city (just above the frontier
between Comunas 7 and 13), with some 15,000 low income housing units built (2004–11).
16. Rotterdam-based Crimson Architecture Historians, from a similar starting point of respect
for existing urban life in the suburb Hoogvliet – where they were invited to intervene –
applied a social survey to assess its various layers of reality, instead of simply returning to
the original planned idea. Feelings of belonging and identity were stimulated by the inter-
vention strategy ‘Welcome In My Backyard’ (WIMBY) (Crimson 2007). The labelling of
Medellín as ‘la más educada’ can be understood as a similar effort to promote belonging.
17. In Europe and the United States, an ‘integrated’ or ‘holistic’ approach to urban issues –
comprising the physical, economic and social dimensions of urban development – was
developed at the beginning of the 1990s. Stakeholders in the Medellín resurrection
process, however, point to the lessons learned from post-Franco Barcelona’s urban revival,
in direct personal contact with influential thinkers and architects such as Oriol Bohigas,
Joan Busquets and Manuel de Solà-Morales. More generally speaking, they also refer to the
effects of the ‘rediscovery’ of the city as a long-term physical and mental construct (with
influential key players such as Aldo Rossi, Kevin Lynch and Joseph Paul Kleihues).The
Bogotá revival (1995–2003) mirrored similar influences (M. Martin 2006 and 2007).
18. Alejandro Echeverri, in an interview with Marijke Martin, Medellín, June 2008.
20. Reijndorp’s (2004: 205) use of informal ‘anti-structure’ and formal ‘structure’, pro-
viding double meaning, does not apply in this case, given the historic dependency and
intermingling of formal and informal. Recently, it is exactly this mingling of the formal and
non-formal (both as a tradition and a strategy) that has been put forward as a lesson to be
learned from (mostly) non-Western urban practices (Brillembourg, Feireiss and Klempner
2005; Hernández, Kellett and Allen 2010).
21. Prestigious institutions, such as UN Habitat, The World Bank, The Inter-American
Development Bank, United States Agency for International Development (USAID),
Agence Française de Développement (AFD), international biennales for architecture and
urbanism, as well as mayors and experts from Rio de Janeiro, Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana,
Johannesburg and others who identify with Medellín’s struggle, have in various ways all
lauded the Medellín model.
22. This also includes long-term, more general visions; e.g. the new Directory Plan for Medellín
2030 wants to make it a fair city (in terms of equality), a city of well-being (‘providing the
basics for good living’), a city of knowledge (education as the most expeditious way to
open doors to equal opportunities), a city of gathering (in terms of enhancing trust and
coexistence) and a safe city (as well as a green, entrepreneurial and global city) (Valencia and
Rodríguez 2011: 18–36).
23. ‘Canales formales de participación no sirven, según el 73 por ciento de los residentes’
(Alvarez et al. 2010).
24. The influence of Barcelona’s school of urbanism (Oriol Bohigas, Manuel de Solà-Morales,
etc.) is evident.
25. Promoting moral, social and civic regulation was the cornerstone of the civic culture
approach pursued by mayor Antanas Mockus of Bogotá (1995–97; 2001–03) in order to
get the city back under control.
26. Evaluations of neighbours’ experiences with the reforms have overly focused on their spatial
dimension.
27. Here, Perlman 2010 can serve as an example.
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2

Proximity, Crime, Politics and Design

To explore the heuristic value of the concept of ‘belonging’, this chapter

Medellín’s Popular Neighbourhoods

Medellín’s current popular neighbourhoods or barrios populares developed

world, excluding those that experience open warfare or genocide (G.Martin

Romancing the Irregular

The anthropological and also architectural interest in the dynamics of

reconstruction in war-damaged Europe, modernist ideas rapidly spread to

for a supposedly over-regulated European and American planning practice,

‘­belonging’ to a combination of spatial and mental bonds as associated to

Early Planning Efforts

as a whole. (A metropolitan authority was created in 1980, but with lim-

Various conditions severely limited effective implementation of the Wiener

DIY Urbanism and Dimensions of Belonging:

of life and day-to-day practices and representations. Here, informal settling

in construction, shops, hotels and restaurants, and as bus or cab drivers.

The Impact of Crime and Violence on Belonging:

terror. Pre-existing gangs, vigilantes, social cleansing and paramilitary groups

active minority of mostly well-meaning dwellers had succeeded in building.

Bringing the State (Back) in: the 1990s

Among a series of wide-ranging reforms to bring the country’s violence under

Second, basic public services continued to be run rather smoothly and to

Social Urbanism: 2004–12

urban development firm Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano (EDU). His succes-

protection, after-school programmes, access to justice, and policing. Also

Social Urbanism and Belonging

a­dministration – when consolidating informal housing – often decided to

and human assets. As a result, it is now evident that the PUI-consolidated

Proximity and Belonging

Medellín’s social urbanism efforts to (re-)engage citizens and promote live-

of strict modernist or functionalist approaches, as well as from paternalis-

This chapter reconstructed the dynamics of belonging, as experienced in

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‘belonging’ to a combination of spatial and mental bonds as associated to

administration – when consolidating informal housing – often decided to