Abstract
The inauguration of Medellín, Colombia’s aerial cable car in 2004, is widely seen as a key turning point in reversing the city’s historical reputation for drug and gang-related crimes towards greater inclusiveness and public safety. Analyses of Medellín’s transformation have tended to focus on establishing the immediate positive outcomes achieved from the cable car and assessing persistent inequality and the fragile balance between enfranchisement and top-down institutional control. In this paper, we take these interpretations of Medellín’s transformation as our starting point and propose that a lasting legacy is to be found in the way the city plans for and works in disinvested areas. Our focus is on examining the elements that have made transformation possible in Medellín. We begin by exploring a set of framing conditions during the period of 1991 to 2000 (‘Before Line K’) and then outline the implementation of Metrocable and its shorter-term outcomes (‘Executing Line K’), before finally reflecting on the wider transformative impacts of this experience (‘Beyond Line K’). As key takeaways, we highlight the role of national policy, municipal finance, and community engagement in bringing a highly informal space into the reach of public institutions, thus providing insights for urban decision-makers looking to do the same.
Highlights
Medellín’s Metrocable, the world’s first urban mass transit application of cable car technology, has been the subject of great interest over the past decade, mainly because of the positive outcomes it is thought to have had on the city
We take as our starting point that it is the collective effect of the various changes that occurred in the city’s physical environment, institutional and financial structures, and behaviors and mental models that can be understood as an ‘urban transformation’ (Maassen and Galvin 2019)
Accepting the validity of both arguments as indicating that urban transformation is an imperfect and contested process, we here focus on the experience of executing Metrocable and achieving its immediate outcomes, to understand how this experience translated into a long-term, multi-level process of planning for large-scale projects in formerly disinvested areas of Medellín
Summary
Medellín’s Metrocable, the world’s first urban mass transit application of cable car technology, has been the subject of great interest over the past decade, mainly because of the positive outcomes it is thought to have had on the city. With the eventual goal of boosting social cohesion and service provision in what was considered an informal area, Metro de Medellín and the municipality refined the strategy of using infrastructure as a means of community development (Sotomayor 2015), and created a project plan that capitalized on both entities’ experiences with community engagement, partnerships, and the strategic deployment of municipal finances.
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