Medellín is now a global trendsetter in urban development. For the city, as for Colombia as a whole, security has been the door through which much else has followed. There have also been important changes in the planning and infrastructure of the city, along with a realisation that security, like growth, depended on a different operating system, using public spaces better and linking outlying areas with the central business district (CBD). The Integral Urban Project provided the city’s so-called ‘gondola’ transport system of cable cars, which now connect various outlying informal settlements across extreme topography to the metro system and thus to the city centre. The project also encouraged development around the metro stations in the form of libraries and green spaces.
Line J of Medellín’s Metrocable network now passes over La Comuna 13, one of the city’s toughest barrios. Inaugurated in 2007, the funicular transport system connects the 28 000 inhabitants of the comuna, and others, to the centre of the city. The journey, which would once have taken hours of travelling up and down winding, narrow roads, takes 10 minutes, and costs just $1.
Looking down at the rusted tin roofs and red-brick dwellings perched on the hillside, a local policeman observed in 2014: ‘We had a problem at the start of the cable car. The locals were shooting at it from the ground.’ The security problem was solved by improved patrolling. Line J, one of three spanning the city, carries 30 000 people a day, the cable cars travelling quickly over the barrios at 16 kilometres per hour, dispatching people efficiently to San Javier Station, at the bottom, and at La Aurora, on the top of the hillside 2.7 kilometres away.
Once at San Javier Station, commuters hop onto the Metro, first opened for service in 1995, and built by a Spanish–German consortium. Smart and litter-free, the system’s 27 stations and modern carriages are a symbol of the change in Medellín’s fortunes. Once the town of Escobar, the city is now the epicentre of Colombia’s mining and manufacturing industries. The Metro carries half a million passengers daily, including 350 000 residents from the north-eastern quarter, where many of the working class live. It is breaking down the barriers between once disparate poor and rich areas, and enabling new business growth.
With construction costs for the Metrocable at $10 million per kilometre and the Metro itself costing $2 billion, developing the city’s transport system was a bold step. The use of the Metro as a development axis was recognised by Medellín’s planners as critical in meeting the city’s modern needs in a period of social change and instability. Medellín’s urban growth since the 1960s had filled the entire Aburra Valley with communities, where harsh living conditions were heightened by drug trafficking, joblessness and violence.
In this positive cycle, improved security has led to economic prosperity, which, in turn, has cemented stability. Medellín boasts some 1 750 export businesses, the largest number of any Colombian city, from textile manufacturers to services. They are supplemented by mining, electricity generation, construction and, increasingly, tourism. Medellín’s success is connected to openness, both between its own communities and to international markets.
These developments have helped change local attitudes and integrate communities into city life, merging the formal with the informal. Medellín gained the Urban Land Institute’s Innovative City of the Year award in 2013, beating New York and Tel Aviv in the process.
Moving up and with the times is not something most African cities have yet managed, at least not in quite the same positive way.
Conclusion: A new urban agenda
Medellín was, not that long ago, synonymous with a level of anarchy that even the most challenged African cities have yet to achieve. However, a dedicated government with a comprehensive security, economic and infrastructure plan was able to turnaround a situation that many had deemed hopeless. The critical ingredients were the recognition the severity of the situation and the leadership taking responsibility for both the problems and the solutions.
The positive lesson for African leaders from Medellín is that change can happen and even extraordinary difficult situations can be addressed in a relatively short period of time. There is another dimension too. Positive change in an urban environment affects proportionately greater numbers of people than in the rural areas, and in so doing releases considerable entrepreneurial dynamism and economic growth.
Achieving this demands a concerted effort by the state and its leaders. Sometimes, as in the case of Father Engel, there are heroic individuals who try their utmost to improve their neighbourhoods. However, they cannot ensure the security of even small areas, let alone highly complex and combustible African cities, and it is difficult for them to sustain their programmes. The dynamics of high population growth, lack of employment and rapid urbanisation can create large areas where government rule is not apparent, and criminals and others can move freely. As a result, the future, as long as ‘business as usual’ continues, is of increasingly anarchic urban areas where people attempt to pursue lives under great stress and insecurity. Given current policies, governments in Africa will not be able provide either the conditions or resources needed for cities to make best use of their inherent advantages of density and scale.
The solutions have to be vested in the overall political economy if urban environments are to provide an answer to Africa’s extreme challenges of social and economic exclusion. Within this framework, can a solution be found that links housing, financing, security, internet connectivity, transport and governance to education, economic growth, healthcare and job creation? Key in this is certainty in the rule of law and avoidance of corruption.
There is little gainsaying the extent of the African challenge. Africa’s current urban frameworks, as will be seen in Chapter 6, are less a product of positive push and pull factors than of desperation. Using this opportunity to deliver a different future involves an acceptance of, on the one hand, the need for density in housing and, on the other, the role that informal communities and business can positively play. Planning, governance and architecture, in this way, become less about building afresh and more about inserting structures into the informal sector and building on the resources and resourcefulness already present.36
Whatever the scale of these challenges, and the constraints of time and resources, Medellín illustrates that 20 years is long enough to fundamentally break the negative patterns of the past if good leadership and the right sets of incentives are in place. The challenge to African leaders is that such dramatic results require a sharp deviation from the status quo that gave birth to these conditions.
The security aspect cannot of course succeed alone. Committing substantial military and financial resources to contexts as diverse as Iraq and the DRC illustrates that there is no such thing as a security solution to a country’s problems. Security crackdowns might provide space, but a political and economic solution is required for longer-term stability.
Chapter 2
Democracy and development
Five steps for success:
•Democracy and development are indivisible. Democratic government represents the interests of the general population, and not just an elite.
•The bouts of stability that authoritarians can bring must be viewed sceptically, given the superior global economic performance and stability of democratic governments over the long term.
•Democracies must be crafted to address the particular political, economic and demographic challenges that countries face.
•Democracy is vital to the empowerment of cities because only democratic leaders are able to devolve power.
•A ‘democracy playbook’ is necessary to meet the threats to democratic elections and institutions.
Challenges and opportunities: The fundamental challenge to improving African economies is to develop structures and incentives that promote private-sector growth and the enrichment of the population. Correspondingly,