Urban Mobility and Poverty; Lessons from Medellin and Soacha, Colombia

This book is one of several outputs from a two-year research project coordinated by the Development Planning Unit, University College London, seeking to document the nature and impact of a series of urban interventions in low-income areas in Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city. This city of 3.5 million is increasingly recognized internationally by the breadth, width and innovative nature of urban interventions, largely driven by a well-resourced local government. The book focuses on the impact of two aerial cable-car lines connecting high density hilly neighbourhoods with the rest of the city, and an associated urban upgrading programme. The case of Medellín shows that medium-sized cities with a dynamic leadership that actively seeks political consensus among the more powerful interest groups are in a position to alter long-standing imbalances. In this particular case, the municipality sought to rebalance deep social and spatial inequalities, the result of a highly skewed income distribution and historical planning policies that in practice segregated and fragmented the city’s inhabitants along income lines.

Medellín’s aerial cable-car lines are the first example of using conventional technology found in ski resorts in a context of high urban density and informal, low-income settlements. This built on a decade-long collective search for a consensus among the city’s political class, intellectuals, community groups and activists for a solution to what seemed to be the city’s almost intractable social problems, including the violence resulting from the illegal drug trade. In the early 1990s, Medellín had become well-known for the violence associated with turf wars between those who controlled the export market of narcotics (mainly cocaine) to the US and Europe. The violence resulted partly from the high levels of unemployment arising from the national economic liberalization that hit textile and garment producers that had been large employers in Medellín, and the readiness of unemployed youth in poor neighbourhoods to take up paid jobs with the drug gangs.
The first aerial cable-car was launched in the early 2000s by Medellín mayor Luis Perez and the city’s Metro company. This was followed by longer-term and more systematic, collaborative work with communities in the poor, hilly neighbourhoods affected by violence and unemployment by two subsequent municipal administrations. At the same time, the municipality continued strengthening its municipal revenue base by widening the tax base but mainly by empowering its powerful municipally owned utilities company (Empresas Públicas de Medellín, EPM) to continue growing and returning its annual surplus to the city’s coffers. In the two fiscal years 2010−2011, EPM injected close to US$ 880 million in surplus into the municipality, much of which was used to finance projects to benefit low-income communities.
The book has 22 short chapters, mostly written by researchers that took part in the research project funded by the British government through its Economic and Social Research Council and the Department for International Development (DfID). It is divided into four parts. The first examines in some depth the case of Medellín’s municipal interventions dating back to the early 2000s. The aerial cable-cars are given prominence, but the key message is that, without denying the significant advantages that the cable-car lines have brought to the inhabitants of the formerly forgotten neighbourhoods, of equal if not greater relevance are the set of urban upgrading interventions that followed the first line, including schools, public libraries, parks, open spaces, social housing and environmental improvements. In the area around the first of two cable-car lines, close to eight times as much was invested by the municipality in such projects than in the cable-car line itself.
The case of Medellín is contrasted in the second section with that of Soacha, a largely low-income and poorly