How transport transformed the world’s most violent city
Contributed by Lucy Sherriff: multimedia journalist based in Colombia, covering social and environmental justice, and urban development
For the citizens of Medellín, a Colombian city with around 2.5m inhabitants, transport is more than just a means of travelling from A to B.
Medellín was once named the world’s most violent city, in a now-infamous 1988 TIME article which cited one 18-hour period where Medellín police reported 13 killings. In 1991, the city witnessed 6,349 killings , a murder rate of 380 per 100,000 people.
But, in 2013, the city was chosen by The Wall Street Journal as the most innovative city in the world, beating Tel Aviv and New York. That same year, Medellín’s Urban Development program won Harvard University’s Urbanism Award. Meanwhile the homicide rate has since fallen 80%, and stands at around 21 per 100,000, compared to NYC’s 3.4 per 100,000 and London’s 1.2. However, the US’ most violent city Baltimore saw 56 murders per 100,000 people last year.
So, what changed? And what can other global cities learn for their own future development?
It is a widespread belief that lack of infrastructure in low-income communities leads to isolation and significantly inhibits the socio-economic prospects of the community’s inhabitants.
The transformation of Medellín from no-go city to thriving metropolis is in part thanks to the local government’s focus on developing innovative transport infrastructure.
Sergio Fajardo, a mathematician, son of an architect and mayor between 2003–2007, rolled out policies that were well-financed by the city. Medellín produces 67% of its department’s GDP, and 11% of Colombia’s economy, thanks to being an industrial hub of textiles, food processing and automobiles, to name a few, and so it had money to invest.
As part of Fajardo’s bid to develop the city with social mobility in mind, he introduced a unique mass transit system of cable cars to ferry residents up the steep hills of the comunas. Medellín became the first city in the world to utilise cable cars, traditionally used in ski resorts for tourists, as widespread public transport. In 2004, the first stage of the Metrocable was rolled out: a 2km line that transported 3,000 passengers per hour in both directions, connecting them to the city’s major employment hubs. The cable cars are cleverly integrated in the already-established metro system with no additional transfer charge, keeping costs down and maximising efficiency for locals. The city now has five cable car lines spanning 11.87km and the Metrocable is used by 30,000 people every day.
Since Medellín invested in its first Metrocable line, cable cars have sprung up in numerous other Latin American countries as a means to connect impoverished, isolated communities to urban centres, such as: La Paz-El Alto in Bolivia; Caracas in Venezuela; and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
A report by the Inter-American Development Bank’s Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative concluded: “[Cable cars] open the door for wider engagement with marginalized urban communities. In the case of Medellín, the Metrocable has not only reduced overall transportation costs and increased access to employment for the city’s most disadvantaged groups, but also helped improve the built environment around them, enhanced public spaces, and strengthened social fabric through community participation. Together, these changes can shape more equitable, inclusive societies and improve quality of life for all residents.”
Not content with cable cars, in 2011, the city opened a giant outdoor escalator — “escaleras electricas” — which climbs the side of the Comuna 13 district, a barrio set on the side of a mountain. Previously, the barrio’s 12,000-odd low-income residents had to climb hundreds of steps, equivalent to the height of a 30-storey building, to get home from the city centre, where many of them work. Now, not only has the 384m-tall escalator improved social mobility, it has also become a popular tourist attraction. Street tours, food stalls and coffee shops have sprung up along the hillside for visiting foreigners, bringing business into the comuna.
But perhaps the pride and joy of paisas — the name for residents of Medellín — is the metro. Despite opening in 1995, and serving around 150 million passengers a year, it is almost graffiti-free, nobody eats in the carriages, and there is rarely litter.
“In the height of the conflict, the Metro was the thing we could be proud of,” explains Pablo Alvarez-Correa, who runs Real City Tours. “It brought us hope, especially to the poorer communities of the city.”
The Metro helped bridge the divide between rich and poor, isolated and central communities and is the envy of many a Colombian city. Medellín is the only city in the country to have a metro, a sore point for the rollos of Bogotá, and adding fuel to the fire in the fierce, long-standing rivalry between residents of Bogotá — Colombia’s capital — and Medellín.
Although homicide rates in Medellín may be on the increase again, due to confrontations between organised criminal gangs, there is no doubt Medellín remains a beacon for cities around the world in tackling social mobility through infrastructure and innovative transport.
