Start Date
10-2-2021 1:45 PM
End Date
10-2-2021 2:45 PM
Proposal Type
Presentation
Proposal Description
Medellín and its sister cities in the Valle de Aburrá, Colombia is are renowned for their polarized past, a site of violent encounter between drug cartels, paramilitary groups, urban guerillas, and national forces from the 1970s until today. However, for over a century, it has also been a beacon of hope for thousands of people forcibly displaced by the country’s rural inter intercity violence or hoping to better their lives through participating in the growing industrial sector. In November 1995, just two years after the death of Pablo Escobar and the dissolution of the Medellín Cartel, the Metro of Medellín initiated commercial operations and was considered a triumph of peaceful urban development, connecting the segregated city and creating a new image of it as a global city of the future.
However, the Metro of Medellín, though branding itself as the vehicle moving the city forward, did not emerge from thin air. Rather, designers and city planners made reference to pre-existing railroad and tram infrastructures calling upon a historical memory of a time before the city was polarized to legitimize the project within local imaginary and link the new infrastructure with existent identities and senses of belonging.
The proposed paper is a mixed-methodological study of the way in which the Metro of Medellín called upon local identity and historical memory to unify a city’s populace around the development of an urban infrastructure, and the resultant beliefs and attitudes towards it. Historical research is combined with a quantitative study of identity and sense of belonging surrounding the present-day Metro of Medellín in its two northern-most stations: Niquía and Bello. The primary field research was conducted as a part of a larger research project by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Medellin, the University of San Buenaventura and the Greater College of Antioquia University. The paper uses a lens of Peace and Conflict Studies to evaluate the importance of physical infrastructure in transforming polarized environments and creating new senses of belonging and identity.
Included in
Infrastructure Commons, Peace and Conflict Studies Commons, Social Welfare Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons
Metro de Medellín: Urban infrastructure and historical memory in the creation of territorial belonging and identity
Medellín and its sister cities in the Valle de Aburrá, Colombia is are renowned for their polarized past, a site of violent encounter between drug cartels, paramilitary groups, urban guerillas, and national forces from the 1970s until today. However, for over a century, it has also been a beacon of hope for thousands of people forcibly displaced by the country’s rural inter intercity violence or hoping to better their lives through participating in the growing industrial sector. In November 1995, just two years after the death of Pablo Escobar and the dissolution of the Medellín Cartel, the Metro of Medellín initiated commercial operations and was considered a triumph of peaceful urban development, connecting the segregated city and creating a new image of it as a global city of the future.
However, the Metro of Medellín, though branding itself as the vehicle moving the city forward, did not emerge from thin air. Rather, designers and city planners made reference to pre-existing railroad and tram infrastructures calling upon a historical memory of a time before the city was polarized to legitimize the project within local imaginary and link the new infrastructure with existent identities and senses of belonging.
The proposed paper is a mixed-methodological study of the way in which the Metro of Medellín called upon local identity and historical memory to unify a city’s populace around the development of an urban infrastructure, and the resultant beliefs and attitudes towards it. Historical research is combined with a quantitative study of identity and sense of belonging surrounding the present-day Metro of Medellín in its two northern-most stations: Niquía and Bello. The primary field research was conducted as a part of a larger research project by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Medellin, the University of San Buenaventura and the Greater College of Antioquia University. The paper uses a lens of Peace and Conflict Studies to evaluate the importance of physical infrastructure in transforming polarized environments and creating new senses of belonging and identity.