I spent a week in Medellin, and that was enough time to fall in love with a city that surpassed all my expectations for it. The city is endowed by a lot of natural beauty. It is not without reason that Medellin is called, “la ciudad de la eterna primavera,” the city of the eternal spring. Like Bogota, it is nestled in beautiful mountains; but because it is much lower in altitude the weather is much nicer, a sort of perfect spring weather, with flowers blooming all around; from orchids to birds of paradise.
Medellin has a strange feeling of old colonial town mixed with a very modern city. The city itself is much more manageable than Bogota, partly because of its size and partly because of the Metro, so that the center of town remain a vital part of the city with its colonial town squares, but updated by museums and Botero's sculpture square, as well as malls, bars and restaurants.
But while all of this makes Medellin beautiful, what really makes it wonderful and very unique, is its civic culture.
Medellin reminded me of my friend Omar. Last year as we prepared our senior art show, we were hanging out with Jurgen Partenheimer, an artist our professor had brought to meet and talk with us. Jurgen asked what we wanted to do and after a very long drawn out pause, sprinkled with a few “urban planning” and full of very unique Omar faces, he answered “I want to fix things.” I have read about the importance of architecture, mostly about its negative effects (like the way suburbia draws people away from each other by its conception), but I have never experienced it, in a way that has made me really know the positive effect it can have.
I had been told that Medellin was a public city. Everywhere you go there are tons of parks and gardens, with fountains and benches, and tables with grand open spaces for people to just hang out, work and really live in the public sphere of the city rather than in their apartments separated from one another. The streets have no potholes (which for a Colombian city is strange), and there is great access to beautiful libraries. Not to mention the fact that everyone in Medellin is so nice and friendly; while I rode the Metro, every time a senior, pregnant woman, or woman with a baby entered the car, someone would stand up and give up their seat immediately. All of these spaces are available to everybody and if you live in poor neighborhood (termed strato 1, 2 or 3 (out of 6)) the entrance to all museums is free.
And it was really the comunas, the poorest neighborhoods in Medellin, and what the city has done to change them that I really fell in love with. The comunas are equivalent to the Brazilian favelas, they are neighborhoods built up on the hills that surround the city. During Pablo Escobar's reign over Medellin, this is where one would find all of the hit-men. The houses are build of bricks and tin roofs and separated from the main city by the geography.
But within the last 10 years the Metro has expanded to the comunas through a series of Metrocable that connect the rail with a cable car that brings one up to the top of the mountains deep into the comunas making it accessible for its residents to access what the city has to offer.
At each comuna there is also a library-park. Huge buildings that serve as a mixture of community center and libraries. Beautifully built and extremely modern, these buildings house computers and laptops available for anyone's use, books, a huge game room for children, an auditorium where cultural and educational talks happen, as well as free movies every weekend, and classrooms for workshops open to the community. On the day I went there there was an accountant helping people prepare their taxes. And on the outside there is a park, with playgrounds and communal spaces.
And, just like in the downtown of medellin, there were no potholes and clean sidewalks; and it was a wonderful surprise to see that despite the houses being constructed on top of each other with tin roofs and whatever was available,
and the fact that few tourists go to this part of town, the government was providing the necessary elements for this community to flourish and for its children to have better access to education and a more positive growing space. And it was lovely to see children running around and playing, people hanging out and talking and finding ways to make their neighborhood more beautiful in any way they could.
I am sure there is violence still in Medellin, there certainly is poverty, but at the same time there is a sense of hope all around. There is a great sense of pride in Medellin, a sense of ownership of the city. People want to make it better whether by being courteous to each other in the Metro, or, simply, by painting their roofs and adding color to their lives.
It seems as if the people of Medellin ,when they were at their darkest time, decided they were going to figure out a way to get out of that darkness, and little by little they are achieving it.
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