Hyperupgrading Medellin: Social urbanism as a distorted spatial justice paradigm

• In Event: Re-thinking urban governance: Making theory from ordinary cities

Abstract

The chapter will reflect on Medellin transformations, offering a critical reflection on discursive and material practices of the politics of informality that, we have called, Hyperupgrading Medellin. Despite the extreme popularization of the case in planning and architectural literature, we felt the need to offer a critical account on the political nature of Medellin’s urban interventions questioning the very nature of the social urbanism discursive practice implemented in the city illustrating the different ways in which informality has been adopted as state’s spatial narrative to promote “innovation” in informal communities upgrading by keeping “formal” areas to work as business as usual. Drawing from extensive action-research and the specific example of Comuna 8 in the central east part of the Aburra Valley, where about 40% of urbanization in Medellin has informal origin and intricacies with crime/armed conflict the chapter aims to disentangle three fundamental elements of the informal urbanization politics in Medellin: a) the pressure on the growth management of Medellin urban fringes and the obsessive control-like mechanisms deployed by various planning tools, b) the de-politization of planning and architecture as discipline and praxis, and c) the aggressive and hyperbolic urban marketing attached to the co-option social movements by the rhetoric of urban equity. Playing with both postcolonial urbanism theories and Giorgio Agamben exceptionality theory the paper wish to offer a renewed critical account on the specific politics, desubjectivation and spatial sovereignty and, finally reflecting on Medellin paradigmatic example.  We argue that the hyper transformation of Medellin has distorted spatial justice paradigms by imposing messianic gestures of architectural artifacts and spatial plans and avoiding informal dwellers claims creating a de-politization of the different grassroots emancipatory practices de facto perpetuating exclusion through inclusion.

Authors

• Camillo Boano, University College London

• Catalina Ortiz, University College London