Medellín

This thesis deals with advances and impasses of participation and urban politics in the transformation of popular Medellín, reviewed in a timeline that goes from 1950 to 2011.Its central objective is to reveal the dispute in which social production of space is debated, between an unbalanced game of forces, that marks the contemporary transformation of peripheral neighborhoods.This dispute acquires importance as a structuring element in the construction of a city in "several hands", tied to contradictions and possibilities that change from time to time.Participation, urban politics and territorial transformation meet in the Integral Urban Project of the northeast zone, allowing to recognize the daily life of neighborhoods before the project, participation derived during the intervention process and appropriation changes generated by the built public space.The used methodology articulates documental analysis of norms, records and theoretical references with fieldwork, inspired in the cartography of social action supported in participant observation, oral source, participatory workshop and walk through the neighborhoods.From the analysis, it was possible to obtain a framework of advances in the conception, management and execution of participation and urban policy that positioned the "Medellín Model", from an intervention cataloged as integral, with a participative methodology, and that guaranteed rights in urban mobility, public space and equipment, housing, coexistence and security.Urbanization evidences visible transformations such as the strengthening of social organization; reduction of violence, access to social goods and services; appropriation of public spaces; socio-spatial inclusion of peripheral neighborhoods to the formal city; opening of neighborhoods to new dynamics; change of the imagination of the inhabitants and existence of new senses of life.However, while the urbanization process contrasts in a significant improvement for the population, it also generates impasses in participation as its restriction to the legitimization of the urban project; predominance of political-programmatic interest over social need; deepening of domination and control exercised by illegal groups; concealment of the dispute between different agents involved; and in terms of territorial transformation, it produces the consolidation of urban centralities in which the improvements appear at first sight as guarantee of rights, but end up being partial and reallocating old conflicts in the periphery of the periphery.These impasses are worsened by the discontinuity of the urban policy that ended up reproducing and even strengthening the evils that it intended to combat.Within the framework of advances in tensions and impasses that stimulate new paths of social struggle, there is a new angle of the dispute for production of the popular city, in which urban conscience of resident is strengthened, allowing today's reappropriation of public spaces by cultural bias; and the need to recognize and link territorial conditions and social needs to public and private interventions

Appropriation · Art · Citizen journalism · Economic growth · Geography · Humanities · Political science · Politics · Public housing · Public space · Sociology · Urbanization · Welfare economics · Latin American Urban Studies · Public Administration