Published in The City Paper, Bogota, November 2008
A trace of speeding silver ‘bullets’ passes over the sprawling slums of Colombia’s second city. But far from being part of the turf wars of old, these ‘bullets’ are gondolas and pertain to Metrocable, a cable-car project bringing new life and opportunity to Medellin’s most marginalized communities.
The Comuna 13 - formerly a no-go urban battleground infamously stormed by state troops supported by tanks and Blackhawk helicopter gunships on May 21st 2002 - is the most recent Metrocable beneficiary and where Line J was launched this year. The steel roofs of its houses are diaphanous and serene under the early morning sun as Metrocable takes me 4 km into this long forgotten corner of the city, rising and falling over precipitous slopes that reveal green bursts of vegetation amid the humble red brick structures, dwellings built by those displaced from rural Antioquia and elsewhere.
Metrocable’s transportation time and money savings, mean many inhabitants can now participate in the city’s economic life, and talk is now of a social miracle unfolding in the Comuna 13. “It was costly to travel before. Metrocable has brought life to these barrios,” says Elian, a Christian volunteer who makes house calls on the elderly.
The cable-car has also brought banks to the area, an initiative allowing businesses to formalize and access loans, boosting the city tax take, which is reinvested in other improvement projects such as urban space generation. This transformation can clearly be seen in Comuna 1 where Line K was launched in 2004 and where the three black pilars of the Biblioteca de España (Library of Spain) was opened in 2007. “Some 9,000 m2 of urban space has been created in the Line K area, increasing it from 1.3m2 to 3.2m2 per 100,000 inhabitants,” says sociologist Juan Alvaro González.
Metrocable is an ingenious solution for the limiting physical reality of the valley city: carrying people over rather than around or through the mountainous terrain.
“Antioquia has very few possibilities for roads because of the topography. Roads are expensive, they are jammed with cars and there are always landslides, so you have to go over the top,” says a Comuna 13 resident.
The role of Spiderman in this web-spinning tale is played by the city authorities who developed Metrocable as a means to integrate and bring economic opportunity, access to work and greater understanding to the comunas that have been beyond the pale for much of Medellin’s recent history.
The economic impact of Metrocable has been very real. “Line K has brought an annual saving of $10,000 million pesos on transport for the people in the area of influence, as they no longer have to take several buses to get anywhere, and there has been a 300% increase in commerce,” says González. An urban planner who didn´t want to be identifed, cautions that not everything is hunky dory, as Metrocable has seen land values jump. Land around Line K stations was previously $40,000 pesos per square meter, but this has risen to $130,000-$150,000 per square meter. “Increasing land value is displacing the displaced as businesses seek the choice spots near the metro stations,” she says.
Through land legalization and social management processes, project planners have sought to extend the benefits of land ownership to the communities. “Eighty percent of the land was illegally occupied, but a process of legalization has helped people obtain land titles where they built their homes, which has reduced intra-family violence. Ownership means inheritance and the ability to legally define who gets what when a parent dies,” says González.
With two lines in operation, Metrocable is not done yet as its 2006-2020 development plan calls for Medellín to be strung like a guitar. Next year a 4.6 km tourist line to Arví Park and the Valle de Aburrá nature reserve will be inaugurated.
A line which will see the recuperation of 17,000 hectares of forest with the planting of over 1,600 native trees, allowing tourism development in a zone of natural beauty. “This is where the famous silleteros of the Medellin flower festival grow their flowers, and we want to help preserve these traditions,” says the sociologist.
Another line under study may extend Metrocable to the Rio Negro international airport, a development that would really make Medellin one of the high flying cities of the world.
