Medellín: over ‘the top’

The expansion of Metrocable is bringing prosperity to marginalized communities and the potential for more tourism in Medellín.

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.

Memo from Medellin

Colombia’s second largest city has shed its image as a dangerous place. Paul Harris writes a memo of this new Medellín moment.

Published in The City Paper, Bogota, September 2008

Medellín is a name that conjures exotic images of the days when drug baron Pablo Escobar made it a red zone by declaring war on the state, putting a bounty on the head of the police and using teenage killers or sicarios to settle scores. “It was crazy as the police were killing each other for the bounty Escobar put on them,” remembers journalist Lorenza Gil.

The hail of bullets that allowed the city to breathe again one Friday afternoon in December 1993 is marvelously depicted by another famous city son Fernando Botero in La muerte de Pablo Escobar (The Death of Pablo Escobar). “I awoke to a noise I thought was kids letting off firecrackers, but it was the police shooting Pablo. Property prices in the city doubled that weekend and there was a three-day party,” says US lawyer and gambler Richard Westerly.

The Escobar days deeply marked a fatherless generation and are a common theme for artists like Botero and writers like Fernando Vallejo Rendón and Jorge Franco.

While Pablo’s death was the start, the revolution in Medellin’s fortunes came with improving security under the Uribe presidency and the city fathers who bet that the city could be something else. The ragged ladies of the brothels near the Parque Berrio (Berrio Park ) were supplanted by the voluptuous bronze forms gifted by the Botero donation, lending the city an image to build upon. “The Antioquia Museum has always been there but no one ever went. Now it has become part of our identity and a reference for the city,” says Gil.

Former Medellín Mayor Sergio Fajardo Valderrama (2004-2007) projected a new metropolis to the world and began social investment programs that primed it to evolve into an international business center and changed its landscape through expanding highways, the Metro and inaugurating the super cable car Metrocable.

And then there are the landmark buildings, such as the new BanColombia HQ under construction, the Library of Antioquia and the towering black blocks of the España Library.

This softening of Medellin’s crispy rind has enabled the bandeja paisa to become far more diverse through the influx of what entrepreneur Lina Insaza calls “healthy money”. The city is no longer adverse to the ostentatious outward signs of wealth that its citizens once avoided. Sneakers are pimped and showy with bling whereas “in the bad days, people didn’t walk because the sicarios would kill you for your Reeboks,” says Gil, and the car bomb bang has been replaced by the screech of supersized low-profile SUV wheels that spin as they horse power up El Poblado’s rain soaked hills. “Having a big car meant you could be a target for kidnapping, but with the fall in the US dollar, everyone is buying them now,” says Insaza.

Money and emergent narcissistic self-confidence are evident in the technicolour braces straightening smiles citywide and the giant-size billboards with visions of ‘fast’ fashion which distract our days, warm our nights and hark of a new Paisa feminism. “The internet and cable TV have given us the opportunity to internationalize and women have started to value themselves more. They want to work and earn their own money and will not stay home with the kids,” says Insaza.

The nefarious side of this recently minted equalitarianism has seen the buy, buy, buy impulse of consumerism wave bye bye to many traditional paisa values. Medellín is a silicon valley uplifted by the surgeon’s art as the de rigeur gift for many teenagers are kikas or breast implants, easing the city transformation from a red zone to pink zone. “There is greater promiscuity and girls, even from good families, are sometimes called out as escorts in order get a new pair of jeans,” says Insaza.

The Carrera 70 nightspots, once the hang out of gangs, are safe and thriving in this new age, while the residential neighbourhood Parque Lleras has mutated into an international restaurant and bar hotspot where one can groove to house music all night long at B Lounge, El Deck or Click, or Latin flavours at Oz, for those who disdain Mango’s dancing cowgirl midgets.

Promo teams roam the city streets showing Medellin is now speed dialing and not speed dying, as seen by the blue eight-foot Movistar ears reprising Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in Parque Lleras ... or is that the aguardiente?

Wedding speech for Gavin and Claire

Good afternoon and welcome to Rolvendon. My name is Paul, and Gavin has asked me to say a few words of thanks on this special day.

When Gavin asked me to do this, just a few weeks ago, my first thought was farrrrkkkk!!!! I’m a little nervous about making this speech. In fact this must be the fifth time today that I have stood up from a warm seat with pieces of paper in my hand. But I live in South America, and so if this speech doesn’t go well I will soon be well out of harm’s way, so bare with me.

Nigel, who conducted the service, said that today was the first time, in all the years that he has been doing this, that he has seen a bride drive herself to the wedding. And that it was the first time he had seen a bridge arrive in a van. I understand that for those of you that are drinking, Claire will be offering a taxi service at the end of the night.

Gavin and Claire have been courting for 14 years. For some reason Gavin wanted me to talk about the hare and the tortoise, but I swear that lunch was chicken, so that’s not going to happen. Sorry Gavin.

In preparing this speech I looked at what other people think about marriage and weddings. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said many things on the subject including “Marriage: this I call the will that moves two to create the one which is more than those who created it”. If anyone understands that, please can they explain it to me. I think what he was trying to say was that the whole is greater than the sum of the two parts, but the comment I like most was by US journalist Helen Rowland who said a wedding is “the point at which a man stops toasting a woman and begins roasting her,” and with 14 years of preparation, I am sure you will agree that Clarie and Gavin have served up and excellent dish today.

However, thinking about it, after 14 years, instead of the Wedding March, perhaps we should have been listening to the Hallelujah Chorus. 14 years is a long time, and by the way they look today, they must have started dating when they were ten. I was certainly surprised. When he told me he was going to do it in a barn, I said, ‘Gavin, I think you have been living in the country too long’.

Gavin and Claire met in Derby, where Claire was studying art and Gavin was working in a bar. As Gavin observed, “Not much has changed really, she's still the creative one, and I'm the piss-artist.”

Claire has been a part of Gavin’s life ever since I have known him. Gavin and I met in 1998 playing pool in the Prince Albert pub on Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, London a place that has to be the antithesis of this quaint English countryside. At the time, Gavin was studying his MA in graphic design at Central St Martin’s and I was studying an MA in printing and publishing at the London College of Printing, creative occupations that have been an enduring thread of our friendship. And it was Claire who was responsible for Gavin being in London in the first place as she wanted to move South from the Midlands and Gavin followed.

Gavin has spent the majority of his professional career as a freelance designer while I have spent most of mine as a freelance journalist, but this speech is by far one of the most difficult writing assignments that I have ever had. However, freelance journalists charge by the word, and as I like the sound of my own voice and have written a lot, by the time this speech is through, I expect there to be big cheque waiting for me, so thank you for that Gavin.

The fact that Gavin and I both work as freelancers in related creative disciplines has cemented our friendship and enabled us to collaborate on a range of prize-winning books about graphic design and other subjects. We have produced 13 books together since 2003, projects that have been stimulating to work on, and that have produced beautiful results.

Although living on the other side of the world does not present Gavin and I with the opportunity to meet or talk frequently, when we do, our conversation is direct and intimate as we discuss hickey’s and binding screws, crotches and hairlines, even stroke weight and finishing techiques, straps, flaps and bellybands, … These are all printing terms, by the way, and part of the rich and fascinating vocabulary that is part of our trade, for which I have developed an obsessive eye.

Gavin and I also have a shared obsession about printed materials that penchant for American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis, an infamous and controversial book that was the subject of Gavin’s final project for his MA ten years ago. As part of this, Gavin produced an edition of the book printed in binary, just ones and zeros and about this thick. Apparently Brett Easton Ellis, who is fastidious for detail and who included detailed lists about the clothes the characters wore, heard about this book and commented “how anal”.

One of the leitmotifs in the book is the sociopathic antihero’s love of music – a passion that Gavin and I share - or rather muzak in Patrick Bateman’s case, puerile pop in which he finds deep meaning, and although Ellis wrote with great irony while eulogizing the merits of the disposable hits of the 1980s by people like Genesis and Whitney Houston, he had a lot to say about love, such as these observations about Huey Lewis and the News:

“Things looked up for Huey and the boys on the second album, 1982's Picture This. The album hits its peak with "Do You Believe in Love," which is the best song on the album and is essentially about the singer asking a girl he's met while "looking for someone to meet" if she "believes in love." The fact that the song never resolves the question gives it an added complexity that wasn't apparent on the group's debut.”

For many people here, it may have seemed that Gavin and Claire were never going to resolve the question of whether to get married or not, but happily, we now know the answer to that. Sharing your life with someone you love is one of the most important ways that we can better ourselves and grow, and although the marriage question may have dallied for a while, Gavin and Claire have been sharing their lives and growing together for many years.

In fact, they are now sharing surnames. Claire is now Claire Ambrose-Gordon, and Gavin is now Gavin Ambrose-Gordon, or as he pointed out to me with a tinge of disappointment, GAG. Even their dog Benny is joining in and will become BAG. … Well, you may not like your new initials Gavin, but at least it means there is one GAG in this speech that works, so thank you for that.

Gavin told me that the idea today was to have an unconventional wedding and this was reflected in the dancing entertainment. The original idea was to have a lap dance for everyone but unfortunately the wedding budget didn’t stretch that far, so only I will be getting one.

Latin America, where I live, has sensuous, vibrant dances such as salsa, meringue and samba, and when people ask me what the national dance in England is, I have to try to explain the … erm …sensuous qualities of … erm…Morris dancing, another great challenge.

The term Morris dancing is derived from moorish dance, perhaps from the Moresca pageant that celebrated Ferdinand and Isabella driving the Moors out of Spain in 1492, about the same time that Gavin and Claire first started dating.

I remember that as a child at school, Morris dancing was something that we looked forward to with a mixture of excitement and fear as it was an activity that always saw the blood rise. As this was about the time that Star Wars came out, this was usually in the form of a split lip, bloody nose or cut hands as this traditional English dance in the school hall turned into a light saber battle scene in the Death Star hanger. Fortunately there were no serious injuries today.

I will soon be returning to the relative safety of South America, and in drawing to a close, Gavin and Claire I would like to leave you with some words from one of the greatest writers from that continent, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who said, “the problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast”. Having said that, I hope that you continue to build your lives together and have a happy and prosperous future.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure you will agree that Gavin and Claire are wonderful, generous people and a fantastic couple. So please raise your glasses and join me in a toast to the bride and groom, Claire and Gavin, Mr & Mrs Ambrose Gordon.
ENDS