MEDELLÍN: CO-CREATING MORE ROBUST URBAN KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
In February 2013, the Urban Land Institute chose Medellín as the most innovative city in the world due to its advances in politics, education, and social development. Although Medellín has been crowned Most Innovative City, boasts very wealthy neighborhoods and sets an example for urban planning to the world at large, the city is still challenged by harsh economic disparity. Wealth mainly clusters around the city center and decreases exponentially into the surrounding hills.
In Phase I of another Ecocity Builders/Secondary Cities project, local planners, utilities, academics, and local non-profits teamed with community members of Comuna 8, one such vulnerable hillside district outside of the city center that is made up of several low income formal and informal neighborhoods, to apply local participation methods to urban metabolism. The 2C/Medellín team focused their data collection and mapping on waste management, material flows to and through households, and citizen perspectives of waste practices in their communities throughout several neighborhoods within Comuna 8, a priority expressed specifically by community leaders.
After they collected the data, participants were able to apply their training from the workshops by using Urbinsight’s metaflow app to turn their collective data input into urban metabolic information system flow diagrams. These visualizations proved not only important for researchers to streamline and interpret the household and parcel scale data, but for Comuna 8 residents to understand and improve their own waste stream and for the city to understand the needs of its people.
For Phase II of the project, the 2C/Medellín team determined that the next priority neighborhood type should be a mixed income city center neighborhood. Many neighborhoods of this type are situated within the city center amongst more wealthy business districts, but are overlooked by the municipality. As a result, community members of these neighborhoods often have lower earnings, high unemployment, reduced waste collection services, reduced security or health services, and increased air pollution.
On recommendation by the planning department, University of EAFIT took the lead as the main academic partner, which suggested Boston, a neighborhood characterized as the intended archetype (mixed-income, city center), as the recommended study area. Low Carbon City(LCC), a Medellín-based and internationally recognized non-profit organization with strong ties to the Boston community, joined as the community based partner.