Contra Miradas

Narratives from the Urban Periphery

By Kiersten Thamm in collaboration with Emily Hart

All images and quotes are courtesy of the Contra Miradas research team.

Medellín is nestled in the Aburrá Valley in Colombia, flanked by steep slopes in places, its terracotta neighbourhoods splashed across the wide valley floor as well as up onto the hillsides. As with many South American cities, the city grew rapidly and informally. People who moved to there often built their houses on the city periphery, which slowly crept up the steep slopes that surround the centre. These hills are now fully-fledged neighborhoods, or barrios, with close-set houses, winding staircases, and narrow streets. 

In 2004, Medellín became the first city to fully integrate an aerial cable car into its public transit system to connect the hillsides to the urban center. The project, named Metrocable, led by Metro de Medellín, was designed to connect isolated communities, who had suffered geographic and institutional neglect, with the city center. 

National and international press celebrates the urban regeneration associated with this and other mobility infrastructure projects—but public attention has paid little attention to the actual residents of Medellín and the Metropolitan Area of the Aburrá Valley (AMVA). 

The interdisciplinary research project ContraMiradas is trying to change that. The group explores the impact of infrastructure on residential social, economic, and cultural realities. ​Through 130 interviews and six months of invrestigations, the research team learned about the community and its self-management within the planned and unplanned urban growth. The project visualizes the organization, construction, and survival of the people who live in peripheral neighborhoods of the northeastern region of ​​Medellín. It resulted in an exhibition at the Biblioteca EPM that highlights the stories and images of residents. This article presents portions from that exhibition in a digital form.      

The team that put the research and exhibition together included Colombians and Europeans who wanted to bring the periphery’s view to the story's center. They tried to combine theory, scientific results, and artifacts of everyday life to showcase the community’s practices and everyday self-management processes.   

Informal Urban Growth 

The city of Medellín is an economic center of Colombia and the decision-making epicenter of the entire Aburrá Valley. Regardless, it has been marked by violence. Most of the barrios that sit around the edges of the urban complex, high on the mountainside, have become the homes of people who fled from Colombia’s civil conflict, urban violence, and territorial disputes—communities with traumatic pasts. 

These communities set up new homes in areas without infrastructure or government services. People moving to the area in search of decent living conditions and to avoid political violence without guaranteed essential services such as water, sewerage, and electricity. The high-risk  areas prohibited the possibility of social assistance that provides housing or a job. 

- Member of a Foundation in Santo Domingo

Without paved roads and good drainage, the yellow dirt and dust of the roads is pervasive, staining shoes and clothes alike. Residents became stigmitized as “tenderrudos” and “patiamarillos” (yellow-shoes) for the dust covering their shoes. In the ContraMiradas memory workshop, participants worked on individual and collective memory from oral traditions and memories, and some recounted stories about how they worked to avoid that yellow dust. One participant said,

The yellow shoes have been a symbol of the hillside neighborhoods of Medellín. Its inhabitants had to go down from the top of the mountain to the Trasmayo Terminal on foot to work in the center of Medellín or its surroundings. Due to the conditions of the ground and lack of pavement, their shoes were always stained by the sand of the streets. To prevent the stigmas associated with dirty shoes, lockers were created at the bus terminal where they kept or loaned clean shoes for residents to use. 

Intentional Infrastructure

Interventions Metrocable’s first line, Line K, now connects some of the city's most physically challenging to  reach and socially marginalized areas in northeastern Medellín with the urban center. Today,  around 150,000 people use Metrocable daily, and the use of  1.7 million gallons of diesel fuel per year has been prevented. Additional interventions included other metro lines and an extension of the road network, which had to form a rapid and wide network of roads that connected with the main sectors of the city. The territorial interventions have also reduced crime rates, increased access to education, reduction of daily travel times and the cost of commuting, and attracted new businesses, tourism, and investments to previously disconnected parts of the city.​

Persistent, Creative Communities 

Communities have implemented self-management practices that allow them to improve their living conditions while reiterating demands for state support to combat the social inequalities that are still apparent between the center and the periphery. 

Granizal neighborhood has one of the most acute situations. Residents of Granizal have claimed the fundamental right to drinking water for years: the ongoing lack of access to a decent aqueduct system has marked their community struggle. Its absence has led to serious consequences for the public health of this population.

The Covid pandemic helped residents to reinforce pressure on the state to respond to their demand for the right to drinking water, though the implementation of a successful recent lawsuit is lagging. Up to today, all they’ve received are a series of large containers with clean water. People are forced to walk to these containers to fill their buckets with water and transport them to their homes. Leidy, a resident of Granizal, talks about this emergency,

The community of Vereda Granizal, needing water, diverted it from an EPM pipeline that goes to the Piedras Blancas dam, stored it in tanks, and then distributed it to the houses through pipes. While that water has never been drinkable—even causing health problems in the community—this diversion presents a solution, albeit an irregular one, to a vital problem that neither EPM nor the Municipality of Bello have been willing to permanently solve. In recent years, EPM has installed tanks with a capacity of 1000L and 5000L in the territory that are filled every day so that the population of Manantiales and El Pinar can obtain the vital minimum of water in their homes. This photograph shows one of those water tanks on display in the exhibition.

Other infrastructure projects are needed to give residents access to health, training, recreation, and mobility. 

- Juan Carlos, inhabitant of the Portal de Oriente sector of the Granizal village, 2021  

- Member of a Foundation in Santo Domingo, 2021​

These deficiencies in urban equipment are deeper in some sectors than in others, given that, just as in Granizal, fundamental issues such as networks for home services and transport routes are required in neighborhoods such as Santo Domingo or El Picacho. 

​It’s important to point out the instrumentalization to which the populations of sectors such as Granizal are subjected by groups with electoral aspirations. Unfortunately, political groups are only interested in the area and its people at election time. A social leader in Granizal reports,  

- Social leader in the Granizal village, 2021 

It is worth highlighting the great variety of cultures gathered in the same sector, giving the possibility of intercultural dialogues. The identities of the neighborhoods of La Cruz, Manrique, Vereda Granizal, and Santo Domingo are mixtures of knowledge from inhabitants. Each person brings with them, whether in an overt or covert way, what was in their home at the time. Plants, animals, music, and foods mix in these neighborhoods.

- Resident, La Cruz

Navigating Continuing Challenges

Through the words, objects, and images of its residents, we can begin to see the complex and layered truths of the Aburrá Valley: its urban realities are complicated, contradictory, and compelling.  

This city is fragmented. Though its steep terracotta slopes gaze directly down onto the skyscrapers and government offices of Medellin, the periphery lies—in many ways—far from the centre. The gaps in infrastructure, services, and security persist, with acute consequences for the residents of many barrios. 

- Juan Camilo, Fundación Huellas

- A resident of the Paris neighborhood in Bello

Though the metro goes some way to closing the chasm between the centre and the periphery, the fragmentation of the city is more than just geographical, and the cracks must not simply be papered over.

- Mother and resident of El Pinal, Line M​

- Estefania, Emily, CEDEZO, Santo Domingo, Line K

Many hours of life are spent collecting safe drinkable water, many pesos are spent paying illegal groups for security, and many go without dignified work. 

In Colombia, there are around 50,000 recyclers earning a living by collecting solid waste. The recyclers of a Granizal neighborhood separate plastic bottles, a job that many of us do not do at home. Through their work, they contribute to a much cleaner world. 

Amid a sense of exclusion and distance from the centre lies a sense of identity and closeness. In neighbourhoods that have created their own infrastructure, woven networks of community support continue fighting to have their rights recognised, and basic needs met. Medellin demands more than a single narrative.

Its history cannot be told via a cable car, a single piece of street art, or a single person. The city deserves a multitude of voices, media, and perspectives.

​​Learn more about Contra Miradas in Engligh

• “Contra Miradas – What to expect from the exhibition on Medellín’s lesser-known neighborhoods” by Helene Dotsch in The Bogotá PostColombia Calling Podcast (YouTube version) 

Resources referenced in the Contra Miradas project

• Alcaldía de Medellín. (2006). Cerro Santo Domingo. https://bit.ly/3xW61mhBallesteros, J. I., Sierra, M., Torres, E. M., Velásquez, C., y Vélez, E. (2009). Santo Domingo Savio: un ter[r]itorio reterritorializado. https://bit.ly/3eJWSFD 

• Correa, M. (2009). Las víctimas del desplazamiento forzado toman la palabra. Reflexión Política, (21), 160-171. https://bit.ly/2JCfgno Foro Social Mundial. (2005, enero). Carta Mundial por el derecho a la ciudad (N.o 5). https://www.ugr.es/~revpaz/documentacion/rpc_n5_2012_doc1.pdf 

• Duhau, E. (2002). Dimensiones socio-políticas de la irregularidad y la regularización de los asentamientos populares. https://bit.ly/39VcVPw 

• Fundación Berta Martínez de Jaramillo. (s.f.). Descripción demográfica barrio La Cruz. http://www.bertamartinez.org/Default.aspx?TabId=242 

• ¡Granizal, ahora más cerca del agua potable y el alcantarillado público! (2020, Marzo, 3). Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Políticas de la Universidad de Antioquia. https://bit.ly/36aEthD 

• Montoya, N. (2014). Urbanismo social en Medellín: una aproximación a partir de la utilización estratégica de los derechos. Estudios Políticos, (45), pp. 205-222. https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=16431516011 

• Maldonado, J. Facultad CC Políticas y Sociología, Universidad Complutense, Madrid. Política y Sociedad, 25 (1997), Madrid (pp. 21-36) Ortiz, A. (2012). Caracterización Comuna 3 Manrique de la ciudad de Medellín. https://bit.ly/3hSyBz8 

• Rengifo, C. J., Cárdenas, O. M., Suárez, E. M., Balbín, K., Quiroz, S. J., Henao, M. C., Muñoz, J. D., Garcés, M., Naranjo, G., y Granada, J. G. (2017, Octubre). Rutas de memoria colectiva, paz territorial y pedagogía crítica Comuna 3 de Medellín y Vereda Granizal de Bello. Universidad de Antioquia. http://hdl.handle.net/10495/12567 

• Ríos, A. F. (2019, Marzo, 6). En la vereda Granizal, banda pretende cobrar $8000 semanales por agua que ni siquiera es potable. Por los Derechos Humanos. https://bit.ly/33FsNll 

• Ruiz, Jaime. (2001). Antecedentes urbanísticos de Medellín. La Sociología en sus Escenarios, (5). https://revistas.udea.edu.co/index.php/ceo/article/view/1587 

• Torres, C. A. (2009). Ciudad informal colombiana: barrios construidos por la gente. Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. 

• Vargas, J. (2019).

• Velásquez, C. A. (2013). Intervenciones estatales en sectores informales de Medellín. Experiencias en mejoramiento barrial urbano. Revista Bitácora Urbano Territorial, 23 (2), 139-146. https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/748/74830874017.pdf 

• Vélez, A., Tavera, D. J. y Ríos, M. A. (2016). Estrategias de desarrollo comunitario para el manejo de la visibilización político-administrativa en la vereda Granizal del municipio de Bello- Antioquia [Tesis de pregrado]. Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios, Bello, Colombia.