A study of Jennifer Robison’s “Ordinary” city: Getting off the map through Medellin’s Social Urbanism
Beatriz Kauark Fontes
In 2002, Jennifer Robison published her article “Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map” at the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. The article defended the necessity for an alternative approach to contemporary urbanization. Robinson argued that a division in the field of urban studies was made with urban theory and the so-called “global” (western) cities on one end and development studies and third world cities on the other. According to Robinson, this limited and harmed the field of urban studies. This current field division allowed cities around the world to have its “city-ness” (the characteristics of being a city) compared to western global city standards.
Global western cities became the model for all urban agglomerations despite their unique location, economic situation, or culture. This included cities where western theory was no relevant anymore due to its completely different reality. The author defended an approach to urban theory where all cities should be put on the same analytical level. She believed that by restructuring this approach, the understanding of cities everywhere would be enhanced. We do live in a diverse world and, accordingly, we must embrace this diversity by looking for a more cosmopolitan approach.
When cities were categorized as global cities, it excluded a majority of cities around the world. Not all cities have a global economic influence. Robison then introduced the concept of “discrepant cosmopolitanism,” defended by James Clifford in 1997, where culture is not localized but indeed has a worldwide effect to the urban environment. She also defended the concept of “ordinary cities” of Amin and Graham in 1997. In her and Anthony King’s (1990) view, all cities today should be considered world cities. One cannot trace the history or study of western (“first world”) cities without analyzing and studying the history of “third world” cities. In fact, Robison summarized three key conclusions of the initial rounds of world cities research that supported her view that all cities are global cities:
· World cities articulated regional, national and international economies into a global economy. They served as organizing nodes of a global economic system.
· World cities could be arranged hierarchically, roughly in accord with the economic power they commanded — competition between world cities and the impact of external shocks shaped the fortunes of world cities and their position in the hierarchy. Cities could rise and fall through the hierarchy. The relative balance of global, national, and regional influence determined their position.
· Many populations were excluded from the space of global capitalism, and thus from the field of world cities: they were ‘economically irrelevant’ (Knox, 1995: 41).
In analyzing those aspects, all cities had regional, national or international economies. Hence all cities could be arranged hierarchically and all cities had populations that were excluded from the space of global capitalism. Robison defended that those considered poor, irrelevant, off-the-map cities were also relevant to the world’s economy and should not be excluded from theorization. Cities were interdependent and should be approached as such. Modernity and tradition were correlated.
According to Robison, widening the compass of analysis might have helped to encourage a more critical edge to the global and world cities literature. Her article is an invitation to lose the formal methods of comparison and think outside the box — to look within ordinary cities’ realities and their needs and to be creative. With that in mind, I believe that the city of Medellin in Colombia and its social urbanism program is a good example of how ordinary cities should be considered in urban studies.
The city of Medellin is not within the usual global city map since it was not considered a world economy. However, it is the second largest and most important city of Colombia, having great regional and national influence. In 2017, the city was home to 2,5 million inhabitants according to the Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística. It has faced problems of urban and social inequality and insecurity in the most inaccessible places since the beginning of the 20th century.
Medellin is a city that has long suffered from rapid urban and population growth due to migratory processes and industrialization. This increased the demand of housing and urban infrastructure that the formal city could not absorb. Informal settlements composed more than half of the city with urban inequality and social-space segregation being its causes. Additionally, Medellin also suffered from intense drug traffic and violence. This occurred especially in the “comunas,” the poorest informal neighborhoods with very difficult accessibility located in the peripheral lands. These parts of the city presented the lowest quality of life, human development indexes and highest index in violence according to Alcaldía de Medellín in 2004.
Since the 1990s, public administrations, academics, and non-governmental organizations have studied and implemented programs aimed at transforming the quality of life of the habitants of marginal neighborhoods (Restrepo and Orsini, 2012). Part of that transformation included recompensing part of the social debt accumulated during decades of inequality (ibid). However, those organizations eventually stopped seeing the eradication of informal settlements as the solution to urban problems. Instead, by embracing informal settlements as part of the city, significant change was made. This marked the beginning of the Social Urbanism program by recognizing the right to the city.
The Social Urbanism program aimed to enhance the quality of life of city inhabitants and fight inequality and violence by “making the problem part of the solution” (David, 2016). When it was created in 2004, the main idea of the program consisted of developing punctual intervention projects in dense and dangerous areas of the Comunas alongside development of social policies. There were a series of projects that improved existing infrastructure, connected physically segregated areas, and introduced urban equipment in these areas. The projects ranged from library-parks, schools, bridges, and public spaces to social housing all within the marginalized areas. They were all projected with a deep assessment of the Comunas, their communities and their needs. What was once seen as informal, illegitimate parts of town became the major focus of innovation for the program. The Comunas’ dwellers were no longer ignored.
The benefits generated by Social Urbanism measures cannot be disassociated with the implementation of the cable car to the public transportation system. The cable car was the primal form of integration of the Comunas to the formal city and it enabled further projects to take place. This could be seen as a precedent of Social Urbanism.
Social Urbanism was a government initiative, financed almost entirely with public resources. It was completed with a participatory budget and planning. Social Urbanism is currently active yet has a great deal of challenges ahead. Despite its young age, it is considered to be a very successful project. There are no doubts of its innovative approach. Medellin did change by looking within based on its particular needs, history and culture.
According to inhabitants themselves, the program brought a better sense of safety, inclusion and care for the Comunas. Insecurity and violence is still a problem in the areas but it dropped significantly. As an “ordinary” city, Medellin reinvented itself with “ordinary” measures. It is a city that could relate to others’ development from the global South. It benefited from and set an example of abandoning formal western comparisons by tapping into its creativity.
References
Brodzinsky, S. From murder capital to model city: is Medellin’s miracle show or substance? April 17, 2014. The Guardian, UK.
Chau, R. Social Urbanism: Transformational policy in Medellin, Colombia. December 2, 2015. Owen Gutfreund URBP787.72 Cities in Developing Countries.
Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano (EDU) (s.f.). Los proyectos urbanos integrales. Available at: http://www.edu.gov.co/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=10 6&Itemid=73
Restrepo, A. E., Orsini, F. M. Medellin, Environment, Urbanism and Society: Informality and Social Urbanism. June, 2012. Urbam EAFIT.
Robinson, J. (2002) Global and World Cities: A View from off the Map. IJURR, 26(3):531–554.
