Architecture, politics and peacebuilding in Medellín

ABSTRACT The transformation of Medellín in Colombia is well known to urbanists. A highly contested, violent and unequal city in the 1980s and 1990s, Medellín’s Social Urbanism ushered in a series of ambitious reforms that reimagined public space and mobility. These were designed to address challenges related to violence and inequality, concerns which are present both in Medellín and across the Latin American region. In examining the relationship between architecture, politics and peacebuilding, we consider how the role of architecture was and is conceptualised in the city’s socio-political transformation and how the changing form and use of the urban built environment contributed to shaping conditions for peace to emerge. Drawing on qualitative interviews with key stakeholders, we show that while the challenges of violence remain, the architectural and the political became intrinsically entwined to both build peace in the city and forward a new image of Medellín both internally and externally.


Introduction
The streets and avenues of Medellin's comunas march up the hills of the Valle de Aburrá, sloping gently at first, then steeply.Most of these neighbourhoods are still relatively poor, often informally built, and suffer varying degrees of violence and insecurity.Yet they are far safer than in the 1980s and 1990s, when Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel controlled the city and homicide rates were the highest in the world.The neighbourhoods are filled predominantly with low-rise corrugated iron and red brick dwellings.Yet dotted amongst these, a handful of high-rise buildings are conspicuous.When visiting the central Moravia neighbourhood in 2018, an unfinished residential tower stood around 20 stories tall.Built illegally and against planning permissions -and with suspected criminal ties -it loomed over its low-rise neighbours.Despite the prolonged efforts of the city's urban planning offices to halt its construction, it stood as a defiant challenge to the State, a physical embodiment of the power and influence of criminal organisations and the threats of violence that remain still present in Medellín.The built environment as a conjuror of symbolic territorial contestation and control.
Across the valley, another building stands in another low-income neighbourhood and looks out over the city.A stone's throw from the metrocable gondolas that rise from the city centre to the streets of Santo Domingo, the Biblioteca España stands as arguably the defining image of the reimagination of Medellín (Figure 1).Designed by El Equipo Mazzanti and acclaimed across the pages of international architectural magazines, the Biblioteca España was built as an iconic modern library and community centre that was inaugurated by King Juan Carlos I of Spain in 2007 and became a centrepiece of the city's turnaround.It typified Medellín's public space interventions, where high-quality public buildings and services were built in marginalised and often insecure neighbourhoods with the aim of reducing violence and inequality.Yet only 7 years after its construction, the library was shuttered indefinitely due to serious structural flaws.Like the illegal tower across the valley, the Biblioteca España is another physical embodiment within the built environment -this time of the State's attempts to bring inclusion and safety to marginalised neighbourhoods in the city, and the challenges in realising such an ambitious aim.
But in these neighbourhoods of imposing towers, another set of structures emerged simultaneously.Smaller-scale, materially useful to neighbourhoods and aesthetically pleasing.Projects and interventions that have opposed the creep of violence, offering well designed, functional community spaces linking the State and civil society.These Proyectos Urbanos Integrales (PUIs -Integrated Urban Projects) and other place-based projects that are often connected to the city's public transport infrastructure have demonstrated the effects of working systematically, transdisciplinarily, at multiple scales, over time and with community participation to affect urban change.As these vignettes allude to, there is a connection between architecture and the built environment, the conditions of violence and peace and the policy approaches that foster peacebuilding in the city.
These connections motivate this article to examine the socio-political role of architecture and built environment interventions and their potential to support urban peacebuilding in violently contested cities.To this end, we consider the question: what was the political role of architecture in Medellín and how was it used to support the reduction of violence in the city?In seeking to answer this, we engage with literatures in architecture, sociology, political science, conflict studies and urban studies and trace the emergence and use of built environment interventions as non-traditional policy instruments within the broader political economy of Medellín.We further draw on qualitative fieldwork from repeat visits to Medellín between October 2016 and August 2018.This consisted of ethnographic observations across the city and over 30 interviews with key political actors and high-level decision-makers, urban policy stakeholders and residents in the city.
Our analysis discusses the ways in which architecture and urban space interventions became a key political instrument in achieving policy goals and building peace in response to extreme violence, and how they were challenged by and related to the context of criminal governance in the city.It also shows that the successes of violence reduction in Medellín have seen its architectural interventions centred in the city's 'Miracle' narrative.This has served the purpose of extending and reappropriating Social Urbanism as a means of 'remaking' the city, both internally and to the world.However, we reiterate here that while the magnitude of its successes can be debated, Social Urbanism was underpinned by both broader multidisciplinary engagements and social programs; and an uneasy engagement with the territorial dynamics of criminal governance that remain largely out of view in the mainstream narratives of the city. 1 These insights make nuanced contributions to our understanding of the role of the built environment and spatiality in urban peacebuilding, and how these link with the history and contexts of place and the dynamics of criminal governance and urban violence. 2We do not aim to infer any causal relationship between architecture and peacebuilding nor do we suggest that such interventions were necessary or sufficient for the subsequent declines in violence in Medellín.Rather, our contribution is twofold.First, to outline the processes by which non-traditional actors and approaches were integrated into policymaking processes and the ways in which this created new avenues to address crises of violence.And second, to highlight how changes to the built environment and architectural projects contributed to reshaping socio-spatial relations in ways that supported peacebuilding, but that required both broader social policy support and engaging with the dynamics of violence in the urban to have a degree of success.
The following section briefly situates Medellín in its socio-political and historical context.We then review the theoretical linkages between architecture and the built environment, political processes and representations, and violence and peacebuilding.Following this, we trace the trajectory of Medellín's Social Urbanism, outlining: how violence represented a critical juncture enabling the emergence of new policy coalitions; the role of architects and architecture in the political processes underlying Social Urbanism; and the nature and limits of the socio-political changes that emerged.We

Situating Medellín
The transformation of Medellin from global 'murder capital' to urban innovation hub and architectural icon is well known to urbanists.Under threat from powerful narcotrafficking and urban armed groups during the 1980s and 1990s, the city suffered under the world's highest levels of lethal violence, with 381 homicides per 100,000 population (Figure 2) and experienced a sustained social and political crisis. 3he crisis of violence in Medellin can be traced back to the 1970s, when the city saw a population influx due to extensive domestic mobility and internal displacement in the context of Colombia's decades-long civil war. 4 Forced displacement from rural areas saw informal settlements proliferate across the hillsides of Medellín.Exclusionary political structures failed to support these new urban citizens, and criminal narcotrafficking organisations, paramilitary groups and militias grew in power.The violent contestation over control of the city and the complicity of the corrupted State5 in effect rendered Medellín both ungoverned and ungovernable, reflecting many of the broader challenges to urban peacebuilding in Latin America. 6hile Colombia's decades long civil conflict and Medellín's own trajectory of extreme violence is unique, the experiences of the city must also be understood in the broader context of the political economy of violence in Latin America during the 20 th century. 7The city is in many ways emblematic of Latin America's democracies that Arias and Goldstein argue are defined by their violent pluralism; where 'states, social elites, and subalterns (employ) violence in the quest to establish or contest regimes of citizenship, justice, rights, and a democratic social order'. 8This violence has a 'reproductive quality' and is embedded within Latin America's perverse state formation processes, such that 'rather than reflecting a rupture with the past, violence in Latin America has merely accelerated its complex reproduction in many forms across (gendered) spaces of socialisation'. 9Others have labelled these perverse intersections of statebuilding, securitisation, corruption and violence in Latin America 'the rot within'. 10he dramatic extremes of violence in Medellín should thus be seen as a heightened continuation and embodiment of the processes of institutional capture and erosion by elites and non-state violent entrepreneurs over time.Within this dynamic, both the State and non-state organised criminal groups overlap in their influence and become entwined in plural governance arrangements. 11Resultingly, the legitimacy to govern (urban) territory becomes both contested and shared, with non-state criminal groups providing de facto services, justice, security, and arbitration in pursuit of territorial legitimacy in lieu of -or in spite of -the de jure authority of the State. 12As criminal governance challenges State legitimacy in marginalised urban areas, 13 violence becomes fundamentally embedded within the urban fabric. 14et against this backdrop, from the late 1990s, Medellin embarked on a series of ambitious public policy reforms unique to the city.These have come to be collectively known as Social Urbanism, an umbrella term encompassing a broadbased set of strategies, policies and urban projects and their continuity across multiple changes in political leadership.These consisted of strategic transportation and infrastructure projects, new public space interventions in marginalised communities, the extension of social programs and the fostering of a culture of citizenship -with the broader goal to address inequality and violence. 15panning three decades and multiple changes in municipal government, Social Urbanism's development of integrated transport infrastructure and high-quality, avant-garde public architecture coincided with a precipitous fall in violence (Figure 2) and contributed to the external branding of the city. 16A predominant narrative has since emerged whereby architecture is closely entwined with policies underpinning the city's transformation and that architectural objects and practices were constitutive of the city's civic rejuvenation.As such, the 'Medellín Model' is now widely regarded as an exemplar for how to address urban crises through coalitions of social, economic, professional and political actors driving innovative approaches to urban development. 17espite this, the fear and experience of violence remain present, 18 reflecting the challenges of criminal governance in building sustainable peace in urban areas in Latin America. 19Critiques 20 also suggest that homicide declines coinciding with the advent of Social Urbanism were largely attributable to consolidation of paramilitary control of the city by Don Berna and the Oficina Envigado 21 and (potentially fragile) agreements between the State and criminal groups. 22As such, some claim that the city was 'pacified by navigating, rather than challenging or eliminating, the power and influence of (illegal) organisations'. 23Relatedly, others consider Medellín's approach was largely a neoliberal project to create favourable economic conditions, (re)exert State power and territorial control and construct Medellín as a Global City. 24Here, the formalisation and resecuritisation of urban space was enabled by 'architectural objects (which) have appeared in an archipelago of intervention sites scattered across the city'.These'symbols of reassurance' were used to reinforce a politically, economically and culturally advantageous narrative; but one from which there emerges an 'overemphasis of architecture as compensation for social insecurity'. 25

The political nature of architecture
As the vignettes in the introduction convey, architectural objects and the nature of the built environment are imbued with and exert both material presence and symbolic and political meaning.They shape social and economic activities, access to and mobility within the city, the social capital and interactions between citizens and the State, and the safety, security and wellbeing of communities.Fundamentally, what is built, where it is built, how it is built and for whom it is built are questions of politics. 26Architecture can thus be seen as a co-production or assemblage of socio-political visions; a physical representation of how the State and society negotiate, form or convey power, discipline populations and shape and order societies through pride, concern, care, consideration and control. 27istory is replete with political visions being enacted through the design of the built environment.Beyond architecture as a conduit for co-creating, symbolising or enacting political projects or visions, Rabinow critically notes how architecture, planning and urban design have historically been deployed to 'establish military control, regulate activities, separate populations, and establish a comprehensive order, on both an aesthetic and political level'. 28The Haussmann plan for Paris (1853-1870) is an emblematic case of disciplinary and military ends, albeit one that was later contested. 29It saw medieval quarters demolished and inhabitants relocated to make way for avenues, boulevards, squares and parks to rebuild a less congested, more efficient, healthy and beautiful city.In a similar vein, early architectural modernism formed a public health and disciplinary project of raising the modern man. 30Contemporary analogues are also seen in the ordering logics of public space in Costa Rica, 31 in Holston's critique of the political influence of the built environment over daily life in Brasilia, 32 and in Stienen's critical work on built environment interventions in the 'reconstruction and resignification' of Medellín. 33

The urban peacebuilding possibilities of architecture
Beyond the disciplinary or ordering role of architecture in shaping cities, the design and form of the built environment has long been a touchstone for thinking about issues of violence and security. 34Jane Jacobs famously outlined relationships between the planning and architectural design characteristics of cities and criminality 35 ; and the influential Broken Window theory posited that criminal activity was more likely in areas with blighted physical conditions. 36Such perspectives have influenced decades of discussion around the planning and use of public space, including the street, as a preventative measure for crime, and the role of design and architecture in governing and disciplining populations. 37from liberal critiques and the 'local turn' in peacebuilding scholarship 40 and approaches to peacemaking in post-conflict, divided and violently contested cities, 41 urban peacebuilding considers the socio-political, spatial, material and associational natures of cities as inherent to building durable peace.According to Bjorkdahl 'urban peacebuilding takes as its point of departure the interdependencies and frequency of interaction inherent in urban life, and the proximity of the city space to alter the social relations as well as the materiality of divided cities'. 42Here, the social and spatial complexities of the urban, together with the overlapping and contested identities, meanings and agencies written onto space, place and territory, have provoked a range of theoretical perspectives on how the urban shapes the dynamics of peacebuilding 43 and the role of cities as sites of peacebuilding knowledge production. 44ithin this literature, architecture and the design of the built environment are seen as important, particularly in post-conflict cities. 45 While 'everyday' architecture or the design of the built environment may reinforce or prolong violence and conflict, 46 the re/design of the built environment may equally serve to repair infrastructure and the socio-technical fabric of the city; reshaping relationships, associations and civic engagement and expressing 'spatially different constellations of memory and contestation'. 47Here, by materially and symbolically shaping the built environment and in engaging with and connecting state, private sector and civic actors, architects and architecture can be integral to urban peacebuilding efforts.In manifesting itself as assemblages of generative visions, architecture can both produce physical spaces for interaction and connection, and symbolic spaces of relational identity to recognise diverse identities and groups in the city. 48As such, architecture can serve to break down barriers between groups, address issues of diversity, access and equity, rebuild or create common spaces to support inclusion and social cohesion, and foster a sense of belonging in the city. 49

(Limits to) the socio-political potential of architecture
While deployed to develop modern societies, combat crime and build peace, the conceptions of what architecture can achieve remain varied and debated.Deriving from an ideologically driven radicalism between the 1950s and 1970s, architectural social ambitions were extensive, as seen in the master plans and urban designs of new cities and New Towns, such as Brasilia, Toulouse le Mirail or Milton Keynes. 50However, these ambitious goals often failed to live up to idealised expectations and were often marred by social problems, crime and dereliction.These relative failures of large-scale, socially ambitious master plans and architectural projects led to a departure from strong, deterministic conceptions of architectural form in defining the social environment.This coincided with a neoliberal shift towards deregulation and the extensions of global capitalism in the 1980s.The shift has been argued to have curtailed the socio-political potential of architecture, with architects and urban theorists critical of architecture's role in the neoliberal city.In serving mainly to produce surplus value through property investment and development, David Harvey, for instance, argues that architecture is limited in how it can address systemic or structural problems. 51And in rueing its inability to operate outside of the logic of capitalism and the death of its critical-political potential, Manfredo Tafuri concluded that contemporary architecture had reached a nadir.To him, the discipline was 'obliged to return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the best cases, to sublime uselessness'. 52et despite Tarfuri's eulogy of sorts, recent contemporary architectural experiments have increasingly paid attention to political, environmental, democratic and social conditions, while acknowledging the political limits of the discipline. 53xperiments addressing inequality and social problems under contemporary, neoliberal and postmodern conditions can 'repoliticise architecture and accept its fragility in the face of contingent forces', thus 'making small moves towards a slightly better place rather than large moves towards a reinvented world'. 54In moving away from ideologically driven architecture and large-scale masterplans of the 1960s and 1970s, emphasis has shifted towards embedding in local context and understanding urban complexity, together with both potentials and contradictions of architecture as a political tool. 55This contextual and social-political shift within the context of the neoliberal city has also led to many smaller urban projects and interventions designed to have a wider impact 56 Here, the epistemological concept of 'situated knowledges' has relevance in bringing together (post-modern) relativism and (modern) universalism while going beyond the dichotomy. 57These 'situated knowledges' represent a multiplicity of voices and contributions of different non-experts and experts, creating space for shared knowledge or 'spatial agency'. 58Such concepts attempt to repoliticise architecture by critically exploring the potential and relevance of architects' social and political engagement in the meeting between human agency and structure.

Building peace in the contested city: architecture and politics in Medellín
Research on the dynamics of the 'Medellin Miracle' has proliferated, particularly in literatures on urbanism, planning, political science and conflict studies. 59Broadly, Medellín's transformation can be understood as a coordinated socio-political project aimed at addressing inequality and reducing violence. 60This was linked with and explicitly enacted through a technical-physical change using infrastructure, urban design and architecture to remake mobility and public space as key instruments to achieve progressive policy agendas. 61Tying to our theoretical section above, the following section traces the political foundations of architecture as a policy tool, the peacebuilding potential of architecture, and the broader outcomes and limitations of these changes in Medellín.

Critical junctures and new coalitions: architecture as political instrument
As homicide rates peaked in the early 1990s, class and income no longer provided insulation from threats of violence, and the economic, political and security interests of all citizens, including elites, became increasingly vulnerable.This moment of crisis presented an opportunity to remake policy approaches, such that 'political spaces opened up in which community organisations and social movements had a seat at the table'. 62As former mayor Anibal Gaviria remarked to us of the time, 'Sometimes you need a very bad situation to pull out the best of a people and a society'. 63his window of change coincided with broader national political reforms, which sought to strengthen human rights, local democracy and the autonomy of city governments.President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo established an advisory office, Consejería Presidencial para Medellín (1990-1994), with the objective to contribute to enhancing local democracy. 64This was led by Maria Emma Mejía Vélez, whose office established an agenda of community participation, meetings, city workshops, and professional working groups that pursued constructive dialogues to develop a shared conception of the city's challenges and potential solutions. 65Architects and academics took part in these crossdisciplinary workshops -along with political and business actors, media , NGOs, community leaders and civil society -including citizens from the city's poorest districts.These diverse and at times radical coalitions galvanised a cross-class, cross-disciplinary set of actors, which was formative in developing a shared understanding of the city's challenges. 66Fundamentally, violence and exclusion became seen as linked with the marginalisation of poor communities, which allowed the power of violent actors to grow. 67ut of this grew a stakeholder community imbued with a sense of responsibility and a collective vision of re-imagining the city in contrast to its violent history.This 'ideological cohesion' among professionals, elites and social movements coincided with constitutional amendments in 1991 permitting the popular election of local mayors.Gaining support and legitimacy from emerging progressive coalitions, candidates from nontraditional political backgrounds eschewed patriarchal and clientelist politics, instead including a wider range of actors into urban politics 68 -including those from architectural professions.Antanas Mockus -a philosopher -was elected mayor of Bogotá in 1994, and mathematician Sergio Fajardo elected mayor of Medellín in 2003.Both were widely praised for catalysing their cities' turnarounds. 69Yet rather than being attributable to individual mayors, the changes in Medellín (and Bogotá) stemmed from the political processes and broad-based coalition building in the 1990s. 70The crisis of violence coinciding with political institutional changes represented a critical juncture enabling new actors, networks, collaborations, and strategies to emerge, and the possibility of gaining political power to pursue them.

The instrumentalization of architecture for urban peacebuilding
As cross-sectoral multi-stakeholder approaches emerged, the city's professional classes became more centrally engaged in urban policy discussions.Due to this, the story of Medellín often emphasise charismatic mayors, star-architects, and technicalarchitectural interventions driving declines in violence and inequality.Yet the city's transformation emerged from the broad-based collaboration of multiple agents through cultivated networks and assemblages of practice throughout the 1990s, rather than due simply to the actions of architects or architectural interventions themselves. 71During the crisis, construction and architectural commissions were hindered by extreme levels of violence.Because of this, universities and schools of architecture and urbanism became 'professional refuges' from the conditions of violencein the city, drawing inspiration from and building connections with international collaborators. 72This period of professional development and multidisciplinary networking saw new networks of practice emerge, allowing Medellín's architects to imagine a different future, build competence and prepare for change. 73Innovative urban labs emerged at the Facultad de Arquitectura at Universidade Pontificia Bolivar (FAUPB), Centro de Estudios de Hábitat Popular at Universidad Nacional and Centro de Estudio Regionales at Universidad de Antioquia.Internationally renowned architects and professionals were invited to teach and train new architects and professionals, focusing on urban complexity, social responsibility and multidisciplinary collaboration. 74As this generation of young architectural professionals and their professors began to enter into public office and work with urban design and planning, they became influential actors in the redevelopment of the city.
Building on this engagement, the 'radical' use of architecture as a political tool came to prominence in 2004 under mayor Sergio Fajardo and his newly established Compromiso Ciudadano political party.Together with architect Alejandro Echeverri, who headed the municipal office of Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano (EDU), they led an urban transformation process, which involved a coalition of non-traditional academic, professional, and civil society actors.Differing markedly from repressive approaches to public security in other Latin-American cities, Social Urbanism developed participatory and multidisciplinary approaches to public space interventions.These sought to account for local contexts of violence and marginalisation and understand the needs of -and work with -communities in urban planning and development processes.During fieldwork, early-career architects described to us how as new graduates they worked in interdisciplinary teams engaged by EDU.Spearheading the city's reengagement in marginalised, violent neighbourhoods they revealed the need to build trust and negotiate with both local populations and local criminal groups for access to areas of operation, and for legitimacy. 75These teams of architects, 71 McGuirk, Radical Cities; Daniel Cardoso Llach and Nida Rehman, 'Magical Modernism: Latin American Urbanisms and the Imaginary of Social Architecture', Dearq 29 (2021): 54-67. 72Interview, Pérez August 2018. 73Interview, Pérez, August 2018. 74Bellalta, Social Urbanism. 75Interviews, Architects John Octavia Ortiz, Oscar Santana and Francisco M. Orsini, August 2018, Medellín.social workers, planners, communicators and engineers collaborated with business actors and communities to map local needs and contexts and develop and implement trans-scalar public space interventions.Identifying them as Proyectos Urbanos Integrales (Integrated Urban Projects -PUIs), they combined redesigned public spaces and infrastructure with social programs for health, education, culture and recreation, with the overarching aim of fostering wellbeing, connection and community.
Medellín's PUIs built on Barcelona's Proyectos Urbanos, which sought to contribute to physical and social change through multiple, strategic urban projects rather than master plans. 76The 'Barcelona model' was both a response to neoliberal shifts in urban planning, where the role of city master plans diminished and project-based urban development expanded, but also one which emphasised architecture as an explicit policy instrument.Having studied in Barcelona, Echeverri worked closely with Fajardo in translating the 'Barcelona model' to the Medellín context -and developing it further -by focusing on investing in the city's poorest districts with more extensive community engagement and multidisciplinary collaboration. 77or instance, in the comunas of Popular and Santa Cruz, the PUI Nor-Oriental projects included sports facilities, playgrounds, footbridges, squares, pavements, school buildings, a library, and parks, among others, all planned and erected in the space of a few years (Figures 3 and 4).These urban projects were developed based on community mapping and participation and adapted to local context, sometimes in highly detailed and specific ways.The changes that resulted from these projects represented marked improvements in the everyday lived experiences for many parents, children, youth, local businesses, and other residents we spoke with in the community. 78Moreover, while these individual projects created local improvements at the community level, the various urban interventions carried out accross Medellín cumulatively contributed to broader systemic changes at the citylevel.
Crucial to these successes was multi-partisan political support and continuity over time and across changes of government.Fajardo's successor, Alonso Salazar Jaramillo (2008-2011) continued development of PUI projects across the city.The publicly owned utility company Empresas Publicas de Medellín (EPM) added educational and social centres -Unidades de Vida Articulada (UVAs) -by repurposing and developing their water tank infrastructure sites across Medellín's hillsides. 79Mayor Anibal Gaviria (2012-2015) together with planning director and architect Jorge Pérez oversaw the upgrading of the downtown and redevelopment of Medellín's river areas as part of the Parques del Rio project, Figure 4. Neighbourhood and public space upgrading, constructing pavements, entrances and private-public door front space, within the PUI Nor-Oriental, Comunas 1-2.Photo: Oscar Santana. 78Interviews, multiple residents, August 2018, Popular comuna, Medellín. 79Interview, Horacio Valencia, Lead Architect, Empresas Publicas de Medellín.August 2018.Also see (reference redacted for review).
which also integrated environmental sustainability and biodiversity ambitions. 80ach of these initiatives can be seen as drawing on a lineage that emphasises the significance of redesigning public space in extending and maintaining political visions of supporting urban safety and social inclusion. 81n service of building more durable peace in the city, Social Urbanism drew on the premise that the nature and form of the built environment could have both material and symbolic effects on conditions of violence. 82In combining social programs with public space interventions in marginalised communities, it sought to design both material and symbolic visions of security and equity through State-led participatory urban development initiatives.This sentiment is evoked by former mayor Sergio Fajardo: the most beautiful things for the most humble people, so that the pride felt in that which is public illuminates us all.The beauty of the architecture is essential.Where before there was death, fear and dislocation, today there are the most impressive buildings, all of the highest quality . . .In this way we are sending out a political message about the dignity of the space which is open, without exception, to all citizens, which means recognizing the value of everyone, reaffirming our self-esteem and creating a feeling of belonging. . . 83plicit in this use of architecture was a representational conveyance of equity, authority and security.Capillé and Psarra suggest it was used to both project the image of a city reemerging from the cloak of violence and marginalisation through the erection of monumental objects of symbolic social change; and produce social change through architectural projects that arranged public spaces and services to generate social cohesion, community and security. 84Yet while Medellín's 'projects of spectacle' branded the change, gained political traction, and forwarded the narrative of a new future, arguably the more substantive changes relied on the many smaller urban projects developed in collaboration with communities.This confluence of architectural analysis and citizen collaboration delineated local community needs and functional components of placespecific interventions; and the actual design of the urban project then took form.Here, architecture as practiced in Medellín's Social Urbanism was not simply as pure design, but resembled an iterative, collaborative process of participatory engagement between State and civil society to create spaces for peace to emerge.

The socio-political limits of architecture in Medellín
The successes of Medellín's built environment and social interventions created a powerful narrative that has become enormously valuable for the city. 85Bestowed with numerous awards, Medellín has been portrayed -and leveraged its perceptionsas an iconic architectural hub, urban innovation lab and Global city. 86However, while important, the reification of the role of architecture in building peace in Medellín obscures several important dimensions, reiterating that socio-technical fixes alone cannot address social-political problems.
First, it overlooks the multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary sets of choices, projects and transformations that underpinned the city's public space interventions.While the material presence of architectural forms was the most visible embodiment of the city's change, it conceals smaller public projects driven by participatory design, social engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration done by multi-stakeholder groups over a number of years.Several professionals we interviewed who worked with participatory processes, urban planning and design of PUIs pointed to the Biblioteca España as highly visual representation of change. 87However, they also noted how it was not as responsive to local needs, interests and insights as many of the more everyday urban architectural projects, which arguably had a greater positive impact.This also speaks to the importance of community agency.Todtz notes that while the State's physical interventions in Medellín often sought to 'de-territorialise the underlying geographies of violence', so too were residents engaged in a 're-territorialisation of these spaces through insurgent spatial practices' that reclaimed 'individual and community autonomy' in the face of pervasive violence. 88As such, while the library and other projects of spectacle embodied the 'physical and symbolic value of architecture in local politics', 89 they cannot alone account for the mechanics and magnitude of the changes in the city or everyday lived experiences.
Second, underlying the city's built environment interventions was a shared conception that peacebuilding in Medellín relied on addressing issues of equity and the factors contributing to violence.While spectacular architectural entities may have communicated the city's new direction, such gestures could not proceed without connecting to broader socio-political programs, policies and agendas that address inequalities and improve livelihoods.Moreover, such engagement would not have been possible without attending to the dynamics of criminal governance and the spatiality of violence.In focusing on the city's architecture, there has been somewhat of a tendency to 'depoliticise' the local political economies of territorial governance and violence in the myth-making around public space interventions in Medellín.Yet interviews revealed how engaging with criminal groups was integral to gaining access to neighbourhoods in order to develop public space interventions. 90Moreover, the broader renegotiation of the local dynamics of criminal governance was an important factor related to the declining trajectories of violence that emerged alongside Social Urbanism. 91As such, there are thus clearly limits to what architectural forms alone can do, particularly in the context of urban socio-spatial segregation inherent in Colombia's system of territorially defined economic strata 92 and the persistence of criminal governance in marginalised urban areas that follows.
Third, it overlooks how Social Urbanism became a lens to further the political economic goals of the city's elite by reframing and exporting the city's image as a progressive, enlightened and innovative global city. 93Violence negatively impacted the city's image and ability to do business and attract capital, which presented 'a unique situation in which social and economic objectives were now one and the same'. 94merging out of a political process as an assemblage of practices and actors to combat violence, Social Urbanism entrenched architecture and the revitalisation of public space as both instruments of urban policy and a way to brand the 'new' city.Moreover, the extension of State reach through infrastructure and public space investments also shaped -at times contentiously -a 'securitisation through placemaking', where State approaches to control urban space created more favourable business and investment conditions, rewarding elite interests. 95Given that inequalities and divisions between the 'formal' and 'informal' city remain entrenched, 96 some claim that Social Urbanism 'generates political and representational spaces where, despite the transformations, the marginality persists as a historical and interpretative frame that allows the territory to be "legible" to the administration and the city'. 97he above outlines some of the ways Medellín's built environment interventions under Social Urbanism met their socio-political limits.While certainly contributing to peacebuilding in the city, the overt focus on architecture's constitutive role in violence reduction often overlooks Social Urbanism's political foundations and the myriad actors, networks, and multidisciplinary participatory processes upon which this narrative is built.It may also exaggerate the magnitude or durability of the changes that have emerged, the degree to which its success is shared, and the peace that has been built in the city.In particular, the negotiated and strategic use of violence by criminal organisations is often overlooked, 98 with such circumstances being fragile and prone to change.Indeed, violence has increased in recent years, and criminal organisations still hold influence over much of the city, 99 with everyday fear persistent. 100ne reasonable rejoinder to this is that built environment interventions enabled the formal state to re-exert its presence in marginalised areas, bringing with it improved governance and services that successfully challenged the legitimacy of illegal actors and made the city meaningfully safer.However, recent evidence from Medellin suggests that the State has since struggled to win over residents when engaging in areas where its presence was initially weakest. 101Further, as the State re-engages in marginalised communities, criminal groups may react strategically to deliver more governance services to further compete for local legitimacy. 102Such findings suggest that the legitimacy of criminal organisations is sticky, making it demanding for the State to resist and challenge the influence of violent groups.Broadly, while Medellín's use of architecture and interventions in the built environment have been important to building peace in the city, they have not done so alone, nor have they done so completely.

Conclusion: architecture and peacebuilding in violently contested cities
This article traces how architectural practice in Medellín became embedded within a broad-based, sustained socio-political agenda of reducing inequality and violence.Emerging from new political coalitions, architecture and urban design were deployed as central tools to build peace and promote the inclusion of spatially and economically marginalised populations.In observing the interplay between politics, architecture and urban peacebuilding, we show how a sustained, inclusive political project that tied social service provision and upgrading of public space and mobility options was central in Medellín's transformative peacebuilding processes.This is not, however, to say that this was a singular driver of change -several authors have noted the wider range of factors including dynamics of the Colombian civil war, and agreements between criminal groups to reduce or hide violence that also played meaningful roles in stemming homicides. 103et despite the challenges of violence and marginality remaining present, Social Urbanism successfully centred architecture as a means of building a spatially situated and interconnected approach to improving the safety and inclusion of many of its most marginalised residents.This has elevated the role of architecture in the socio-political discourse within (and subsequently beyond) the city, such that it is now seen as a legitimate instrument to improve safety and inclusion, attract capital and support governance agendas.
Radical and unique, Medellín's experiences are instructive for how we understand the role of architecture and the built environment in urban peacebuilding processes.At the outset, we should be somewhat cautious.Built environment interventions to control and order urban space have at times exacerbated violence, 104 and the failures of architecturally divined high-modernist social utopias are well-known. 105However, recent transdisciplinary, postmodern perspectives are tracing the lineages from modernist New Towns, Tafuri's form without utopia and contemporary grand visions towards a concept of a plurality of local and contextual 'utopias'. 106It is here that Medellín's contextual, intervention-by-intervention approach, and its connection to spatiality, history, culture and function is relevant for how we may conceptualise the built environment in urban peacebuilding processes.In Medellín, architects and architecture played a legitimising and unifying role, connecting spheres of the public and private, arts and sciences, capital and labour, and furthering the social, technical and human capital in the city. 107In pursuing the potential for change through collectively elaborated networked interventions, Medellín's multiplicity of modest and singular socio-architectural projects were anchored in and responded to knowledge of communities' needs and local political economies of violence and marginalisation.And in responding to -but not always solving -these, and being integrated across the city, they became a social and physical foundation on which the emerging peace in the city was built.
The city's experiences speak directly to several theories on urban peacebuilding.Initially, Medellín's place-based approach resonates with the concept of 'urban acupuncture' where networked, small-scale, strategic interventions in vulnerable locations are designed to promote safety, connectivity and community, and scale across spatial locations to support broader positive urban change. 108It also links with debates about the meaning of 'the local' in urban peacebuilding 109 which may refer to a spatial location, or the types of actors involved in peacebuilding processes.Medellín's experiences suggest the relevance of the local vis-à-vis both spatiality and agency. 110But it equally shows that its successes were also based on how these connected with higher-order forces through its networking of interventions across the city and being anchored in a broad-based consensus of top-down political support.
It also reiterates the spatial natures of violence and attempts to build peace, and the need to engage with the nature, location and organisation of violence in the places in which it occurs.Following Björkdahl and Kappler, in transforming both neighbourhoods of the physical city and the everyday encounters and old and new meanings ascribed to these, the remaking of space and place through architectural interventions fostered new avenues for peacebuilding. 111These places and spaces both produced and represented visions of a better future while acknowledging the city's violent past, creating physical and emotional sites of beauty, function, and memory. 112Moreover, while marginality and violence persist, the city's built environment interventions and associated public services have shaped diverse physical and representational spaces and structures that have begun to support conflict transformation.As such, Medellín's approach may also embody peacebuilding as an act that acknowledges rather than suppresses conflict.Here, we may consider its architectural interventions exist as what Danielak describes as 'spaces of trust, empathy or solidarity . . .within landscapes of insecurity, inequality, relative deprivation, disengagement and destruction'; as 'opportunity spaces for creating new forms of democratic engagement and dealing with differences'. 113uch ideas also imply the need to be attuned to varied conceptions of how and where to build peace and what its ends are -and who gets to define them.Of relevance here is the spatiality within the idea of territorial peace explicit in the Colombian Peace Process, 114 which recognises the 'contrasting and polysemous notions of territory' for different actors and interests party to conflict and violence in Colombia. 115According to Stienan, such an understanding 'articulates two different and conflicting notions of territory' that must be addressed in peacebuilding efforts: '"territory" (in the singular) as State space and "territories" (in the plural) as "self-governed spaces" that fragment State space'. 116Both in Medellín, Colombia or elsewhere, any efforts to build peace in the city, including through the use of built environment interventions, must negotiate these contrasting notions of space and territory -both physical and representational -and grapple with questions of where, how, and for whom peace is created and located.
In considering the relevance of Medellín's experiences for other violently contested cities, it is likely that the changes seen here are difficult to replicate elsewhere, emerging from a set of social, political and temporal conditions, experiences and relations that are in many ways unique to the city.As such, treating Medellín as a typical case may prove challenging, as its conditions of violence were so acute, the role of architecture so pronounced and the reduction in violence so dramatic.However, these radical experiences may help uncover conditions and connections that elsewhere are difficult to detect.The lessons emerging from Medellín suggest that coordinated, participatory and sustained political action that integrates networked, place-based architectural interventions with social programs can play a meaningful role in addressing violence and marginalisation and contribute to building peace in violently contested cities.In Medellín, it was not simply the buildings, but the process of building that mattered.