Alejandro Echeverri is an architect and the driving force behind one of the most exciting urban developments of recent years: the resurgence of Medellín. He is now touring the world’s major cities with his model. But he knows how much remains to be done in his home city.
Alejandro Echeverri is an architect and the driving force behind one of the most exciting urban developments of recent years: the resurgence of Medellín. He is now touring the world’s major cities with his model. But he knows how much remains to be done in his home city.
In fact, the metaphor of the city as a body is a thing of the past. But when Alejandro Echeverri uses it, it takes on a new connotation: the Colombian architect and urban developer is not talking about veins and arteries as supply channels or the brain as a business and therefore decision-making center. But of the skin. For Echeverri, the city is first and foremost a skin-like phenomenon. “It’s about the skin of the city, the concrete and vulnerable districts in the city center.” The city is sensitive, the city is vulnerable. But through deliberate architectural interventions, something can be created on the skin of the city “that makes people proud”. And for him, pride is a core concept of his major project: the fundamental transformation of his home city of Medellín from a run-down drug capital into a diverse and, above all, liveable metropolis.
From 2005 to 2008, Alejandro Echeverri headed the department for “urban projects”, something like an urban development office in Medellín. Today, Echeverri heads the “Center for Urban and Environmental Studies” at Medellín’s EAFIT University. Above all, however, he is an architect. The built environment, visualizing and structuring urbanity is his passion. This also leads to statements that border on the emotional. “We have to treat our city with love. Architecture can do that.”
In the noughties, Echeverri and his boss, then mayor Sergio Fajardo, made changes to various districts. They built new bridges in barrios such as the extremely poor Andalucia. They raised a cable car that now connects Santo Domingo with the city center. And all of this, at least in the case of Echeverri and his team, was done without any official party connections. “We simply had our ideas: Bringing public transportation to poor areas; opening up spaces; building schools and learning centers. And people listened to us.” The result: Medellín got rid of its bitter status as the crime capital of the world. Cities like Ciudad Juárez in Mexico reaped the rewards.
Echeverri’s relationship with politics is distanced. In general, “politics in Medellín is a very fragile thing”, as he says. Good and evil, change-makers and obstructors of change – it is not always possible to make a clear distinction here. And of course Medellín’s problems have not been solved. The murder rate has actually risen significantly since 2008: 150 out of every 100,000 people are murdered every year. More than the 75 five years ago, but significantly less than the 420 in 1993, the year in which Pablo Escobar was shot dead by police officers. Of course, the problem of drug production throughout the country has by no means been solved. Most observers agree that the American government’s “War on Drugs” has failed. Colombia’s ambassador in London, Maurizio Rodríguez, calls for a “completely new way of thinking” in an interview with The Guardian newspaper.
Read more in Baumeister 1/2014
Photos: Iwan Baan
