Public transport, and the way people behave on it, tells you a lot about a city. I once asked a teenager on the London Tube if she wouldn’t mind picking up remains of a sandwich she’d tossed on the seat next to her, mayonnaise and limp lettuce oozing onto the blue and red fabric. “Mind your own f****** business,” she shouted at me. Trying to keep calm, I carried on, explaining it was “everyone’s business” to keep the Tube clean because it’s a public space we all use. I recalled this unpleasant encounter on a recent trip to Medellín in Colombia, which has the cleanest public transport system I’ve ever seen.
Some readers might do a double take at this statement. It is counterintuitive for many of us to imagine a South American city with pleasant, safe, cheap and clean public transport, particularly given what is happening in Ecuador right now. But in the past 30 years, Medellín has gone from being one of the world’s most dangerous cities (in 1991, the homicide rate was seventeen deaths a day) to becoming a model for urban renewal. You can even get free counselling from a professional psychologist in some of the busier downtown stations by going into a small green tent called an Escuchadero or Listener. This innovation was introduced to deal with the mental health crisis that emerged in the wake of the pandemic. There’s a QR code on the outside of the tent for booking appointments and a choice of emoji faces displaying different emotions lined up under the question: How is your day going?
The metro is a symbol of hope and progress after decades of civil war and gang violence
I first visited Medellín in 2017. I’d been invited to give a lecture on public service broadcasting at one of the universities and as a thank you they offered me a tour. I was expecting a couple of museums and a stroll around the main square to view the huge, voluptuous Botero sculptures. Colombia’s most famous artist grew up in Medellín and donated many of his works to the city. Instead, I was taken on a tour of the metro system, including a cable-car ride up to Comuna 13, one of Medellín’s poorest neighbourhoods.
My guide was a PhD student from the urban studies department. He explained how the building of the metro in the late 1990s and early 2000s had brought the residents of the city together. The cable cars – linked to the metro stations – take passengers up to former shanty towns that cling to the steep hillsides in the north. Until that point, all I knew about Medellín came from watching Narcos, the 2015 Netflix series about cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar. When I mentioned this to the PhD student, a cloud of disapproval passed over his face. Colombians hate the glamorisation of a man they see as a psychopathic mass murderer.
So, if you want to make friends in Medellín, don’t mention Escobar. Praise the metro and watch the locals beam with pride. It’s the only one in the country. Even the capital Bogotá doesn’t have a metro. “We have an expression here, we call it Metro Culture,” says architect Juan Luis Isaza, the city’s former head of heritage. “The metro is seen as a great leveller, a symbol of hope and progress that arrived after decades of civil war and gang violence.”
When the city first unveiled its plans to link the impoverished shanty towns to the city centre and affluent southern suburbs, many argued that the poor would vandalise the trains and cable cars, drop litter and cover them in graffiti like they did to their own neighbourhoods. “But the opposite happened,” says Isaza. “This brutally segregated city came together. We are all proud that our metro is so clean and well organised.” The transport system is almost entirely free of graffiti, people abide by the prohibition on food and drink and behave politely even when the carriages are packed. It has also significantly reduced the city’s CO2 emissions.
This shanty town built on a rubbish dump is home to a new park and cultural centre
But Medellín’s metro culture didn’t happen on its own. It came about as part of a carefully coordinated campaign. The city financed a community leadership development programme training more than 2000 people to organise events ranging from public meetings to concerts and exhibitions, featuring local artists. The aim was to explain that the metro belonged to everyone and the whole city had a responsibility to care for it.
Like many great social innovations, Medellín’s transformation came about after years of bloodshed and conflict. The ten-year civil war known as La Violencia, which raged through the Colombian countryside from 1948 to 1958, forced people to abandon their homes and move to the cities. That was followed by further decades of violence between left-wing guerrilla movements fighting right-wing paramilitary groups and the army. Finally, into this toxic cauldron came Washington’s War on Drugs waged against the cocaine cartels. With every fresh surge of bloodshed, more and more people abandoned the lawless countryside for shanty towns on the steep hillsides of Medellín.
For decades these comunas, as the informal settlements were called, felt like they didn’t belong to the city, but lived outside an invisible fence of privilege. They were too far from the centre to access jobs or services. The state was largely absent and, excluded from traditional labour markets, the male population found work in the cocaine trade.
A series of transformative mayors, including Sergio Fajardo in the early 2000s, have each made their mark on Colombia’s second largest city, building public housing, libraries, museums and sport facilities. This shanty town built on a rubbish dump is now home to a new park and cultural centre. Computer labs and innovation centres were set up in the poorest neighbourhoods to help residents set up their own small businesses and, from what I saw on my most recent visit, these are now bearing fruit.
Comuna 13, once the most lawless neighbourhood, is now a major visitor attraction with cafes, restaurants and shops set up by residents. Cultural collectives teach kids music, breakdancing and mural painting. Small outside spaces host concerts and dance performances for the tourists. A series of brightly coloured escalators and slides have been built up and down the hillside, framed by huge murals.
It’s hard to believe that twenty years ago the Colombian president sent in Black Hawk helicopters and armoured vehicles to bring Comuna 13 under government control. Dozens of people including women and children “disappeared” in the process and are believed to lie buried in a mass grave on the hillside opposite. The wall art recalls this history with murals depicting besuited politicians in the sky throwing dice into a shanty town below; images of helicopters morph into hummingbirds while tanks transform into beetles, nestled in lush tropical foliage.
When I first visited this impoverished hillside neighbourhood in 2017 there was already great wall art but very few tourists, apart from a few intrepid backpackers on a Pablo Escobar tour. Six years on, I’m advised to get there early before the crowds of tourists, mainly Americans, block up its narrow alleyways. As in many successful globalised cities, residents of Medellín now complain about gentrification and the downsides of mass tourism.
Its current reputation as a hip party city has led to a proliferation of Airbnb rooms, while the influx of young digital nomads from Europe and the United States has made rents less affordable for locals.
On my latest visit, I had dinner with a young British writer who moved to Medellín from London five years ago. We ate in a restaurant offering small plates of locally sourced organic food, which the waiter explained to us in earnest detail. The writer confessed she found life much easier here than in London – she pays a fraction of the rent, has a large social circle of both Colombian and expat friends, enjoys weekly salsa classes, the lush tropical vegetation, and the sun shining all year round. What’s not to like? As I strolled home through the clean leafy streets of the downtown neighbourhood where I was staying, I mused that if I was 30 years younger, I too might have been tempted to move to Medellín.
Kirsty Lang is a writer and broadcaster. She presents the “Round Britain Quiz” on BBC Radio 4
