The evolution of community participation in city development in Medellin, Colombia

In 2013 the city of Medellín received the accolade of being the world’s most innovative city, based mostly on its investment in transport and other public infrastructure specifically targeting the city’s poorer areas. Much less widely known and analysed is the city’s local government’s experimentation with forms of citizen participation, within the context of Colombian legislation and initiatives, ranging from district-level participatory budgeting to design workshops for public spaces in specific neighbourhoods. Indeed, the city’s administration recently set out to become an example of citizen participation for the rest of Colombia and Latin America, involving citizens further in public decision-making. However, there is some evidence that these local government-driven participatory processes have affected pre-existing community-led decision-making mechanisms and the ways in which communities engage with the administration, with results that are not necessarily conducive to better outcomes for communities. The proposed research will critically review the evolution of local government citizen participation initiatives in Medellín since the change in the Colombian Constitution in 1991, with a particular focus on the last decade and on initiatives addressing areas of informal settlement. It will then conduct fieldwork in Medellín, working with communities to explore how community organisations’ strategies for engagement with public authorities and procurement of housing, infrastructure and services have evolved, and how communities themselves have been changing, including their perceptions and preparedness for such engagement. The analysis of this data will explore the extent to which communities are being empowered or not, as well as alternative ways forward for the relationship between local government and communities in relation to local development. The findings will provide a basis for reflection and recommendations that are of direct relevance for city governance in Medellín, but also potentially for other Latin American cities and beyond, including the European context, where public participation in urban planning continues to be developed.

This PhD project would contribute to a specific research area that since 2014 has been developed jointly by The Urban Institute (TUI) at Heriot-Watt University and the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), as part of the Edinburgh Strategic Alliance, focused on urban development initiatives in Medellín, and which has been identified as a potential impact case study for REF 2021. The PhD research would develop knowledge in a topic that has been explored only to a limited extent within the ongoing work, and would further strengthen the collaboration. It would be jointly supervised by Harry Smith at TUI and Soledad Garcia-Ferrari at ESALA. The researcher would be provided with support while conducting research in Medellín from our partner universities there, including the Universidad Nacional de Colombia Sede Medellín and the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana; would have access to local government bodies we have good links to; and would work with the community organisations we have ongoing working relationships with, including the Working Group for Internally Displaced People (Mesa de Desplazados) and the Working Group for Housing and Domestic Public Services (Mesa de Vivienda y Servicios Públicos Domiciliarios) in Comuna 8.