The whole world is talking about borders. Whether or not globalization is to blame – border spaces and the politics of bordering dominate current political debates and have done so for quite a while, even before Donald Trump came along. Alexander Gutzmer, editorial manager of the monthly architecture magazine Der Baumeister wrote a book on the topic. He describes the different ways in which borders are reflected upon, mediatized, and instrumentalized in political ways, with the border between Mexico and the USA as prime example. He demonstrates that borders are not only misused for implementing subversive policies but also enable the creation of art with political relevance. Gutzmer will read from his book and in follow discuss his findings with Anja Koller, editor of the urban landscape magazine Topos. The recent issue of Topos is dedicated to the topic of borders, too.
Important Facts
Where: Architekturgalerie München im Bunker, Blumenstraße 22, 80331 Munich
When: 15 October 2018, 7 pm
Once known as the most dangerous city in the world, this January Medellín in Colombia was named the number one travel destination on the rise in South America. From a world full of darkness and crime, the city has stepped into the light – thanks to its own society, which remembered its values at the darkest moment.
The third part of the Medellín series by Alejandro Restrepo-Montoya is about new transport infrastructures and integral urban projects that allowed the city to be woven and integrated through its streets and public spaces.
The city of the new century
One of the most remarkable and profound thoughts that resulted from reflections about creating a better city was that a historical social debt had to be balanced, one that concerned the peripheral neighbourhoods and the city’s more distant places. Those places where the State was not seen, and where violence among the inhabitants and youth gave rise to to the illusion of making money in exchange for their own lives.
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In these places, where violence had found ideal conditions due to a lack of opportunities and promises made to find a better living condition at any cost, the political administration arrived with its social development programmes, new infrastructure, education and culture. In places where previously there had only been space for violence, spaces were created for the community to meet.
Efficient connection with other spaces
The city approached its most remote neighbourhoods by connecting them to the centre viah new means of transport, such as the Medellín Metro, which linked the south with the north and the centre with the west in the mid-1990s. Later, other transport systems – such as the Metro cables to the northeast and western centre of the city – were planned in order to join with the layout of the metro and generate new connections with the most remote neighbourhoods, where a lack of accessibility had separated the inhabitants from urban structures. The articulation of these transportation systems allowed the inhabitants of those communities to have a faster, more efficient connection with other spaces in the city.
Over the years, in the surroundings of these transport infrastructures, integral urban projects were built that allowed the city to be woven and integrated through its streets and public spaces. New urban connectivities, educational spaces, schools, cultural spaces and other spaces, such as parks, new streets and squares, were planned and constructed so that the city’s inhabitants could meet each other.
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The city and inhabitants of these neighbourhoods found in these public spaces places to see how life goes on. In their buildings they found other activities that had not been close to the environment they inhabited for years. Through public invitations and international architectural competitions, different urban spaces, new libraries, kindergartens and educational institutions were designed and built. The most beautiful projects were part of the urban development in the neighbourhoods occupied by those communities that – for years – had lived with violence. Thus, various sectors of the city began to intervene in the centre and in the north on the eastern and western slopes through the development of new transport systems and public spaces that articulated the life of the community.
Medellín’s social and urban transformation is the result of the reflections of the community, of different social and institutional sectors and academia, and of the political decisions made to improve the living conditions of the community.
In the new century the city began adding to these interventions in transport infrastructures with the construction of new public spaces and buildings for culture and education, where different activities are still part of community life.
Nearly 20 kindergartens were built as a result of public architectural competitions, where – through participation in open invitations – the guild of architects and urban planners could propose for improving the quality of life within these communities.
A new mental structure
These activities were followed by physical interventions and specific improvements in more than 200 educational institutions; open space and sports venues were adapted to receive the South American Games in 2011. New connections – such as the Ayacucho tram in the centre of Medellín – were proposed. New Metro cable lines continue to be built and the city has intervened in different ways to benefit the communities that inhabit it. This city of the new century brought about a reduction in rates of violence through institutional presence, accompanied by the quality of urban space and the generation of meeting places where the citizens of tomorrow are educated according to modern parameters. We still believe that a child who takes a pencil or plays a musical instrument will never take up a weapon in order to attack his community. This way of thinking has allowed the inhabitants of the city to develop a new mental structure.
Through education, culture, care for families, high-quality public space and attention to the community, profound changes have been generated in the way of feeling and inhabiting a city that, until a few years ago, walked in the shadows, but – through culture, education, hope, dreams and the realisation of those dreams – has changed the mentality of its inhabitants and has improved the quality of life in our communities. The city that was developed and planned from the early XX Century, that city of industrial splendour that also attracted activities of illegality, that city reinvented from culture, education and public space, has given way to the city we now have today.
Click here for the first part of our Medellín series.
And here for part two.
Once known as the most dangerous city in the world, this January Medellín in Colombia was named the number one travel destination on the rise in South America. From a world full of darkness and crime, the city has stepped into the light – thanks to its own society, which remembered its values at the darkest moment.
The second part of the Medellín series by Alejandro Restrepo-Montoya is about the drug history of Medellín and its effects on society and urban development.
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The illegal economy of drug trafficking generated other social dynamics and led to acts of violence in the city that grew over the years. Drug trafficking generated an attractive economy for criminal groups that organised themselves around this activity and – as a consequence – the city changed its planned development process due to an environment of violence that grew over the years.
The spiral of illegal business
The illegality of drug trafficking attracted new capital and profoundly damaged the part of society that was rapidly transforming its values. The Medellín of those years was blind in its march to a stage of violence that began in the 1970s; while in the 1980s and 1990s it reached its highest crime rates. The offer of new opportunities and economic privileges from crime reached the less well-to-do sectors and the poorest neighborhoods (barrios), captivating those who did not have opportunities and leading to blame of a system that provided a scarcity of options. The lack of education, coupled with the attraction of money, made many groups of young people join this army of terror. Large groups of our society fell in love with the illegal activities and criminal transactions that represented – in a short time – large sums of money. This crisis, which began in the 1970s, worsened in the 1980s and 1990s. The rates of insecurity and homicide in Medellín reached alarming figures. According to Bogotá’s El Tiempo newspaper, 1991 was the most violent year in four decades in the city, with 7,273 murders; a rate of 266 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants.
The drug war against the National Government was open and direct. This crisis led us to position ourselves as one of the most violent cities in the world. On 11 August 2008, the portal razonpublica.com indicated that “in 1983 a period of nine years began, lasting until 1991, in which violence grew rapidly, and the number of homicides almost tripled (increasing 290%)”. The same article also included another alarming figure: “Between 1983 and 1991, the rate went from 34 to 79 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, the period of the greatest growth.”
The city had reached its most crucial point. Violence and a change in the perception of values had caused profound damage to the social structures of the city.
At that moment, when darkness and disillusion had reached every point of the city, a light opened to recover a society consumed by a scarcity of values, by violence and illegality. The illumination of thought and dialogue made society begin to organise itself and to ask about fundamental values and about life at the darkest moment.
This initiative, driven by reflections from academia, from art and culture, and from different sectors of society, generated other alternatives for public discussion, and citizen and political movements that expressed the feeling of a community that had been overwhelmed by illegality, crime and the loss of values during three decades of violence that overshadowed the urban development that had consolidated the city.
The light in the middle of the crisis
Civil society and academia were precursors of a reflection that had political consequences and brought about change at the most difficult moment. At that time, when the crisis of values was deepening, society began to organise itself, generating deep reflections about the meaning of life in our community.
Academia, in the midst of the years of crisis, had already provided different reflections in the field of social issues. In the field of science, academics continued research processes and the production of new knowledge, and also increased urban development from the faculties of architecture. In its classrooms during the 1980s and 1990s, academic proposals were made concerning models of city occupation, new urban development, the role of the river, the role of the hills in the urban structure, the planning of growth on the river banks, the re-densification of the city’s central area, the study of environmental conditions and urban structuring based on natural components and transport. These topics were subjects of permanent reflection among the academic community, and these ideas and proposals had great social repercussions.
Among the many actors and with the participation of different sectors of the city, other conditions began to be perceived as a result of these reflections. Academia formed permanent-dialogue groups composed of teachers and students who were also part of the policies of the city’s mayoral candidates, who put into practice the theories that were developed and, in their administration, accompanied several of these university professors who were part of these reflections.
A succession of local governments, from different political parties – but with a unity of purpose concerning social welfare and urban development – began to build the city we have today. Although this is unfinished, and some problems persist, hope has been cultivated.
Click here for the third part of our series.
And the first part of our Medellín series can be found here.
Mumbai may only be India’s second city in size, but it is without a doubt the subcontinent’s capital of commerce, glamour, and endless aspirations. In many ways, it resembles New York, although the metropolis once called Bombay is, of course, twice as large. By mid-century, the self-declared Maximum City will swell to some 40 million inhabitants: the largest urban space on earth.
The German journalist and author Michael Braun Alexander wrote an articel about Mumbai for the hundredth edition of the Topos magazine, sharing insights into the life in the city, its infrastructure and development. For the last three-and-a-half years, he has divided his time between Berlin and India, where he has worked as a foreign correspondend for Welt am Sonntag and various other publications. He shows his personal impressions of Mumbai.
You find the whole article “Mumbai” by Michael Alexander Braun in the 100th copy of Topos Magazine!
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On the one hand identification with a landscape, with one’s surroundings, requires a common history, common cultural roots and a similar perception of and interaction with this history. On the other hand it deals with individual memories, stories and experiences. This issue investigates landscape and identity as viewed from a variety of perspectives. It introduces thoughts about a new philosophy of landscape, the search for new identities for urban areas, design interventions on existing sites, the interconnections between literature and landscape, the handling of memories in post-war landscapes and stories of the land in indigenous cultures – to name but a few of the topics in Topos 92.
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Purchase Topos 92 here or subscribe now!
A selection of articles from Topos 92:
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Jerry Van Eyck
Identity is not Imitation
The ability to conjure an emotional connection to the landscape and to a particular experience is the most powerful tool landscape architects have. The ongoing design and construction of a new public realm along the famous Las Vegas strip is establishing a vocabulary that is authentic to Las Vegas.
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Ursula Kellner
Landscape Strengthens History
The Lorsch abbey World heritage site at the foot of the Bergstraße in southern Hesse, Germany, has been given a new conceptual framework that makes the remnants of the complex perceptible again. Local residents have overcome their initial skepticism and the new tourist attraction is now accepted as part of the town.
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Jutta Kehrer
Landscapes of Imagination
Four impressive luxury resorts present different ways towards responsible resort design. Yet, all not only achieve to protect the existing natural environment but to magnify its presence and identity by making each landscape become an essential part of the resorts’ narrative and guest experience.
