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Date: April 29, 2024 Mon
Time: 10:26 pm
Time: 10:26 pm
Results for urban violence (medellín, colombia)
1 results foundAuthor: Samper, Jota (Jose) Title: Urban Resilience in Situations of Chronic Violence Case Study of Medellín, Colombia Summary: The guiding question for this case study on urban resilience in situations of violence is how connections between individuals, communities and the state (Evans 1996) affect conditions for resilience. It is territorially focused on the informal settlements in Medellín, Colombia’s second largest city, where various violence entrepreneurs have produced acts of violence that at times have made the city one of the most dangerous in the world. Non-state as well as state armed actors have enacted violence, but together individuals, communities and the public authorities are coping with fluctuating conditions of insecurity by fostering positive resilience to strengthen communities and foster connections with the state. Together this has contributed to violence reductions, or at least pressures against the actors of violence. The qualitative research for the report is based on semi-structured interviews with community members, state officials, academics and armed and formerlyarmed actors. The author also conducted participant observation in community meetings in two districts of Medellín (Comunas 5 & 6, and Comuna 13) that have negotiated long histories of violence. Out of more than six decades of violence there has emerged a sophisticated group of resilient community organizations that have managed to cope with attacks by both illegal armed actors in their communities and by excessive force on the part of the state. Positive interactions between the state and these community organizations have contributed to the production of innovative resilience strategies and the adaptation of these strategies within a larger institutional scale and framework implemented by the state. The report is divided into four sections. The first provides an overview of the conditions of violence in Medellín. In particular, it focuses on how spatial conditions play a fundamental role in the intensification of insecurity in some parts of the city. It highlights the importance of urban informality—physically and socially—as causal factors in understanding the complexity and multiplicity of armed actors that historically used informal territories as urban battlefields (J. J. Betancur 2007b; Roldán 2003; Samper 2010). The second section presents a short overview of some of the security strategies that the city government has implemented in Medellín. It focuses specifically on two non-traditional security strategies—investments in urban infrastructure, especially in improving access to the informal settlements, and participatory budgeting—which unexpectedly enhanced security externalities. It concentrates on those strategies because they closed the physical and social distance between the informal communities and formal state structures, a distance that for as long as sixty years has been in the form of isolation (Davis 1999). The third and fourth sections are centered on resilience. The third reveals how community efforts to preserve conditions of security are the result of coping strategies with different armed actors (both non-state and state) within the context of complex informal governance structures embedded in informal settlements. These organizations are often extremely fragile, as measured by the constant attacks on the lives of their leaders, but their survival proves their resilience and of how they pose a real (or perceived) menace to illegal armed groups. The fourth section explores how interactions between state security agents and community organizations provide broader scopes of resilience than would be possible if both were working separately. These interactions between community efforts and state interventions point to the fact that in Medellín connections between the state and civil society have produced two crucial outcomes in terms of resilience: (1) they provide the state with a testing ground for new security strategies that can be implemented in the larger metropolitan area, thus extending conditions of resilience throughout the city; and (2) they enhance the power of existing community governance institutions in ways that provide community organizations with the legitimacy to contest the excesses of state-induced violence. Finally, the report concludes with an understanding that these state-community synergies are not static but rather dynamic as they result from the externalities of ongoing programs, with each cycle of community-state interaction producing new and enhanced resilience mechanisms. Details: Cambridge, MA: Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2012. 34p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed December 7, 2012 at: http://www.urcvproject.org/uploads/Medellin_URCV.pdf Year: 2012 Country: Colombia URL: http://www.urcvproject.org/uploads/Medellin_URCV.pdf Shelf Number: 127139 Keywords: Urban AreasUrban ViolenceUrban Violence (Medellín, Colombia)Violent Crime |