Mayor, Sergio Fajardo, beautify grassroots
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
An article that we can pass. It was published by Simon Romero on 15 July at the New York Times on the urban projects of the mayor of Medellin, Sergio Fajardo. Is it possible that social expenditure invested in the poorest areas gives better results? Investing in the poor not only increasingly shows Colombia, but each time is more urgent and necessary. Fajardo was 40% investment in education and the results are not left waiting. It is not just to increase manpower, but to increase the foot of the real presence of the state where nobody went before. 
By: Simon Romero July 15, 2007 - Translation of Al Rodas
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, July 15, 2007. ROMERO, Simon. Colombian mayor, Sergio Fajardo, beautify the Shanty-town. Translation of Al Rodas, Colombia Passport: Economics, Society and Culture. MedellinInfo .
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-Posted by MedellínInfo - Photos bcrp77 .
- Dressed in jeans and shirt, three-day beard and tousled hair sport almost to his shoulders, Sergio Fajardo looks every inch of himself to the nonconformist mathematician who spent years taking a doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. But that's past life for Mr. Fajardo, the mayor of this city and the son of one of the most famous architects. Now he insists on an unconventional political philosophy that has returned to Medellin in a shaft of architectural creation.
"Our most beautiful buildings," said Mr. Fajardo, 51 years old "should be in the poorest areas.
bcrp77 With this simple idea, Mr. Fajardo hired renowned architects to design luxury assembled libraries and other public buildings in the more marginal parts of the city. Their eccentric shapes - one resembles an immense blackened loaf of bread cut in half - occupy areas where hundreds of players before fighters were killed in Colombia's war on cocaine for years. Years ago, residents say, a tenuous peace was imposed by paramilitary drug traffickers rather defeated their Ribal.
Now
Medellín is no longer stigmatized as one of the most violent cities in the world.
This city of nearly two million people had 29 homicides per 100 thousand inhabitants in 2006, a huge difference when compared to the 381 homicides in 1991 in a population of 100 thousand people.
Elected in 2003 as an independent and leading a growing economy and a significant decline in violent crime, Mr. Fajardo turned the city into a model for the new education and development.
Medellín, a contrast between the urban and the Andes. Photo bcrp77 
. Increased public spending in the city in education by putting 40% of the annual budget of Medellin that is U.S. $ 900 million, while it also has increased spending on public transport projects and loans small business development. Five new libraries are central to social policy, but Mr. Fajardo is also building a science center and dozens of schools, while expanding public transportation by building up neighborhoods metrocable popular in the hills of the city. He argues that the poor will develop the skills necessary to compete through investment in education and creating new public spaces, reflecting a faith in architecture in order to achieve the goal.
"Fajardo holds a long commitment to putting the state presence in areas that for years were ignored," says Aldo Civico, who directs the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University and has largely devoted to the topic of violence in Medellín. "You have to start a process of transformation somewhere."
Many parts of Medellín remain far from idyllic. Police officers with assault weapons and wearing fatigues still patrol many parts of the city. In the center, just steps from the elegant plaza filled with voluptuous sculptures by another native son of the city, Fernando Botero, street children are doped with glue and dose of cocaine. Some in Medellín whisper that Diego Fernando Murillo, the paramilitary leader known as Don Berna, still controls much of the city from his prison cell in the nearby city of Itagui. Others say drug profits in the boom wash building and construct apartments and shopping accompanying commercial architectural reconstruction of the mayor.
However, the transformation of Mr. Fajardo Medellín has captivated the city and, by implication, other parts of Colombia. His popularity is at 80%, making it the most popular mayor in the country and makes it potentially as a presidential candidate at the end of the mandate of this year.
"Performs a redistribution of wealth without a speech sophist," says Hector Abad Faciolince, a prominent novelist and national political commentator. "If Medellín can not take this challenge, then What will happen? "
comes from the department of Antioquia, whose capital is Medellín. He and Mr. Fajardo were educated in the city by the Benedictine monks. But Mr. Fajardo has a rigid separation of the conservative policies of Mr. Uribe, the closest ally of the Bush administration in South America.
Mr. Fajardo, however, favors a debate over legalizing drugs, a rather unconventional position in a nation that leads the world export of cocaine. A personal decision like going to live with his companion, Lucrecia Ramírez (near the home of the Archbishop of Medellin), has brought harsh criticism from leaders of the Catholic Church.
Ms. Ramírez is a psychiatrist who prefers the title of "first woman" to "first lady" and leads an effort by possessions models fashion events Medellín. She also challenged beauty pageants with alternative contests that reward knowledge of science, literature and business.
Not everyone in Medellín, which despite of his history of drug trafficking is considered one of the most culturally traditionalist Colombia, agrees with the projects carried out by either Ms. Ramírez or Mr. Fajardo. Old villas and trees are down and critics say the new marketing is like Miami or Caracas.
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Some point to his taste for expensive public works seem massive pyramids or cubes of abstraction.
"Fajardo is our pharaoh," said Jaime Alonso Carvajal, a member of the Environmental Collective, a group that led protests against the tough mayor's decision to build pastel-colored pyramids along a major avenues that cost about $ 500 thousand. "cementing is to Medellin to turn it into a fucking dust."
Mr. Fajardo says he welcomes such protests, viewing them as part of the creation of the city where people can discuss everything that has to do with their economic circumstances. "It's a breakthrough for our society that people feel safe enough to express anything about me in any part of this city," he said during an interview as he walked through the center of Medellin. "And as to the forms - he says - I'm still a mathematician. I love geometric forms. "
Spain through the lens of bcrp77 
. 's masterpiece of Mr. Fajardo's strategy lies in the foothills of Santo Domingo Savio, a popular sector in which they live 170 000 people. Visitors take the metro from downtown then connect to metrocable that leads to Santo Domingo. From there walk on steep roads up to the Spain Library Park designed by Giancarlo Mazzanti. There, boosted by gray brick blocks, a rectangular structure that looks like the ruins of a medieval citadel and includes a library, auditorium, Internet rooms, day care center and art gallery.
This is surprising to those who live in different ways in its shadow. Yasmin Henao, a lady of 30 who lives with her husband and three children in a timber tuburio, said he has doubts enter. "I saw guards at the entrance," said Ms. Henao in an interview at his home. "I do not know if this is a place for me."
Nearby, Jaime Quizeno, a mechanic, offered another perspective when the evening starts to fall into the hillside. "It seems like a huge nuve when illuminated at night," says 63-year Quizeno a smile.
"A beautiful thing, right here among us"
Bibliography
, July 15, 2007. ROMERO, Simon. Colombian mayor, Sergio Fajardo, beautify the Shanty-town. Translation of Al Rodas, Colombia Passport: Economics, Society and Culture. MedellinInfo .
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