Medellin Colombia has moved from being the home of cocaine cartels to being the South American Bilboa. The current mayor, Sergio Fajardo has gone on a building boom to revitalize the city and bring needed services and schools to the underserved barrios.

NYtimes





From libraries and schools, to aerial cable cars, these public buildings are cutting edge architecture with a social mission.

The pièce de résistance of Mr. Fajardo’s strategy sits on a hill in Santo Domingo Savio, a sprawling slum that is home to 170,000 people. Visitors take the metro from downtown then connect to a new cable car system that swiftly transports them up into Santo Domingo. From there, they walk through hard-edged streets until reaching the Parque Biblioteca España, designed by Giancarlo Mazzanti. There, rising from cinderblock hovels, is a hulking rectangular structure that looks not unlike some medieval citadel and includes a library, auditorium, Internet rooms, day care center and an art gallery.


But not everybody is happy, “Fajardo is our pharaoh,” said Jaime Alonso Carvajal, a member of the Environmental Collective, a group that led raucous protests over the mayor’s decision to build pastel-colored pyramids along the median of a major avenue at a cost of nearly $500,000. “He is cementing over Medellín to turn us into a dust bowl.”