Abstract

SERNA, Yurany Andrea. Urban renewal and right to the city: discourses and actors around the renewal of public space in the historic center of Medellin. Rev. Arquit. (Bogotá) [online]. 2022, vol.24, n.2, pp.37-49.  Epub Nov 24, 2022. ISSN 1657-0308.  https://doi.org/10.14718/revarq.2022.24.3858.

This article approaches the problem of urban renewal and its impact on the right to the city in the absence of comprehensive interventions that contribute to the solution of structural problems. The main objective is to analyze the actors and discourses that are activated around the renovations of public space in the historic center of Medellin, their motivations, and their impact in the right to the city. For this purpose, a bibliograph review is made at European, Latin American and national levels, which is triangulated with the information gathered through the ethnographic method and the Critical Theory for the discourse analysis. The findings evidence how renovation activates discourses and tensions that do not affect decisions on city planning, but do influence technical decisions on public space, thus affecting relations in the social space, given that the interests of citizens with a better quality of life are included, excluding marginalized sectors. This inclusion is linked to the capacity for participation, where the vulnerable population does not express itself with the same efficiency and does not expose its own interests due to the lack of recognition of citizen participation mechanisms. Additionally, there is evidence of the expectation of real estate development favored by renovation, as a response to the global practices in which the city is inserted, object of world economic consolidation. Thus, the inhabitants who have resisted precariously in the historic center of Medellin, supporting themselves through informal, even illegal practices, endure the social rejection of the upper classes and some features of gentrification as a strategy for the globalization of culture.

Keywords : culture; discourses; globalization; social exclusion; urban space.

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