Medellín, Colombia used to be the murder capital of the world. With the explosion of the global drug trade in the 1980s, crime burgeoned, plunging the city into a state of lawlessness. Slum communities, stacked up along the perilous slopes of the surrounding Aburrá Valley, were on the front lines of the violence and mayhem.But today, Medellín is transformed.
Pinky Sonawane spent her childhood gathering garbage on the streets of Pune, India. She’d join her mother in pulling plastic bottles, cans, and cardboard from roadside dumpsters, selling the materials to scrap traders for income. With no organized waste-collection system in the city of 4 million people, there was plenty of waste for her to pick—it filled bins, littered streets and piled up in mountainous heaps in dumps. But Sonawane and others like her were often treated like the garbage they collected.
The story of how Warwick Junction bucked the global trend of replacing informal markets with malls and shopping centers is a testament to the compromise, conflict, and resourcefulness of a small set of actors – informal workers, local officials and the small non-profit Asiye eTafuleni (Zulu for “bring it to the table”). It is a story of social healing and the enduring contradictions of a modern African city.
The WRI Ross Prize for Cities aims to spotlight exemplary real-world examples of urban transformation to help inspire better cities for all. Nearly 200 projects around the globe submitted applications for the inaugural $250,000 prize.
