Colourful Cities of Colombia: Cats, Carnival, and Curuba

by Joyati Das & Rewa Marathe

Last week we, the Evidence to Action project team from the Melbourne Centre of Cities, arrived back in Melbourne, Australia after a whirlwind trip across four Colombian cities in 12 days. The purpose of the trip was to visit Fondation Botnar’s implementing partners and learn about their project approaches, unique contextual challenges, and opportunities to progress youth-focused activities and processes set up to build evidence of impact. While still recovering from our 40-hour-long transpacific trip back to the Southern Hemisphere, we write this reflection to document our experiences in this amazing country of contrasts. During our time in Colombia, we had the privilege of witnessing the vibrant life and culture in the capital city of Bogota, visiting a community school in La Playa and redeveloped waterfront by the Magdalena River in Barranquilla, spending time in the troubled neighbourhood of Potrero Grande in Cali, and being hosted by the mayor’s office in Palmira. In Bogota, we were afforded a brief window into the city during our walks between the hotel and our various venues where we met with several partners for briefings ahead of the rest of our travels. We observed the people and places: cafés with young and old, all engaged in vibrant conversations over coffee and curuba juice with a “can do” attitude; the entrepreneurial energy of the young people; the bus rapid transit and beautiful architecture; the frustrations with the slow progress in the national peace process; and yet the positive energy in the air of a nation on the go.

Our first briefing was with Fundación Corona, a family foundation with an extensive network of allies at the local and national level, who are leading the design, monitoring, and evaluation process for Fondation Botnar’s Nuestra Barranquilla initiative. They emphasised the need for flexibility and adaptability in a country that is going through rapid political and social change. We also met with Despacio and World Resources Institute (WRI) Colombia, who are implementing partners for the Healthy Cities for Adolescents (HCA) Phase II project in Cali and Palmira, to be briefed ahead of our field visit. We wrapped up our time in Bogota with a visit to the UN-Habitat Andean Countries HUB to meet with the implementing team for the Youth Game Changer Initiative in Armenia, an intermediary city in Colombia. As the home for the work on localisation of SDG goals in the region, UN-Habitat enables local action with city stakeholders, especially with local governments. We also met with advisors to select Colombian initiatives, Diseño Público, who shared their vision of these city-wide partnerships and national-level collaboration of multi-sectoral alliances as ground-breaking for youth transformation in Colombia.

Our field visit started with Barranquilla as we travelled with Fundación Corona to visit Nuestra Barranquilla. The city is famous for one of the world’s biggest carnival celebrations and is the birthplace of musical superstar Shakira. As we travelled through the city with our partners we saw the vibrant shades of its Atlántico culture in its colourful street art, music, dance, and food. We started our day with, what we thought was a briefing involving a small group of partners, but soon it transformed into a gathering of more than 20 representatives that continued to stream into the room over time, from different organisations within the city, including universities and the government’s education department. These partners we met identified themselves as proud Barranquilleros, residents of a city that was never colonised and was instead "founded by cows". The conversation in the room was led by youth leaders who shared a common vision and worked with each other to cultivate trusted relationships brokered by Fundación Corona through Nuestra Barranquilla. They exhibited a spirit of collective ownership as development actors critical for building a consortium for city-wide mobilisation for youth wellbeing.

Inspired by the collaborative spirit of the Barranquilleros, we travelled back inland to Cali, a city with a great affinity for cats, real and bronze. Here we met with Despacio and WRI Colombia to visit the HCA Phase II project; both organisations use tactical urbanism to promote urban development. Despacio has been working in this city implementing strategies and interventions to promote Healthy Cities for Adolescents since 2019. We travelled to Potrero Grande where we visited a local community park and its surrounding area. Here Despacio is employing tactical urbanism interventions, using art to transform the public spaces in collaboration with the local residents. In Valle de Cauca we witnessed the evidence of the success of Despacio’s earlier intervention from HCA Phase I involving a similar tactical urbanism approach. Behind Colegio Nuevo Latir, across the Cauca River is the Puente de Colores, a derelict bridge that acted as an invisible line of danger across Valle de Cauca. Despacio worked with the local community leaders to transform the bridge equipping it with planters, paint, and patience. The bridge we walked across was a warm welcoming space dotted with benches, connected with free WIFI, and frequented by community residents and school children attending Colegio Nuevo Latir. The other remarkable change was in the young community members who now serve as social leaders, having left a dangerous life behind to shoulder the responsibility of the change they want to see in their neighbourhood. The evidence of this change in people and places, brokered by Despacio and its team demonstrates that one needs patience, and local knowledge to lead interventions bringing everyone along to ensure the inclusion of diverse voices, creating spaces for those who are often “left behind”.

Next, we drove to Palmira, a city that offered a contrast to Cali being led by their energetic young mayor and his wife, the first lady. They welcomed us to the city and showcased their innovative and consistent efforts at creating small changes over the last four years during their tenure in the city government through the Pazos project. Pazos is a peace and opportunities Strategy for Social Prevention of Violence – a strategic initiative led by the Mayor. This comprehensive approach to violence prevention focused on working with youth earned the city the UCLG Peace Prize in 2022 during the UCLG World Congress in Daejeon, Korea. As part of this initiative, we once again saw planters and paints being deployed as tactical urbanism interventions to revitalise the public space outside a local sports centre to create a bike lane in partnership with Despacio.

After nearly missing our flight out of Palmira at the end of a hectic day, we reached another Andean city, this time Medellin, the city of eternal spring. We met with Fundación MiSangre and Universidad EAFIT, partners for the Safe and Sound Cities (S2Cities) Program. We were invited to spend time at a capacity-building workshop for young people in the city of Envigado outside Medellin. The workshop was organised for youth leaders who are developing and implementing projects in their own communities supported by Fundación MiSangre with micro-grants under the S2Cities Program. The reflections we heard from the young participants during the workshop affirmed our envisioned approach for the systematic evidence-building process as laid out in the E2A implementation guidelines. The next day we visited Universidad EAFIT to meet with the team who are making sense of these and other similar reflections to map change created through the implementation of the S2Cities program. Partners such as Fundación MiSangre and Universidad EAFIT are building capacity for establishing a participatory evidence-building process to document the change being created in the city.

Colombia is a large and complex country with diverse issues. It has a number of intermediary cities that are home to innovative ideas, creative spirit, and political will that are essential for creating urban change. These cities need to be a focus of investments for sustainable urbanisation as is recommended in the New Urban Agenda. Investments in these cities should include building capacity across projects to produce evidence and leverage knowledge to advocate for the change that the local communities want to see in their spaces. If Sustainable Development Goal 11 “make cities inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable” is to be realised at the local level, employing a custom approach to urban development interventions in each context is critical. Projects need to be fit for context, inclusive and equitable, practical, and innovative, creating enabling environments that foster shared learning across the diverse city stakeholders to develop a collective vision for the city. The Evidence to Action Framework is designed to enable this contextualisation through a participatory process and it is currently being applied across Fondation Botnar’s cities portfolio worldwide.

We thank our partners for inviting us into their spaces, for hosting us, and for sharing their time and their stories. We thank Fondation Botnar for our ongoing partnership in this E2A journey from local to global.