Dealing with Dangerous Spaces The Construction of Urban Policy in Medellin

In Latin America, cities with security challenges are increasingly invoking urban planning policy to rebuild governance in neighborhoods perceived as unruly. While the state's "arrival" in marginalized areas is long overdue, it is also embedded in complex histories of violence and socio-spatial marginalization. Medellin's Comuna 13 has historically been materially and discursively constructed as a space of relegation. Interview and focus group data show how policy cycles for Comuna 13 evolved from discretionary programs (1978-2002) to securitization and (para) militarization (2000-2003) and then social urbanism, a program of participatory urban upgrading (2004-2011). The latter, a reformist approach, aims to provide better services, foster participation, and reduce socio-spatial segregation. Underlying these positive aims, however, two contradictions remain concealed: deep-seated inequality resulting from decades of normalized exclusion and the perpetuation of a regime of hypersecuritization and (para) policing that recreates itself under new governance and spatial arrangements.