Lilac-flowering creepers engulf an abandoned house on a street corner in Medellín, Colombia, spilling from the roof and smothering most of the upstairs windows. A giant fan palm is visible through one opening, while a knotty tangle of aerial roots cascades down to the pavement from another. Step through the doorway of this overgrown ruin, and you find not a scene of desolation and decay but a sleek steel frame holding up the crumbling facade, which forms an unusual entrance to an enchanting new public park.
“We behaved more like archaeologists than landscape architects,” says Edgar Mazo of Connatural, the firm behind the Parque Prado, in the working-class neighbourhood of Aranjuez. He leads me through a series of planted terraces; fountain grasses and trumpet trees sprout from where a derelict car park and abandoned homes once stood. “You dig up the concrete, water gets into the ground, vegetation grows up, and the people come back,” he adds, speaking through a translator. “That’s natural regeneration.”
In recent decades, Medellín has been widely celebrated for its astonishing urban transformation. In the 2000s, it went from being one of the most dangerous cities on the planet, riven by murderous drug cartels, to a case study in the miraculous peace-bringing powers of architecture and landscape. Sergio Fajardo, the son of an architect who served as Medellín’s charismatic mayor from 2004 to 2008, was hailed for sprinkling the city’s poorest neighbourhoods with dazzling new libraries, stadiums and swimming pools.
These determinedly “iconic” projects were enthusiastically feted on the pages of glossy design magazines, and their stories recounted in keynotes at international conferences. Impoverished hillsides were connected to a new metro system with an elegant web of cable cars and outdoor escalators, while parks dotted with expressive architect-designed canopies sprang up across the city. The dramatic fall in crime during Fajardo’s term was largely credited to this vision of “social urbanism”, and the increase in the amount of public space per citizen.
But the Medellín miracle has since lost some of its sparkle. Take the Biblioteca España, one of the flagship projects, designed by Colombian star architect Giancarlo Mazzanti. It stands as a striking cluster of chiselled concrete boulders, rising from the hillside in the formerly no-go barrio of Santo Domingo. But it has been shuttered since 2015, due to structural defects. Or look at the outdoor escalators, which snake their way up the slopes of Comuna 13, one of the most notorious gangland neighbourhoods. Built to improve access for residents of the steep hillside, they have now become an overrun tourist attraction for Pablo Escobar-themed slum tours (which are often run in cahoots with the gangs). With more than 25,000 visitors riding the moving stairs here each week, locals barely have space to use them.
Mazo’s work takes a markedly different approach from the 00s penchant for spectacle. When he was asked to look at the sloping half-hectare site in Aranjuez, which was home to a rundown car park and six boarded-up houses, abandoned for more than a decade, there was an existing plan to raze everything and replace it with a park traversed by a big zigzagging ramp. It looked like a hangover from the earlier lust for shape-making, something that might photograph well from a helicopter.
Instead, Mazo and his team decided to keep most of what was already there. Almost 70% of the material on-site remains, albeit in a new form. Walls and floor slabs were chiselled from the two-storey parking structure, and the rubble used to fill the basements of the houses, with soil packed on top. The buildings’ roof timbers were reclaimed and used to make benches, while the landscape was shaped in such a way that rainwater is retained, meaning that no artificial irrigation is needed. The team even collected seeds from the plants that had sprung up on the plot, so they could be scattered around the new park after the project’s construction – allowing the natural colonisers back in.
The project was built during the pandemic for a cost of just $1.5m (£1.1m), and the lockdowns allowed time for the plants to establish, without the threat of being trampled by visitors. Five years on, the planting has reached a level of maturity that makes this urban oasis seem like it’s always been there – a rare fruition of the Covid-era prophecies of nature reclaiming the city.
The result is a beguiling place, where the sloping topography is mediated not by a great switchback ramp, but by a series of stepped terraces and slopes that form little outdoor rooms. The former car park’s concrete frame makes for an imposing armature at the centre of the park, supporting a raised steel walkway and framing a series of semi-enclosed spaces beneath it. Reclaimed bricks and stacked roof tiles serve as retaining walls, creating a rugged backdrop to lush clumps of grasses and palms. Gabion cages filled with rocks and rubble line water retention ponds, and provide platforms for seating. A sandy clearing down below makes space for ballgames and events, while park-goers can watch the action from the terraced decks above, and enjoy a grandstand view across the sprawling city and its seven hills.
“When people first colonised this valley,” says Mazo, “they used to climb up to the top of the hills to communicate with each other. The park now becomes part of that system, giving people an elevated view to connect with others.”
Crucially, there’s a space for everyone here – from elevated walkways, to quiet shrub-lined reading areas, to seating tucked away from prying eyes. The sense of fragmentation, as well as the level changes, allow different social groups to coexist. On a Tuesday afternoon, most of these different compartments have their own distinct visitors. A student sits cross-legged on a bench by a giant monstera plant, drawing, while a couple canoodle on the deck above him. A solo pensioner takes in the view from the top, enjoying the shade of a kapok tree. Dog-walkers come and go, while a pair of middle-aged guys get stoned in one corner, not very well hidden behind fluffy fronds of purple grass.
Parque Prado was one of the pilot projects of the city’s Plan de Renaturalización, an initiative launched in 2016 to introduce 120 neighbourhood parks (20 of which Mazo was commissioned to design) and 30 green corridors, ripping up asphalt and concrete to improve groundwater infiltration, and planting urban orchards to mitigate the effects of climate crisis. In some areas, temperatures have reduced by as much as 3C, while several species of birds, lizards and frogs have returned, which hadn’t been seen in the city for decades. There have been harder-to-measure social impacts, too.
“Some local residents were initially worried about the park,” says Mazo. “The area had become known for drug addicts and prostitution, and they thought it would only make things worse.” The opposite has happened. By creating space for different walks of life to mingle, “people are mixing here without any problems”, he says. “Some people assume that a completely flat, open surface with no vegetation means you can have more surveillance,” he adds. “But if you have different shapes, levels and conditions, people can identify with the space, feel more comfortable and take care.”
Local residents have taken such ownership over the park that they voluntarily clean it up and have started doing some guerrilla gardening – planting seeds for the space to take on a life of its own.
