THE MEDELLÍN MIRACLE
THINK OF A GONDOLA SUSPENDED UNDER A cable, floating high off the ground as it hauls a cabin full of passengers up a long, steep mountain slope. To most people, the image would suggest ski resorts and pricey vacations. To the people who live in the poor mountainside communities once known as favelas at the edges of Medellín, Colombia, the gondola system is a lifeline, and a powerful symbol of an extraordinary urban transformation led by technology and data.
The technology that helped save Medellín is not what you’d see in San Francisco, Boston or Singapore—fleets of driverless cars, big tech companies and artificial intelligence. It is about gathering data to make informed decisions on how to deploy technology where it has the most impact. And it is about establishing a constituency for change that transcends wealth and class. When experts get together to discuss the path to smarter cities, Medellín often comes up as a standard against which any city’s vision for transformation should be measured—including the judges of Newsweek’s Momentum Awards (see page 30).
Where most smart-city initiatives are of, by and, to a large extent, for the already tech-savvy and well-resourced segment of the population, Medellín’s transformation has for the most part been focused on people who have the least. “Smart-city efforts tend to be centrally planned, with change driven by tech companies,” says Soledad Garcia-Ferrari, an urban development researcher at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh who has studied smart cities around the world. “Medellín looked for initiatives that are inclusive of every facet of society,
