Urban planner Daniel Carvalho says embracing youth culture can transform Frances poorest suburbs
In the hilly streets of Medellin's Comuna 13, once ranked the most dangerous district in one of the most dangerous cities in the world countries, Daniel Carvalho is a local hero.
The urban planner is credited with helping to transform the poor neighbourhood on the western slopes of Colombia's one-time drug and crime capital from no-go badlands into a tourist attraction.
His weapons? Not the firearms and knives of the notorious drug gangs who held Medellin in their clutches for decades, but art and culture.
Today Carvalho , now a Medellin councillor, is turning his attention to another city- one that is no stranger to art or culture but which has suburbs that are afflicted by crime and exclusion among their disaffected youth: Paris.
In a meeting with city officials last week, Carvalho explained how young people in Medellin had been persuaded to use their talents to turn their city around.
” Thirty years ago, Medellin was the most violent, the most dangerous city in the world. Nobody wanted to go there , not even Colombians ,” Carvalho told the Observer .” Today the city attracts tourists and Colombians.
” We detected you can really change people's lives with culture. Not by devoting them culture, but by getting them involved in it. We don't stage a concert, we give people the tools to stage their own .”
Growing up in Medellin, which spend two decades under the yoke of the largest cocaine cartel in history run by the notorious narcotic lord Pablo Escobar, Carvalho has described Comuna 13 as a terrifying place.” There were slayings all the time. The police didn't come here, they just couldn't … it started to change when we opened the doors to community involvement and artists started to understand they have a role in the city ,” he told a television documentary.
Among the projects Carvalho supervise was allowing graffiti artists to decorate the 385 metres of covered escalators, part of a regeneration programme giving Comuna 13 residents easier access to their hillside homes.
” Today local children do graffiti tours. They not only have a fierce pride in their district, but it enables them to earn money. Before they were denounced to be at the service of the drug lords, because there was nothing else for them to do. Now there is. The alteration is enormous ,” he said.
Medellin's youth are also being given access to music lessons and instruments and encouraged to set up hip-hop ” schools” where the older ones teach their juniors, he said.
” At first the idea was that if they had an instrument in their hands they wouldn't be holding a handgun, but we've discovered so much talent. Now they play music instead of sitting at home drinking, smoking or taking drugs .”
The Paris meeting was organised by Ruth Mackenzie, artistic director of the Chatelet Theatre and a passionate proponent of culture for all.
British-born Mackenzie has been inducing waves at the historic Chatelet, previously known as Broadway-sur-Seine for its penchant for American musicals, which opens in September after a two-year renovation with what she describes as “activist” ambitions.
One of its first displays will be a rap music adaptation of Albert Camus' Les Justes – a play set in Moscow about a socialist revolutionary plot to murder a despotic governor- by the French rapper and director Abd al Malik, who has been writing the script with children from some of Paris's poorest areas. In the suburbium of Aulnay-sous-Bois, where a series of national riots started in 2005 highlighting social tensions in the French banlieues, other youngsters are learning circus skills for another Chatelet show.
Mackenzie and Carvalho say Paris is not Medellin, but lessons can be learned.” We know from experience that the arts can help those in prison, in social services, in the prevention of radicalisation, and communities dealing with vandalism and crime ,” Mackenzie said.
The Paris deputy mayor responsible for culture policy, Christophe Girard, who has met Carvalho, agreed.” Daniel is extremely interesting, articulate and profound ,” Girard told the Observer .” His presentation was formidable.
” We should definitely have links between our cities and joint projects. We know how important art and culture are; every single time we open a culture place in a district where there isn't one, it totally alters that district. It enables people to meet, to talk, to sing, dance … to dream .”
Mackenzie says what impressed officials most was when Carvalho uncovered a graph showing how since engaging local communities, murder rates in Medellin had plummeted to a low of 496 in 2015( though last year the number rose 7.6% to 626 homicides, many in Comuna 13 ).
” Our artists aren't police officer and we're not going to work miracles, plus Paris is not Medellin, but the values we're instilling through the arts, like respect, engagement, listening to others are really important ,” Mackenzie said.
” I watch these children learning circus tricks and they may not end up working as acrobats, in fact they probably won't, but they are learning important life skills that will help them … plus it's fun .”
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