Hip-hop schools and graffiti art saved Medellin. Can they do the same for Paris?

Pedro_P

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Urban planner Daniel Carvalho says embracing youth culture can transform France’s poorest suburbs.

At the Paris Beaches, children learn circus skills with the STREB Extreme Action company for the Châtelet theatre reopening parade.
▼ In the hilly streets of Medellín’s Comuna 13, once ranked the most dangerous district in one of the most dangerous cities in the world, 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 guns and knives of the notorious drug gangs who held Medellín in their clutches for decades, but art and culture.
Today Carvalho, now a Medellín 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 Medellín had been persuaded to use their talents to turn their city around.
“Thirty years ago, Medellín was the most violent, the most dangerous city in the world. Nobody wanted to go there, not even Colombians,” Carvalho told theObserver. “Today the city attracts tourists and Colombians.
“We discovered you can really change people’s lives with culture. Not by giving them culture, but by getting them involved in it. We don’t stage a concert, we give people the tools to stage their own.”

Daniel Carvalho grew up in Medellin when it was under the yoke of drugs cartel lord Pablo Escobar. Photograph: Kim Willsher/The Observer
Growing up in Medellín, which spent two decades under the yoke of the largest cocaine cartel in history run by the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, Carvalho has described Comuna 13 as a terrifying place. “There were murders all the time. The police didn’t come here, they just couldn’t … it started to change when we opened the doors to community participation and artists started to understand they have a role in the city,” he told a television documentary.
Among the projects Carvalho oversaw was allowing graffiti artists to decorate the 385 metres of covered escalators, part of a regeneration  programmegiving Comuna 13 residents easier access to their hillside homes.
“Today local youngsters do graffiti tours. They not only have a fierce pride in their district, but  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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Jack Sparrow

Medellin has had a difficult history.

warlikeprince

I am shocked to learn that in Paris there was dangerous area which was out of bounds for most tourist. But this architect is really Angel for them. If not for increasing state of livelihood for them he surely increase fun in their lives...