The unbearable resilience of Medellín: Violent recovery and contested representations of (post-)conflict

Introduction

Twenty-five years ago, Medellín, Colombia’s second-largest city, endured an intense urban conflict from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Marginalized territories known as the comunas were hardest hit, and the Comuna 13 in the western part of the city was among the most severely affected. Today, like many other peripheral districts, this area remains a contested territory. Extortion, forced displacement, and occasional killings continue to shape the everyday lives of its residents, who navigate spaces under the influence of both state and non-state actors—a phenomenon now widely described as “criminal governance” (Arias, 2017; Lessing, 2021).

That said, the experience of the millions of visitors who now flow each year through the Comuna 13 differs markedly from these dynamics. What they encounter are busy streets lined with art shops and restaurants, a cable car linking the hillside to a modern metro station, and a brand-new multimedia library. Their gaze is drawn to the colorful rooftops and the vibrant street art that covers many walls, while a state-of-the-art outdoor escalator carries them up the steep slopes, where municipal stewards greet questions with a smile. Yet beneath this polished image, tourist numbers have grown so dramatically that concerns about overtourism have already entered municipal and community debates, adding another layer of tension to the neighborhood’s post-conflict trajectory. The situation is also critical, with local gangs shrewdly integrating into the flourishing tourist economy, primarily through the systematic extortion of guides, street artists, and craft vendors, while also profiting from parallel economies of drugs and prostitution (Naef, 2023).

This tourist space, however, is confined to a small section of the district—limited to the barrios of La Independencia and 20 de Julio, clustered around the modern escalator popularly known as Las Escaleras. Built to improve residents’ mobility in these hilly neighborhoods, Las Escaleras soon became a flagship landmark in an intense city-branding campaign presenting Medellín’s transformation from the world’s murder capital into a hub of innovation. Yet, notwithstanding celebratory narratives of recovery, the area around Las Escaleras differs significantly from the other barrios that make up the Comuna 13. In this sense, Amin and Graham’s (1997) metaphor of a “synecdoche” aptly captures how this fragment of the district is mobilized to represent the entire city, producing a carefully curated postcard of successful post-conflict recovery. As a hypervisible island of exception, Las Escaleras and its surroundings concentrate social investments and urban innovations, alongside numerous support organizations and advocacy groups. The place, and by extension the Comuna 13, quickly became a symbol of resilience, relentlessly deployed as a showcase for tourism and innovative urban planning. The Comuna 13 thus illustrates the ambivalent trajectory of Medellín’s recovery: on the one hand, international tourism, social investments, and civic life flourish; on the other, dozens of criminal groups continue to rule. Crucially, these two sides of the mirror do not operate in isolation. Crime and development, conflict and urbanism, are deeply entangled in Medellín’s contested transformation.

From urban conflict to social urbanism

From the late 1980s onward, the Comuna 13 emerged as a strategic stronghold within Colombia’s armed conflict, hosting urban militias affiliated with guerrilla organizations such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP), the National Liberation Army (ELN), and the Comandos Armados del Pueblo (CAP). Between 2001 and 2003, a series of large-scale military operations sought to expel these insurgent groups, most notably Operación Mariscal (May 21, 2002) and Operación Orión (October 16–18, 2002), both of which drew strong criticism from human rights organizations for civilian casualties and alleged collusion between state forces and paramilitary actors. In the aftermath, territorial control largely shifted to paramilitary groups, including the Bloque Cacique Nutibara (BCN), one of the urban fronts of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). These interventions reduced homicides and expanded state presence but also caused civilian deaths, left traumatic memories, and reshaped patterns of violence, generating a reconfiguration rather than an end to armed governance in the area. This led to a contested demobilization: many paramilitaries briefly disarmed before returning to organized crime (Baird, 2018; Civico, 2016).

While the demobilization contributed to declining homicide rates, others also attribute the decrease to Sergio Fajardo’s 2004 mayoral election and subsequent political reforms. A mathematician by training, Fajardo presented himself as an independent centrist, distancing his administration from the dominant Liberal and Conservative parties and promoting a style of governance defined by pragmatism and technocratic expertise. His administration launched a program labeled “social urbanism,” which played a central role in rebranding Medellín as a model of urban transformation (Echeverri Restrepo and Orsini, 2010; MacLean, 2015). From 2004 onwards, after decades of violence, Medellín drew global attention for its experiments in social innovation. In a nutshell, social urbanism sought to address inequality and violence through major investments in mobility, culture, sport, security, public space, and education in the city’s most deprived areas. Alongside Las Escaleras, iconic projects such as the Metrocable (an urban gondola system) and the Parques Biblioteca (state-of-the-art multimedia libraries) rebranded Medellín and attracted international acclaim. Beyond these flagship infrastructures, social urbanism combined targeted territorial investment with a security rationale aimed at reintegrating historically marginalized neighborhoods into the formal city. It sought to address inequality through spatial transformation and symbolic re-signification, operating simultaneously as a social policy, an urban design strategy, and a city-branding project.

The poster child

In 2013, Medellín was named the “World’s Most Innovative City” by the Urban Land Institute, subsequently garnering dozens of urban design awards and hosting the World Urban Forum in 2014. At that stage, Medellín’s experiment in urban transformation was increasingly framed as a benchmark of effective governance, often cited as an inspirational reference for other cities in the South navigating violence. Capitalizing on this global recognition, local government together with private stakeholders amplified their efforts to reshape the city’s reputation beyond its violent past. What came to be celebrated as the “Medellín Miracle” rested largely on the belief that the city had succeeded in transcending decades of armed conflict, a transformation attributed above all to its ambitious architectural and infrastructural interventions (MacLean, 2015). Critics have challenged this celebratory narrative, noting how it was often reduced to an overly simplified formula in policy debates and journalistic accounts. Scholars argue that Medellín’s transformation was grounded in forms of spectacular urbanism—high-profile architecture, emblematic projects, and globally promoted events—that enhanced the city’s international visibility but often undermined aspirations of equity and inclusion. For Betancur and Brand (2023), this amounted to only a “half-miracle”: it consolidated Medellín’s insertion into global markets while failing to deliver on promises of social justice. Hylton (2007) has been among the most forceful critics, interpreting the model as inseparable from the logics of narco-capitalism and exposing the continuities between the city’s celebrated renewal and its violent political economy.

Visions of Medellín’s transformation as an inevitable outcome of neoliberal globalization, shaped by narco-entrepreneurship, certainly hold validity; yet, as Colak and Pearce (2015) rightly observe, they require more empirical investigation. Accordingly, the limited impact of social urbanism in the comunas also calls for deeper research, so as to avoid either portraying an idealized narrative of transformation or, conversely, reducing it to a purely cynical account of spectacular narco-urbanism, where the drug economy is seen as the primary driver of urban transformation. My fieldwork revealed, in contrast, a spectrum of local responses. Some residents celebrated the revitalization of their barrios as evidence of long-awaited recognition, while others highlighted the dissonance between spectacular infrastructures and the lived realities of their communities. I personally witnessed brand-new libraries and modern sports facilities standing nearly empty—yet I also observed others brimming with activity and generating a strong sense of pride among local inhabitants. Some projects, however, never saw the light of day or were poorly executed: initiatives were abandoned from one administration to the next, or hastily completed so that the incumbent mayor could reap the honors. In some respects, the uneven geography of social urbanism interventions—at times fostering inclusion and pride, at other times reinforcing marginalization and discontent—reflects the profound inequalities that continue to shape Colombia’s second city.

That said, despite ongoing debates regarding its actual impact, social urbanism laid the groundwork for Medellín’s integration into a range of international development initiatives. This was especially evident within resilience-oriented networks, where concerns over violence gained increasing prominence. Globally, so-called “resilient cities” that had initially prioritized environmental challenges began extending resilience frameworks to encompass social issues such as crime, inequality, and poverty. Within this shift, institutions like the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies advanced the notion of making societies resilient to violence. As a result, peacebuilding and violence prevention gradually evolved alongside domains such as climate change, energy systems, and transportation, moving resilience beyond engineering perspectives toward socially oriented approaches.

Within these emerging frameworks, Medellín became a poster child for the incorporation of urban violence into the governance of resilient cities, a narrative quickly folded into city-branding strategies. It rested, on the one hand, on social urbanism, which suggested that infrastructure projects had played a direct role in reducing violence, and on the other, on the claim that the resilience of Medellín’s marginalized communities—often articulated through art and cultural practices—had enabled them to endure decades of crime and drug trafficking. A pivotal milestone came in 2016, when Medellín was admitted to 100 Resilient Cities (100RC), the international network launched by the Rockefeller Foundation. The 100RC program embraced a broad definition of resilience, spanning shocks (such as floods or heat waves) as well as chronic stresses (including chronic violence or unemployment). In its application, which emphasized the city’s recovery from long-standing violence, the municipality underscored the significance of social approaches to resilience planning. The comunas were given particular attention, portrayed as places where residents had managed to adapt and, in some cases, flourish despite entrenched poverty and insecurity.

In what follows, I draw on the operational and theoretical repertoire of the resilient city, specifically examining how marginalized urban populations experience, appropriate, or resist this concept amid violence and crime. Building on recent research on the interplay between violence and resilience, I explore their responses to urban praxis informed by resilience and grounded in the paradigm of social urbanism. While a significant body of work has revealed the pitfalls and challenges of programs like 100RC (Fastiggi et al., 2020; Roberts et al., 2020; Naef, 2022), very limited research has paid attention to the lived realities of communities positioned at the center of these initiatives. This article seeks to fill this gap by developing a twofold framework. First, I consider the resilience of violence through a blend of theoretical and empirical insights in order to expose some of the epistemological tensions inherent in mobilizing a concept like resilience to address urban violence. Second, I highlight the resistances the concept of resilience itself can generate. In unpacking what I term the violence of resilience, I contrast community narratives with representations widely promoted in urban discourses, city marketing, and tourism.

The analysis draws on fieldwork conducted in Medellín between 2014 and 2023, during nine research visits lasting between several weeks and two months. It is based on 156 interviews with municipal officials, resilience and urban practitioners, community leaders, business owners, tour guides, and residents of different ages and social positions. While the article engages broader historical processes, its empirical focus lies on how resilience has been mobilized and contested in the post-2010 period, including but not limited to Medellín’s participation in the 100RC initiative. This period was pivotal for the city’s urban recovery, unfolding in the aftermath of a decade shaped by state-led armed operations, the reintegration of former combatants, and the reconfiguration of governance arrangements associated with Colombia’s postwar transition. In this context, the very term “post-conflict” remains contested, given the transformation rather than disappearance of criminal organizations and the sustained entrenchment of violent orders. For this reason, some scholars prefer to speak of a “post-agreement” period, referring to the peace accords between the FARC-EP and the Colombian state (González and Álvarez Palma, 2018; Guilland and Naef, 2019). The analysis that follows aligns with this perspective, showing how, despite intense urban recovery efforts, violence continues to shape many of Colombia’s urban margins. Therefore, while I retain the designation of “post-conflict” for analytical clarity, I stay attentive to the continuities and reconfigurations of violence that unsettle the term itself.

Violence and resilience

About 15 years ago, resilience emerged as a central paradigm in peacebuilding and security policies, drawing on the theoretical foundations it had already established in environmental and disaster studies. In that field, resilience was understood as the capacity of systems to withstand, adapt to, and recover from external hazards or shocks, either by returning to a state of stable equilibrium or by establishing a new one. Meanwhile, scholars in urban studies were investigating how resilience unfolds in cities, coining the category of the “resilient city” (Vale and Campanella, 2005). Research on chronic violence built on these frameworks to lay the groundwork for examining how vulnerable populations coped with poverty, marginalization, and insecurity (Coaffee, 2022; Davis, 2012; Koonings and Kruijt, 2015). This body of work paved the way for more critical perspectives that interrogated the role of resilience in security planning and questioned its capacity to advance social justice (Fainstein, 2015; Fitzgibbons and Mitchell, 2019). A more radical body of scholarship argues that resilience discourse masked neoliberal failures and state withdrawal, often legitimizing greenwashing, exclusion, and gentrification (Evans and Reid, 2014; Kaika, 2017; Tierney, 2015).

Here again, it is crucial to resist the reductive tendency to frame resilience planning either as merely a neoliberal instrument or, conversely, as a universal panacea for complex urban problems. While resilience initiatives are increasingly framed around the mantra of addressing ‘people-oriented’ concerns, it remains nonetheless essential to broaden the debate as to how such agendas contribute to equity—by asking whose interests are prioritized and whose are marginalized (Grove et al., 2020). In other words, as several scholars have emphasized, the central issue is to determine whose resilience is actually at stake, particularly given that resilience is unevenly experienced along lines of age, sex, and class. This reflection is especially relevant for a city like Medellín, which sought to blend crime prevention with resilience agendas. In this context, Coaffee (2022) asks whether security-driven resilience benefits citizens or merely markets the city to an external audience. This question can also be raised among citizens themselves, by considering whose interests are protected and whose are overlooked within the city. As Vale (2014) stressed in his seminal work on resilient cities, research on urban resilience must assess who takes control of the term and drives its usage. That is, which economic and political interests are advanced? “Who counts as ‘the city’? (and who decides who counts as ‘the city’?)” (Vale, 2014: 197).

This brings us back to the case of the Comuna 13 in Medellín, considered here as an urban synecdoche. Such an example confirms Vale’s (2014) observation that some parts of a city may be far more resilient than others, and that no “resilient city” can achieve resilience in its entirety. Vale showed how, in post-Katrina New Orleans, the reconstruction of the tourist-oriented French Quarter was prioritized while working-class neighborhoods were neglected. Unlike the French Quarter, which was already a tourist hotspot before Katrina, Medellín’s Comuna 13 became an international tourism venue only after being deeply traumatized by armed violence. It is precisely this troubled history, together with its “resilient” recovery, that brought it center stage. Determining who is the target of resilience initiatives, as well as the timing of these projects, is therefore critical to assessing whether they foster inclusion or, on the contrary, deepen exclusion. More empirical work is thus needed to identify whose resilience is being considered among diverse actors and groups, operating across different scales and temporalities. “Uneven resilience” becomes evident when municipal governments prioritize certain communities, neighborhoods, or particular aspects of the city’s symbolic landscape (Vale, 2014).

Some scholars have thus pointed to a “dark side” of resilience, whereby systems are stabilized in harmful configurations and become less responsive to positive transformative change (Mitchell and Harris, 2012). Building on this insight, research on chronic violence has produced evidence showing that organized crime can itself be highly resilient, and that law enforcement interventions may paradoxically reinforce this resilience (Arias, 2017; Ayling, 2009; Barnes, 2025). Davis (2012) helped lay the groundwork for this perspective by distinguishing between positive and negative resilience, the latter arising when violence entrepreneurs establish their own forms of justice, security, and livelihood control. Shifting the focus to victims, Moncada (2022) suggests that resilience may also entail the use of violence—for instance, in cases of vigilantism, where civil society mobilizes in ways that ultimately undermine the rule of law.

In addition, looking at densification in some of Medellín’s self-settlements, Samper (2017) introduces the notion of “eroded resilience” to critically examine the relationship between urban growth and collective action capacity. As neighborhoods densify, urban and population growth may lead to the fragmentation of social ties, weakening self-governance structures and facilitating their co-optation by non-state armed actors. At the same time, this growth can expand both legal and illegal market opportunities, increasing the strategic value of these territories for criminal organizations. Eroded resilience thus captures a structural reconfiguration of community capacity rather than its disappearance.

Along similar lines, Arias (2022) uses the term “pernicious resilience” to describe the informal arrangements that sustain violent systems. Such regimes are always context specific; in some cases, they persist for long periods with relatively low levels of violence, while in others they are marked by recurring disruptions. Medellín offers a striking illustration: criminal governance is entrenched in most marginalized barrios, with extortion serving as the clearest example of a practice that has persisted for decades. Taking up Arias’s argument, analysts should thus look beyond spectacular disruptions to the conditions and continuities that sustain violent orders, giving equal weight to communities’ historical trajectories and present-day experiences of violence. Doing so helps to clarify who benefits from these structures of power and who remains excluded. In short, both researchers and policymakers must engage with the micro-politics of communities to understand what being resilient to violence truly entails—and to design interventions that neither inadvertently reinforce the status quo nor generate further victimization.

Hence, reflection on resilience and violence must shed light not only on whose resilience is at play but also on what is resilient and for whom. This is crucial to avoid recovery dynamics that reproduce the harmful effects inherited from warfare, perpetuating violence by other means—such as consolidating criminal orders and reproducing marginalization. My aim is to contribute to this debate by examining how residents of Medellín’s barrios perceive and engage with both resilience and violence, thereby drawing attention to the blurred boundary between conflict and post-conflict. In doing so, I do not treat resilience as an analytical category through which to evaluate the success of urban recovery. In other words, my work does not assess Medellín as a resilient city confronting violence. Instead, I focus on the emic dimension of resilience, examining the multiple and contested ways in which the notion is adopted—or rejected—in residents’ accounts. By engaging with these perspectives, I contrast them with the grand narratives of the “Medellín Miracle” and “Resilient Medellín.” Despite the role these representations play in city marketing, I suggest that they obscure some of the very dynamics that have sustained and reconfigured violence in the first place. Furthermore, I argue that in contexts where criminal governance and urban upgrading intersect, resilience is neither purely emancipatory nor purely pernicious. Rather, its ambivalence complicates celebratory narratives of recovery and calls for closer scrutiny of how practices deemed “resilient” become entangled with the reproduction of violent orders.

The resilience of violence

In 2021, in an interview with Le Monde, the internationally acclaimed novelist Juan Gabriel Vásquez observed that Colombian violence has an extraordinary talent for reinventing itself (Singer, 2021). Medellín provides an unfortunate illustration, as criminal groups have shown remarkable adaptability to shifting historical contexts. Indeed, they have strategically evolved in step with the changing regimes that have taken shape in the city’s margins.

Violent orders were imposed on communities, when urban militias took control of these barrios to counter the growing power of street gangs, many of which were tied to Medellín’s infamous drug cartel. Civilians alternated between violent clashes and the fragile peace maintained by militias, who enforced strict social control under the constant threat of violent and often arbitrary punishment—ranging from compulsory community work to forced displacement and killings; then came the paramilitary takeover, as illegal actors leveraged collusion with public forces to consolidate domination over communities. Alongside the demobilization process, criminal governance continued to be imposed on residents—sometimes reproducing mechanisms inherited from the militias and often adapting them to new contexts and ideological frameworks. Rather than disappearing, many of these groups reconfigured into a layered criminal system. Supra-structures—often described as bandas criminales (BACRIM) or grupos delictivos organizados (organized crime groups)—operate now through smaller neighborhood-based street gangs, commonly referred to as “combos,” which regulate everyday life through extortion, dispute resolution, and market control. The post-demobilization landscape is thus marked less by a rupture than by a mutation and a decentralization of criminal governance.

In such contexts, criminal elements have shown remarkable ingenuity, for example by co-opting participatory processes initiated within the frame of social urbanism (Arias, 2017). As many interlocutors noted, participatory budgeting became a particularly effective means of penetrating civic organizations and diverting resources. One interviewee, for instance, recounted how a local gang leader sent relatives to a meeting intended to develop projects for elderly residents. “They would get around it,” he explained, “by sending the mother, the aunt, whoever […] That’s how they took control of seniors’ projects.” Everyone knew these representatives were linked to the local boss, he added, and no one openly opposed them (Personal communication, 2022).

Moreover, criminal groups strategically capitalized on Medellín’s economic boom by capturing profitable sectors such as construction and tourism, in part by extorting entrepreneurs and tourism actors. The Covid-19 pandemic further revealed their flexibility, as they recalibrated their operations to bolster legitimacy. For instance, they adjusted their methods of collecting extortion taxes and used social media to circulate images of their social support. They also adapted to demographic shifts as younger recruits—some as young as 13—entered in growing numbers while older members lived longer due to declining homicide rates. Together, these pressures prompted diversification into legal markets and monopolies that further blurred the legal/illegal divide. Crucially, criminal groups realized that confronting the state was far more costly than working alongside it. Research in Medellín’s periphery has shown that criminal and state rule not only coexisted but were often positively correlated: the stronger the state’s presence, the more gangs engaged in governance (Blattman et al., 2023).

A collaborator of the Secretariat of Security and Coexistence emphasized criminal groups’ capacity to learn, citing militia training centers and the Convivir, vigilante groups from the 1990s that still enforce order downtown despite their official closure:

From the militia schools of the 1980s, and later from what happened with the cooperatives and the Convivir, armed groups also learned a great deal from those processes of social formation, right? And they learned not to go against the state, but rather to seize the state’s inertia and turn it to their advantage. (Personal communication, 2022)

In turn, communities also had to “learn” to coexist with violent actors. As one of Medellín’s city councilors confided to me:

It is not ideal—one does not promote pacts with violence from politics—but if one is realistic, one understands that anyone who has grown up in Medellín, in a poor neighborhood, sees it, feels it, suffers it, but also learns to work with it. (Personal communication, 2020)

Residents often speak of “normalization” or “naturalization” to describe how criminal governance has seeped into everyday life, teaching people to keep silent, not to oppose armed actors, and, albeit to a lesser extent than before, to observe invisible borders. As one resident of the Comuna 13 explained: “Everyday life in La Trece has always had an armed actor in the background, exercising some form of control over the community and over daily routines. They came as if they were the saviors” (Personal communication, 2022).

That said, reducing residents to passive victims under the yoke of criminal actors is misleading. Testimonies also reveal that residents at times deliberately chose to engage with criminal groups, depending on the circumstances. As shown in other contexts (Barnes, 2025; Magaloni et al., 2020), Medellín also illustrates how criminal groups are often perceived as more effective than the state in addressing minor crimes, and are frequently portrayed as protectors against outsiders. Interactions with illegal actors are therefore not only shaped by threat and fear but also by strategic considerations. People might, for example, seek out a gang to mediate a dispute or help organize a soccer tournament, since such informal mechanisms are often seen as more efficient than state interventions. Some interviewees even suggested that public authorities declined to step in during family conflicts, considering them outside their remit. More broadly, the state was frequently portrayed as detached from the barrio’s everyday life. By contrast, street gangs maintain a constant presence in the territory, cultivate local knowledge, and rely on dense social networks. Finally, some observed that gangs can employ violence in ways unavailable to public authorities, thus providing forms of justice regarded as swifter and more expedient than the official system.

As a result, residents of marginalized districts emphasized that violence had transformed over the past decades, particularly following the 2002 armed operation that paved the way for (post-)paramilitary dominance. Several interlocutors explained that violence is now hidden, as armed actors have co-opted issues of everyday coexistence and even household issues:

There is a hidden violence at the moment. Before, it was very visible; now it seems quieter … a disguised violence. Before, you would see people being taken or killed, and you would find corpses on the streets. But now it is another kind of violence, a quieter one where nothing seems to happen … where things are allowed to take place. (Personal communication, shop owner, 2020)

The colloquial expression “tense calm” (calma tensa) is frequently invoked to describe these fragile contexts in which violence is subdued but can flare up at any moment—triggered, for instance, by a territorial dispute or a power vacuum following the arrest of a gang boss. This situation represents a pernicious form of resilience: although these systems are illegal and violent, they remain functional and even create opportunities for marginalized groups. Yet such arrangements are deeply embedded in inequality and shaped by micro-hierarchies, highlighting the importance of asking whose resilience is at stake. A supermarket owner may profit from a local monopoly enforced by a criminal group, yet such an arrangement is rarely rooted in social justice. Similarly, a resident might gain favor with a gang by reporting a neighbor, but always at the expense of others. Only by closely examining everyday practices within criminalized territories can we understand how informal processes sustain and legitimize violent orders while perpetuating inequalities. As suggested earlier, this requires analyzing the mechanisms that uphold these tense and volatile contexts, rather than focusing solely on episodes of spectacular violence.

In Colombia, the notion of tense calm is typically used to describe a temporary state following outbreaks of violence. Viewed through the lens of resilience, however, it can be understood as a more enduring condition: a fragile equilibrium in which disruptions regularly provoke escalations of violence. In Agamben’s (2004) terms, tense calm represents a permanent state of exception, where citizens live with chronic risks that gradually become normalized as people adapt to them. Breakdowns within criminal orders generate shifting balances, giving rise to new arrangements and hierarchies. In pursuing a lasting peace, Colombian authorities thus face the difficult task of preventing the emergence of new equilibriums rooted in tense calm. Caught between mano dura (hardline security policies) interventions favored by previous governments and conciliatory negotiations with illegal armed groups promoted by the current administration, the country continues to struggle to chart a path toward peace.

Medellín offers a telling example: law enforcement actions often sparked violence in the barrios. During my fieldwork, many interlocutors stressed that police crackdowns on gangs frequently undermined local security, unsettling fragile equilibriums and informal arrangements that structured community life. As one resident recalled of the gang that once dominated his neighborhood:

They had the barrio under tight control, and now they’re in jail, lying low, or on the run. That control has been slipping away over the past five years or so, because the police went after them—tracking and pursuing them. As a result, the sense of calm in the barrio was gradually lost while they were in hiding, and the ones who are around now don’t seem very concerned about maintaining it. (Personal communication, 2020)

On the other hand, “softer” approaches inspired by post-war negotiations have sought dialogue between state actors and gang leaders, often with support from community members or religious figures. Known as gang truces, these efforts may temporarily reduce violence but are usually localized and can strengthen criminal groups (Cruz and Durán-Martínez, 2016; Jones and Lloyd, 2025; Muggah, 2014; Savenije and Van Der Borgh, 2015). Still, Koonings and Kruijt (2015) note that such negotiations can integrate gang members into neighborhood life, fostering collective resilience. Overall, these initiatives may ease violence and improve conditions but rarely yield lasting peace. Hence, addressing the resilience of violence demands closer engagement in marginalized neighborhoods, with attention to the everyday ties and local practices—extortion, informal justice, criminal social support—that sustain violent orders.

The violence of resilience

As mentioned in the introduction, Medellín gained recognition as a poster child of resilience to violence and crime, due in part to its early membership in the Rockefeller 100RC program and its application of resilience to social challenges. In the end, however, while resilience agendas ostensibly promised more equitable development, the concept gradually lost traction within the city’s governance. Although the discourse of resilience proved to be an effective branding tool, several initiatives launched under the banner of Resilient Medellín stalled after the initial implementation phase. Consequently, many of my interlocutors—especially community-based actors—expressed unease with the language of resilience, and some rejected the term outright, describing it as overly academic, elitist, or framed as a neoliberal solution.

In other regions, such as Greater Miami, research has highlighted similar dynamics. Although equity was presented as a cross-cutting theme in the city’s resilience strategy, it ultimately failed to address concerns over racialized violence, neglect, and deprivation. As Grove et al. (2020: 1627) observe, it did not produce clear policies but rather became “a site of fervent definitional struggle over whose visions of the city can be realized and whose remain subjugated.” Such tensions were present in Medellín too, where the resilience discourse elaborated in City Hall—grounded in the idea of miraculous transformations—was often at odds with the perspectives of self-settled communities, who emphasized their role as the actual builders of their neighborhoods. The example of the convite is often cited to illustrate the important part they played in fostering the innovation and creativity now associated with the city. A convite refers to collective efforts and solidarity networks through which residents informally constructed their barrios. During these convivial gatherings, people came together to build schools, houses, roads, drainage systems, restaurants, and churches.

The images of the convite and the miracle capture the tension between two narratives, each drawing in different ways on the idea of resilience. The first highlights the agency of marginalized communities in Medellín’s transformation, conveyed through notions of ingenuity, creativity, and solidarity. The second, rooted in the legacy of social urbanism, emphasizes infrastructure, architecture, and public investment. This state-centered vision has been criticized for its hegemonizing tendency (Samper and Marko, 2015), in which residents of self-settled neighborhoods are depicted as passive victims of violence, while the state is portrayed as a savior improving their living conditions through social urbanism projects—the so-called miracle. In contrast, city dwellers in the barrios tend to associate the notion of resilience to their right to the city, by emphasizing their active contribution in Medellín’s creativity and innovation – as illustrated by the convite. Nowadays, both narratives are still critically embedded in the ongoing transformation of Medellín. They are expressed in urban development, but also in domains as diverse as politics, tourism, memory work, art, and civic life. These conflicting narratives, together with the mounting critiques they provoked, prompted me to recognize that discourses on resilience in Medellín carried their own subtle form of violence.

When I consider resilience and urban discourses through the lens of violence, I align with scholarship that critiques resilience as framed primarily around the adaptive capacities of deprived communities, while highlighting how such a perspective overlooks the root causes and structural drivers of marginalization (Evans and Reid, 2014; Kaika, 2017; Roberts et al., 2020). Resilience approaches are often questioned for the elusive nature of the concept, and Medellín’s inclusion in the 100RC program illustrates this ambiguity. In the one-size-fits-all framework provided—where gang violence, flooding, and epidemics are grouped under the same umbrella—practices such as extortion and forced displacement are treated merely as stresses to be absorbed and managed, rather than recognized as manifestations of structural violence requiring political solutions. Romanticized narratives celebrating the resilience of the poor were also actively promoted in the branding of Medellín as a transformed city and further amplified by its booming tourism sector, particularly through its expansion into marginalized territories.

That said, challenging simplified narratives as they circulate in urban discourses and city-marketing strategies should not lead us into our own pitfalls of simplification. Presenting the issue solely as a confrontation between top-down hegemonic discourses that depoliticize the poor and marginalized communities that resist such representations risks obscuring the more complex and ambivalent dynamics at play. Community members involved in grassroots activism or community-based tourism often reappropriated this celebratory image of resilience to their own benefit. This situation evolved significantly with Medellín’s rapid reintegration into the global sphere. With the swift rise of tourism in their territories, community members engaged in this flourishing business also adapted their rhetoric. When tourism first emerged about a decade ago, there was a strong impetus to criticize social urbanism, for instance by highlighting displacement caused by new construction, collusion between illegal and state actors in urban projects, and gentrification following the revitalization of specific areas. Yet, as tourism became massified, resistance narratives gradually shifted toward more consensual representations, increasingly aligning with top-down discourses that celebrated social urbanism and framed resilience as a key factor enabling marginalized communities to thrive despite their conflict-affected environment. Under the label of “transformation tourism,” several emblematic urban and architectural projects in these territories were placed on the tourist map to showcase the miracle of Medellín.

Las Escaleras—the outdoor escalator I introduced in the first section—is without doubt one of the most iconic landmarks promoted internationally to highlight the achievements of social urbanism. This innovative project, built in one of the city’s most traumatized territories, also serves as a vivid illustration of the ambivalent resonances it holds for the local population. While it symbolizes the peaceful integration of the state into the urban margins—marking a shift from repression to social urbanism—many residents nonetheless emphasized that it also entailed its own forms of violence. Several residents living near Las Escaleras complained that the project was imposed by the city, disconnected from the community’s genuine needs, and with an aesthetic at odds with the identity of the place. Many also condemned Las Escaleras for causing displacement and contributing to rising rents. Moreover, while the escalator is acclaimed for the creativity it fostered—exemplified by the vibrant street art scene that now attracts millions of tourists each year—the simultaneous growth of drug trafficking and prostitution in the area, along with the empowerment of local gangs through the systematic extortion of tourism actors, has sparked increasingly heated criticism. Although the project initially generated a strong sense of pride within the community, negative consequences such as overtourism, gentrification, and tourism-related crime now contribute to a profound feeling of dispossession.

Hence, mainstream narratives on social urbanism, as articulated through the promotion of one of its main components, obscure the uneven contexts in which it unfolds and the inequalities it perpetuates. Indeed, while some clearly benefit from social urbanism and resilience-driven projects, others remain at the margins, and at times these initiatives may even exacerbate their victimization. Moreover, simplified images of resilient communities, as diffused through so-called transformation tourism, contribute to symbolic violence by commodifying the poor, through a performance of cultural resilience (Durr and Jaffe, 2012). This dynamic is further intensified when tour guides reconfigure the history of the place to satisfy tourism’s demand for spectacularism, incorporating fictional elements, trivializing violence, and so dispossessing local people of their own history.

Ultimately, such processes reinforce the very structures of inequality and exclusion that social urbanism claims to overcome, thereby generating ambivalent feelings within the community. While some actively capitalized on the image of resilience, others questioned its implications. Some, for example, reduced social urbanism to little more than urban aesthetics, complaining that it contributed to normalizing their marginalization:

In Colombia, and in all our disadvantaged urban areas, it has become normal to live like this: normal for others to take advantage, normal for us to be poor because that comes from God, normal to remain this way, normal to have corruption, normal to have illegality. […] Of course, they paint the streets very nicely, they’ve spent money on fresh paint these days. Tourists come to see the little red, green, and yellow rooftops, and they say: “How divine, because it’s possible, look—you can live as a poor person very well. (Personal communication, community leader, 2022)

Another resident of the Comuna 13 noted that the resilience associated with his barrio was not always a positive one:

People come to the Comuna 13 looking to experience violence, to consume drugs, or to seek prostitution, right? They don’t always see us as positive resilience […] This is an area where we have never truly known peace. Of course, economic reparation is important, but we also need social and dignified reparation. Not just people saying: “Oh, the Comuna 13 is so nice, with its resilient people, so beautiful!” but people recognizing the real value we hold in this territory. (Personal communication, 2022)

Finally, several interlocutors emphasized that public discourses on resilience tend to obscure the fact that the state itself has often been a violent actor—and, for some, remains so. Accordingly, state-centered notions of resilience risk downplaying coercive interventions and their uneven consequences. In this sense, resilience discourse may not only conceal violence but also contribute to legitimating its use in the name of security and transformation.

Resilient lives in urban recovery

Taken together, this analysis highlights both the resilience of violence—visible in the adaptive reconfiguration of criminal governance—and the violence of resilience—manifest in the disciplinary and exclusionary effects of urban recovery projects. In Medellín, the absence of continuous gunfire does not mean that violence has disappeared. In many parts of the city, it remains deeply embedded in the social fabric, sometimes lying dormant but always with the potential to erupt suddenly. Yet, in some of the city’s most marginalized areas, urban discourses and tourism have concentrated heavily on art, culture, and social accomplishments, projecting a performance of community resilience primarily directed at an international audience. Through the relentless promotion of such positive and simplified images, these narratives obscure the violence that continues to shape life in the comunas. These discourses and representations contribute to turning some communities into what Evans and Reid (2014) term “resilient lives,” implying the depoliticization of existence for those living at the margins. According to Evans and Reid, marginalized communities are conditioned to adapt to adversity without challenging the broader power structures that sustain them. In resilience thinking, ecological imaginaries colonize social and political realms, and insecurity and inequality are naturalized. Like environmental disasters, social problems are considered as inevitable challenges that individuals must overcome, rather than the consequences of systemic inequalities and poor governance.

Echoing Evans and Reid’s (2014: 83) argument, some of the discourses embedded in social urbanism can be understood as a shift from a focus on security to resilience, where the city’s recovery is less concerned with narrowing life-chance divides than with promoting self-reliance. In their words, “living in the margins” is no longer regarded as a condition to be overcome but is instead presented as the natural order of things, where individuals are ultimately reduced to the barest level of existence. In their resilient lives, residents of the barrios are compelled to adapt to everyday violence, leaving them with few opportunities to challenge the underlying forces that sustain these dynamics.

In a similar vein, Kaika (2017) uses an immunological metaphor to interrogate global resilience discourses in urban praxis. Referring to initiatives such as the New Urban Agenda and 100RC, she contends that many of the projects and so-called best practices promoted under their banner act less as solutions than as vaccines—small doses that accustom societies to tolerate ever greater levels of inequality and environmental harm. For Kaika, flagship urban projects often conceal detrimental side effects, while resilience rhetoric works to legitimize the status quo, with failures written off as incidental costs. In Medellín’s urban discourse, poor communities are celebrated for their ability to adapt, and, as in Kaika’s “vaccine” metaphor, such narratives deflect attention from the actors and processes that generate the very conditions demanding resilience. They obscure the everyday arrangements and micro-level settlements that sustain a status quo dominated by powerful interests. In doing so, they risk reinforcing practices such as extortion, threats, and displacement and, paradoxically, contribute to the resilience of violence itself.

Finally, for Evans and Reid (2014: 6), contemporary development discourses blur the lines between resilience and resistance, with the latter no longer recognized as a political claim but rather “a pure reactionary impulse premised upon some survivability instinct that deems the nature of political itself to be already settled.” Both authors contest this assumption and advocate for alternative understandings of the human, shifting from the notion of a “resilient subject” to that of a “political subject.”

When a woman in Medellín once recounted the murder of her brother, as well as the fact that she knew the killer, she expressed—in profoundly tragic terms—her lack of resistance, her sense of hopelessness in the face of violence, and how resilience can itself become a burden of violence:

They shot him with seven bullets. You are the only person I have told who it was … I haven’t even told my family, because these guys are still around asking for the vacuna [literally “vaccine,” a colloquial term for extortion]. So the part of being resilient, sometimes you can’t manage it because it eats you. It makes you angry and you don’t process it to get better, you just stay there, as things carry on in the neighborhood. These guys are still there; many versions have come out [on the murder] … And I feel like a coward. I know who belongs to which group, but I have never done anything because I have two children. (Personal communication, 2022)

Some scholars have nevertheless considered the interplay between resilience and resistance in a more hopeful light. While recognizing that resilience discourses and projects can be co-opted by dominant neoliberal agendas, they emphasize that the language of resilience may also provide openings for resistance and alternative ontologies. It has, for instance, created space for developing counter-narratives to mainstream media portrayals of violence and destitution in post-Katrina New Orleans (Zebrowski and Sage, 2019), or acted as a catalyst for more radical transformative actions in response to the exclusionary rhetoric of the New Zealand government following the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch (Cretney, 2019). Resilience discourses, therefore, must be understood in their specificity and plurality. They can depoliticize the urban poor and reproduce inequalities, while at the same time opening possibilities for resistance.

In Medellín, however, public discourses on the resilient city often failed to confront the root causes of violence, emphasizing instead the self-reliance of the population. Although some initially placed hope in the city’s inclusion in high-profile resilience programs, many were ultimately disillusioned once these projects hit the ground. Consequently, many activists, artists, and residents of Medellín now resist what Kaika terms immunological solutions; they refuse to be made resilient on such terms. Instead, they demand transformation rather than mere adaptation, advocating for structural change and equality. They draw on urban art, memory work, civic activism, and even tourism to challenge the dominant narratives of resilience and transformation shaping their city, insisting on being recognized as active participants in its future. Among many of my interlocutors, resilience was frequently framed in opposition to resistance, with some suggesting that resilience embodied the rhetoric of the elites, while resistance expressed the voice of the community.

People sometimes also invoked the term berraco—a colloquial expression that encompasses courage, strength, talent, passion, determination, and even anger—which transcended the categories of resistance or resilience, offering instead a blend of both concepts. Being berraco conveys a stronger inclination toward action than the picture of resilience as it is typically framed in mainstream urban discourses. It reflects how residents at the urban margins of Colombia not only seek to adapt but also work to resist their condition. In doing so, they contribute to politicizing their existence, moving beyond their status as mere “resilient lives.” It is therefore critical to identify these sites of resistance and to “denaturalize” everyday violence and criminal governance. This requires urgently breaking free from development frameworks in which marginalized communities are expected to vaccinate themselves against violence or poverty. For if resilience is nothing more than adaptation, then being resilient to violence may well end up reinforcing the resilience of violence itself.

Conclusion

Resilience has traveled a long way in urban praxis, provoking responses that range from enthusiasm to rejection, depending on its modes of application, the contexts in which it unfolds, the actors involved, and the issues it aims to address. While there has been a strong impetus to expand the concept beyond environmental challenges to encompass social problems like poverty and violence, such initiatives have been widely criticized for their disconnection from people’s actual needs and aspirations. Although resilience projects are increasingly branded as people centered, they remain largely defined by experts in academia, international organizations, and government agencies. Research exploring what resilience truly means for communities grappling with everyday violence, crime, or contested post-conflict dynamics is still limited. This contribution has thus sought to open space for more empirical work that amplifies the voices of these communities—so often placed at the center of resilience programs, yet too frequently absent from academic and policy debates.

In Medellín’s comunas, far removed from the headquarters of international organizations, foundations, and non-profits—where practitioners and policymakers often advance the view that “societies need to be resilient to violence”—the lived realities of marginalized communities lay bare the critical limitations of this perspective. As spectacular acts of violence have progressively given way to more insidious forms, the population’s imperative to adapt tends to normalize and perpetuate fragile and oppressive contexts. Viewing resilience solely as adaptation to adversity is therefore reductive. Yet the call to broaden resilience toward more transformative forms is often lost in one-size-fits-all definitions inherited from engineering and ecology. As I aimed to emphasize in this article, resilience in Medellín’s barrios is, by contrast, varied and multifaceted, encompassing diverse perceptions and understandings of what it means to be resilient to urban violence. It may be linked to the creativity of artists, the ingenuity of displaced communities, the resourcefulness of local entrepreneurs, the innovative policies of the city, and even the adaptability of criminal groups.

Some of the examples presented above demonstrate the complexity of applying the elusive concept of resilience to issues of violence and crime. In Medellín, resilience may at times generate symbolic violence, while at other times it can open spaces for resistance, political claims, and dignity. Micro-level approaches are therefore essential to illuminate these contexts of everyday violence, enabling us to unpack the agency of individuals navigating such conditions and to reveal the sites where they can challenge violence and assert themselves as “political subjects.”

Hence, although I have titled this article in a provocative way, my objective is neither to dismiss the possibilities that resilience offers nor to claim that all projects conducted under this banner have failed. My aim has been, above all, to give voice to those who feel left at the margins of development frameworks and, in doing so, to provide new theoretical and empirically grounded insights into the interplay between urbanization and conflict. Medellín is indeed a striking illustration of how armed conflict has permeated an urban environment and how violence continues to shape the city’s transformation. I finally hope this contribution invites further reflection on violence and resilience in other cities of the Global South, and on the ways urban praxis may blur the boundaries between conflict and what is often too hastily described as “post-conflict.”