Rebuilding Peace in Colombia

Violence is an issue that has particularly affected Colombia’s history in recent decades. Armed conflict between the national government, guerrillas, and paramilitary groups—the latter two being irregular armed organizations of different origins – and the war against drug trafficking has hurt the people of Colombia and undeniably impacted the development of cities and towns across the South American country. As a Colombian student studying City Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, I have asked myself a series of questions about the challenges faced by Colombian cities as a consequence of violence. This text is a compilation of approaches I believe the country should consider when planning its territory, which revolve around three key aspects—forced displacement, people, and drugs.

Forced Displacement

For one, the armed conflict has caused massive internal migration. According to a recent report, Colombia has accumulated more than 8 million victims of forced displacement in recent decades, with more than 5 million still internally displaced.  [1]  Inequality features as a protagonist in this story as most people forced to migrate come from conditions of poverty or are vulnerable groups, such as children, people with disabilities, and single women heads of households. [2]

Forced displacement has been significantly accelerating population growth not only in Colombia’s cities but also the areas surrounding them, as demonstrated by patterns in the accompanying maps. Figure 1.0 shows the number of reported forced displacement events in the year 2022. It illustrates how six main cities—Bogota, Medellin, Cali, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Bucaramanga—contain the highest density of displacement events, measured in events over the area of the municipality/city. It is also evident that municipalities adjacent to these cities reflect a similarly high level of cases. By accelerating population growth at the outskirts of cities, forced displacement is causing sprawl that is most affecting people in conditions of high poverty and vulnerability. Immigrants are also commonly located in informal settlements at the outskirts and edges of cities, which presents different challenges for urban and regional planning.

 

Informal housing conditions are critical to this argument because people tend to build their homes precariously, for instance without seismic resistance in structural design or without proper access to water. Such settlements are also far from major opportunities of employment, transportation, health, and education. In this situation, it becomes necessary to create land-use planning policies that can control the growth and edges of cities, and to respect and learn from the growth patterns of informality to encourage orderly development without relocation, unless strictly necessary due to risk.