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Medellin (Poblado de San Lorenzo), Colombia, South America |
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Medellin was founded in 1616 by the Spaniard Francisco Herrera Y Campuzano as a colonial town by the name Poblado de San Lorenzo. The town was founded as a strategic point between the gold mines in the area and the provincial capital Santa Fe de Antioquia. The town plan followed the standardized rules for the founding of colonial towns that the Spanish Crown had codified in the Laws of the Indies in 1523. The principles that city planners had to follow were derived from Roman city planning, of which the most important were the alignment of the streets in a gridiron and a public square with important religious and governmental institutions in the centre. These principles were used by the Romans to realize their military camps that would later turn into permanent cities. In medieval times this principle of urban planning got forgotten, but as classical ideas got popular again in the renaissance era and humanists started studying classic works, such as Vitruvius' 'De Architectura' the gridiron got back in the planning discourse. Before the gridiron was used again in Europe, the Spanish crown translated it to conquest the Americas, as the Romans used it to conquest Europe. Apart from the rules in relation to the towns' plans, the Laws of the Indies also included rules with regard to what sort of locations were suitable for the founding of towns. Conquistadors needed to take the height of a site into account, in order to create a healthy environment for the future inhabitants and the site needed to be leveled, in order to be able to project the gridiron with the least of compromises to the landscape. In spite of this rule, the colonial plan of Medellin must have been an exception because the original colonial town, and present day neighborhood El Poblado, is situated on the slope of Medellin's Aburra Valley.
Throughout the colonial period Medellin grew from a city of 3,000 in 1675 to 15,000 in 1800. In the 19th century the city started to grow rapidly because of its industrialization. The slopes of the valley got inhabited by internal migrants who were looking for jobs in the city. The slums were the reason for the mayor of Medellin to commission Wiener and Sert to make a master plan for Medellin. The aim of the 1948 plan piloto was to organize the new city on basis of the urban transformation of the ravines, ordering the new growth of the population. The exploitation of the geomorphological configuration was the core of the project. *A community-wide cooperation between government, private individuals and organizations resulted in the elimination of the bad slum areas and the substitution of small, well-built houses in well-planned communities. Luis Uribe Bravo designed the urbanization Villa Sorocco: A road shaped like a long line of s's lead through the residential areas of uniform houses, meeting a civic centre with a chapel, school, cafeteria, sports etc. in the middle.
source: *Dietz; Koth; Silvia, 'Housing in Latin America', MIT 1965 |
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