What Medellín Solved While Many Mexican Cities Are Still Debating
- Editorial
- 22 hours ago
- 5 min read
Medellín shows that transforming a city does not depend on a spectacular project, but on connecting mobility, territory, social investment, and institutions under a long-term vision. While many Mexican cities are still debating how to coordinate these elements, the Colombian experience offers an increasingly relevant lesson for urban competitiveness.
For years, Medellín was viewed internationally primarily as a story of recovery from violence. That interpretation is accurate, but it explains only part of its transformation. The city also changed the way it connects territories, expands access to opportunity, intervenes in historically underserved areas, and builds institutions capable of sustaining decisions beyond a single administration. This is one of the fundamental differences when compared with many Mexican cities: the problem is not always knowing what needs to be done, but ensuring that mobility, housing, infrastructure, economic development, and social policy move in the same direction.
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From isolated projects to a territorial vision
One of Medellín's most important decisions was recognizing that urban problems do not exist independently. A disconnected community does not face only a transportation problem; it may also have reduced access to employment, education, services, investment, public space, and economic opportunities. Integrated Urban Projects applied this logic to territories with accumulated deficits through a combination of physical infrastructure, mobility, public facilities, and social intervention. The distinction may sound simple, but it fundamentally changes how a city is managed: the objective is no longer simply to accumulate projects, but to understand the combined effect they produce on a territory.
Many Mexican cities still operate differently. One administration paves streets, another installs lighting, another rehabilitates a park, and another changes a transit route. Each decision may be valuable on its own, but when it is not part of a shared territorial strategy, public spending improves fragments without necessarily changing the economic and social trajectory of an area. A city can invest heavily and still make limited progress if its projects are not connected.
“Medellín did not transform its future through one landmark project; it did so by connecting institutions, territory, and continuity.”
When mobility becomes economic policy
The Medellín Metro began commercial operations in 1995, and the first Metrocable line entered service in 2004. Over time, the network incorporated different modes of transportation to connect territories throughout the Aburrá Valley. The lesson for Mexico, however, is not to install cable cars in every city, but to understand that mobility reshapes economic geography. When people need excessive time to reach their jobs, that cost is distributed among families, businesses, and governments: productive hours are lost, congestion increases, the range of accessible employment opportunities shrinks, and connecting housing with industrial, commercial, and service centers becomes more difficult.
A city seeking investment should therefore measure more than the number of industrial parks, office developments, or commercial corridors it has. It should also ask where its workforce lives, how long people take to reach employment centers, what services exist around those centers, and how efficiently housing and economic activity are connected. Territorial competitiveness begins long before a company decides to build a plant or open an office; it starts with the way a city organizes the daily lives of the people who will sustain that economic activity.
Institutions that outlast governments
Medellín also built something less visible than its infrastructure: institutional capacity. The Metro accumulated specialized transportation expertise; the Metropolitan Area of the Aburrá Valley consolidated functions related to metropolitan public transportation, environmental authority, and territorial coordination; and Empresas Públicas de Medellín became an important operating and financial asset for the city. Not every Mexican city can reproduce these structures, nor does every city need to do so in exactly the same way, but they can adopt the principle behind them: a city needs organizations capable of learning, preserving information, professionalizing teams, and sustaining strategic decisions when governments change.
This issue is particularly relevant in Mexico. The OECD has emphasized the need for stronger coordination among urban development, housing, and transportation policies, while metropolitan fragmentation and uneven local government capacity continue to make integrated responses more difficult. The challenge, therefore, is not simply a lack of projects, but a lack of continuity between them. Every administration that starts over loses time, knowledge, and accumulated capacity, while urban problems continue to advance regardless of the electoral calendar.
The economic cost of starting over
Every time a city abandons a strategy because a new administration takes office, it loses more than documents and diagnoses. New teams reassess problems that have already been studied, change priorities, replace programs, and build new structures, while urban expansion, congestion, housing shortages, deteriorating public spaces, and pressure on public services continue to grow. That discontinuity also carries an economic cost: longer commutes, more expensive infrastructure, duplicated efforts, reduced access to talent, and greater difficulty connecting people, goods, and opportunities.
Urban policy should therefore also be understood as productivity policy. An industrial strategy without adequate transportation transfers costs to workers and businesses; a mobility policy disconnected from housing remains insufficient; a security policy that ignores public space loses part of its preventive capacity; and real estate growth without infrastructure can ultimately turn economic development into urban pressure. Cities operate as systems even when governments continue managing them through separate departments.
“A city begins to compete globally when it stops managing problems and starts governing systems.”
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Mexico knows the diagnosis; the challenge is sustaining it
In 2026, Mexico's Ministry of Agrarian, Territorial and Urban Development, Sedatu, presented a manual designed to strengthen metropolitan coordination and governance around four pillars: a common vision, collaboration agreements, projects at the appropriate scale, and institutional capacity. The similarities with some of Medellín's lessons are significant because they confirm that Mexico does not lack technical knowledge. The country has specialists, planning instruments, universities, institutions, and governments that understand many of its urban challenges. The difficulty lies in turning that knowledge into permanent execution capacity and sustaining a territorial direction for periods far longer than a single administration.
This is perhaps one of the most important lessons from the Colombian experience. Medellín has not finished solving Medellín. The city continues to face inequality, housing, security, and territorial challenges, and Medellín Cómo Vamos' 2025 Quality of Life Report continues to identify habitat as one of its major structural debts. Idealizing the city would be a mistake. Its value as a reference does not lie in having eliminated every problem, but in having developed institutional and territorial mechanisms capable of addressing them in a more integrated way and sustaining policies beyond a single electoral cycle.
The real lesson for Mexican cities
Copying the Metrocable would probably be the most superficial interpretation of Medellín. The deeper lesson is that mobility, housing, infrastructure, social investment, public space, and economic development need to share a common territorial direction. Many Mexican cities already have strong projects, diagnoses, and technical teams; what too many still lack is the ability to turn those pieces into a strategy capable of remaining in place for ten, twenty, or thirty years.
Mexico does not need to start from zero every time a government changes. It needs to build institutions that make it possible to continue, correct, and improve what already exists. Medellín understood earlier a debate that our cities cannot afford to prolong indefinitely: a city is not transformed by accumulating projects, but by accumulating capacity, coordination, and continuity.
What would change in our cities if future governments continued building the same territorial vision instead of starting over every three years?
Escritos por: Editorial
Sources
World Bank — Medellín Lab 2.0: Sharing knowledge on urban transformationView source
World Bank — Greater Than Parts: A Metropolitan Opportunity / Metropolitan MedellínView publication
Medellín Metro — History of the Medellín MetroView source
Metropolitan Area of the Aburrá Valley — Mission, vision, functions and responsibilitiesView source
OECD — OECD Economic Surveys: Mexico 2024View report
Sedatu — Manual for Strengthening Metropolitan Coordination and GovernanceView document
Empresas Públicas de Medellín — Institutional informationView source
Medellín Cómo Vamos — 2025 Quality of Life Report and Citizen Perception SurveyView report
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