I’m thrilled to announce that I will be writing a paper for Architecture and Culture’s upcoming special issue, “Decentring Urban Experiments.”
My contribution, titled “My neighborhood is an amusement park, and I am [not] okay with that”: Co-laborative Explorations of an Outdoor Escalator System in Medellín, Colombia, explores the complex entanglements of architecture, governance, violence, and everyday life that unfolded after the construction of a public escalator system in Comuna 13. Once a zone marked by conflict, Las Independencias has become a showcase of Medellín’s so-called “social urbanism,” a model now exported and celebrated around the world.
Through a series of co-laborative encounters with residents, the paper traces how this experiment in infrastructural design reconfigured the meanings of public space, tourism, and local economies. It reveals the tensions between pride and precarity, visibility and control, mobility and surveillance. By working alongside community members, rather than studying them from a distance, the project transforms ethnography into a horizontal practice of shared reflection—a way to think about urban transformation from below and in relation.
At a broader level, the paper seeks to unsettle how “urban experimentation” is theorized and practiced. Medellín has long been framed as a paradigmatic laboratory of innovation, yet this framing often obscures the uneven social, political, and ecological consequences that such experiments produce. By juxtaposing official narratives of progress with situated, fragmentary, and sometimes contradictory experiences, the paper opens a space to rethink what counts as experimentation, who performs it, and at whose expense.
This work matters because it invites scholars, architects, and urbanists to reimagine experimentation as a distributed and contested field rather than a top-down model of design intervention. It calls for more attentive, ethical, and co-laborative ways of engaging urban life—ways that foreground the multiplicity of voices, affects, and material practices through which cities continuously remake themselves.