MEMORY

The Future Is No Longer What It Used to Be.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Albert Einstein

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Natural resources are being depleted, and petroleum emissions are suffocating the planet. Society now faces a decisive crossroads: maintain the status quo, leading to a chain reaction of environmental disasters, or move toward a paradigm shift that entails complex challenges. In reality, maintaining the current course is no longer viable. Projections indicate that, without significant change, global energy demand will double within the coming decades.

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We question visions of the future that place blind faith in technology. The future is not a reformulation of what already exists; rather, it is the progressive adaptation of what already exists.

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This project represents a broader reflection that understands the city as a network of interconnected phenomena, recognizing that both individuals and society are immersed within the cyclical processes of nature. Likewise, it assumes that architecture is mediated by multiple cycles, both planetary and local, including environmental, political, energetic, and economic systems. From this standpoint, we propose an urbanism that shifts the idea of construction toward production, and the notion of space toward atmospheres.

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SHRINKING

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In order to speak about our future cities, and Medellín in particular, we believe it is necessary to introduce into urban practice the concept of SHRINKING, as a profound reflection on how we grow and consume becomes unavoidable.

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Throughout human history, our needs have generated expansive actions. Consequently, territory has been occupied extensively, as if our needs could be resolved by understanding surface purely through measurable dimensions. We have begun to speak about space in terms of square meters and square kilometers, forgetting its atmospheric dimension and its capacity to interpret the conditions, situations, and events that geography itself offers.

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In this sense, shrinking is not merely a position of reduction. Rather, it proposes a return to a prior scale connected to spatial awareness, to the atmospheric dimension of territory, and to the necessity of maintaining balance between systems and biosystems, avoiding the excesses of self-referential desires. To make our cities places where survival remains possible, we must recalibrate the relationship between what we need and what we desire.

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MEDELLÍN 2030

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To envision Medellín in 2030, this project proposes the construction of possible scenarios in which human action results in a process of shrinking, both in environmental impact and in the territorial expansion of the city. Shrinking becomes a strategy for recognizing and re-understanding territory, encouraging reflection on bodily proximity, limits of interaction, densification, and population growth. It suggests an appropriate condition in which urban relationships can discover their full potential and explore new possibilities.

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We assume that densification, redistribution, redefinition, and reconfiguration will become continuously applied strategies across infrastructures, technologies, knowledge systems, and territory itself, enacted by the city’s inhabitants to prevent collapse. Under the logic of shrinking, infrastructure must be redefined in relation to geographical territory. Infrastructure networks become drawings of mobility, while geographic structures become drawings of sustainable pursuit, a system that revitalizes the primordial geography of place and invents the small landscape phenomena inherent to every territory.

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EVENTS

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These events, understood as progressive relationships, describe the genesis of a diverse city framed within extended ecological, political, social, and technological relations. Intensified through proximity and density, neighborhoods emerge as laboratories of social innovation, mutable industries fostering macro-diversity, geographies appropriated by inhabitants as infrastructure, hyper-densification, and programmatic diversification of living spaces.

The project for 2030 is not constructed overnight, but through events that articulate its evolution. Today, with relatively low technological integration, our relationship with nature remains limited. The intention is that, as technology advances over the next twenty years, the city will evolve toward a greater ecological consciousness.

The dreamed city is an evolutionary projection, a narrative structure in constant construction, which by condensing its energy ultimately shrinks its extension in order to expand its relationships.