Agroecology in the social construction of popular habitat: a participatory experience in Pinares de Oriente, Medellín.

Under ecological criteria, a scenario of collective action is formed (autonomy, self-organization and alter-organization) as determinants for the design of a community space (kitchen-dining room) which is part of an agroecological system that, through participatory management, addresses ecological, social and food problems of a community made up of people victims of forced displacement that emerges on the urban-rural edge of the city of Medellín, Pinares de Oriente in Colombia. The agroecological approach of this work implies the understanding of the synergies and energy flows in the structure of the production ecosystem and how they relate to the rural memory of its inhabitants to translate them into determinants for the development of the habitat in an urban context.

The framework of the socio-political conflict in Colombia is an important factor in the exponential growth of urban helmets in the main cities of the country due to the forced displacement of predominantly rural people. Built on layers of violence on the eastern slope of the city of Medellín, at the foot of the Pan de Azúcar hill, a territoriality based on peasant memory is constituted through food production practices that structure a new city context, Pinares de Oriente.

“As this is a community we talk about sovereignty because we have to support the peasant […] and who we like to sow because it is the memory of our ancestors. The people who leave displaced from other places do not want to forget that, so be it in the little yard we have sown onion, the stick of chili, what we call the pancoger” (Woman leader and inhabitant of commune 8, Villa Hermosa, Medellín).

In 2006, the mayor’s office ceded to the community a series of lots destined for food production, with a second objective, the containment of urban expansion towards the Pan de Azúcar hill because it was considered a geologically unstable area; creating a self-organization structure of the community towards food production activities recognized as Women Leaders Orchards.

However, the expansion to the north of the neighborhood overflows the containment line, which ends up presenting a distinction in constitution of morphogenesis that goes from being an urban structure to the causal conformation of it, through spatial relationships within the built environment. That is, the orchards lose the orientation of being strategy of containment and food production as a backdrop and leads to a structure of plot of the physical-social relations within the neighborhood. This dialogue proposes that the interaction between the productive vacuum of the agroecological system and housing is a transformation in density as the emergence of a new genesis of urban planning.

Thus, this work emerges as an alternative based on urban agroecology where it promotes the self-regulation of economic processes in the social construction of the environment and the habitat-economy relationship of the community through the notion of space as a common good (Echeverría, et al., 2011).