Social Exclusion in Everyday Urban Mobility Practices: Tramlines in Medellín

In the last two decades, a succession of local governments in the city of Medellín have promoted a policy of urban intervention known as “social urbanism”, which, through investment in infrastructure in marginal areas of the city, was intended to generate social inclusion and build equity in access to opportunities. Among the most representative interventions is the Integrated Transportation System, consisting of the Metro, the metrocables and the tramway, among others. This article aims to demonstrate the impacts of the construction and implementation of the tramway on the processes of objective and subjective exclusion of residents in its areas of influence. The concept of daily urban mobility is used as a theoretical and methodological resource for the analysis of the results obtained from 462 surveys applied to tramway users and residents of its area of influence. It is concluded that this mobility infrastructure, in spite of generating a high impact in terms of physical accessibility, triggered a process of inclusion within exclusion where, under the facade of citizenship expansion, intimate and community interactions are reaffirmed as a response mechanism to persistent exclusions.