Delivering the ‘miracle’: levelling-up low-income neighbourhoods through local infrastructure and jobs activation. Medellín, Colombia, 2000–2018

This thesis addresses an overlooked issue in development policy studies: the relationship between interventions by local governments and income and spatial inequalities, with a particular focus on mechanisms linking these at the neighbourhood level. The argument is built upon the development and application of a framework to analyse the emergence of local welfare regimes in urban areas that recognises interventions in public infrastructure and facilities as welfare policies with a spatially differentiated redistributive practice and social stratification effects. The city and its spatial distribution of resources act as a system of distribution and redistribution, and so local government are granted with agency to address socio-economic inequalities. The framework re-scales the principle of territorial justice, assumes devolution to local governments of the implementation and design of policies, and allows for co-existence of multiple guiding rationales in policy-making. In this perspective, local government interventions in public infrastructure and facilities, rather than global market factors, are major contributors to the production and reproduction of social and economic inequalities and their spatial form in urban areas. This thesis challenges the conventional mechanisms theorised as being sufficient to explain urban economic inequality and neighbourhood change by accentuating the role of physical conditions and in-situ social mobility (change in the economic circumstances of long-term residents). Changes in urban segregation and neighbourhood-level economic conditions are geographically uneven, not attached to city-wide economic or inequalities trends, and are not solely determined by population movement or turnover (as widely overstated by multiple theories on neighbourhood change). Also the practices of the local welfare regime do not necessarily mean activating artificial incentives for the relocation of population groups or firms and might serve a compensatory system benefitting low-income population groups that largely benefit from access to collective and neighbourhood-level public services.