“A City Is Also a Living Organism”: Carolina Londoño at TEDx Medellín

During her talk, the director of Ruta N explained how innovation can transform cities.

Carolina Londoño, director of Ruta N, presented a reflection at TEDx Medellín on how small ideas, connections, and capabilities can generate large-scale transformations. Drawing on her experience as a biomedical engineer and scientist, she connected a personal story with her vision of urban development and the role that science, technology, and innovation play in that process.

The story began with the diagnosis of type 1 diabetes in her daughter Amalia, which occurred while Londoño was pursuing her PhD and also had a four-month-old son. At that moment, her roles as a mother and a scientist came together around the same question: what was happening inside her daughter’s body, and how could she understand it? She began researching and found a connection between her scientific work and her family’s experience.

This led to an idea that she would later take from biology to cities: a protein can change a cell, a cell can transform a tissue, and a tissue can modify an organism. For Carolina, the same logic can be applied to urban systems, where a person, idea, or initiative that may initially seem small can take on a greater dimension when it begins to connect with other capabilities.

“Small things can change big things,” Londoño said during her talk. From this perspective, transforming a city does not depend solely on large-scale projects, but also on the ability to identify ideas, create connections, and establish the conditions that allow them to develop and achieve a greater impact.

One of the examples she brought to the stage was the work of Camila Molina, an economist and educator and a 2025 Gen N winner, who teaches children from vulnerable neighborhoods to develop a different relationship with money and their future through workshops that combine science, innovation, challenges, and creativity.

For the director of Ruta N, experiences like this show that capabilities often already exist but need the right conditions to develop. “A cell needs the right signals, and people need opportunities,” she said during the talk, explaining how an individual initiative can achieve greater reach when it finds knowledge, talent, technology, capital, and people willing to believe in it.

Londoño also presented the case of Forrest Heath, an entrepreneur who moved to Medellín from the United States in 2018 and saw an opportunity to bring high-speed internet to more people. The idea connected with local talent, knowledge, technology, and capital, eventually becoming a company that now connects tens of thousands of households, creates hundreds of jobs, and recently raised more than USD 40 million to expand in Colombia and Mexico.

The third idea in her talk focused on how cities are understood. Londoño proposed looking at them beyond streets, buildings, and institutions, and instead understanding them as living systems capable of receiving information, learning, and responding to their surroundings. From this perspective, a city needs spaces where it can experiment and test its capabilities, particularly when it seeks to turn knowledge into technology and, subsequently, into businesses, productivity, employment, and opportunities.

At this point, she presented FutuMed as one of the spaces Medellín is developing to experiment with science, technology, and innovation under real-world conditions. It is an urban testing area located in the northern part of the city, where solutions can be tested with real people, challenges, and needs. As an example, she mentioned a device developed by a team of scientists, lawyers, and engineers that seeks to help repair damaged nerves and disappears once it has fulfilled its function.

At the end of her talk, Carolina Londoño returned to her daughter’s story to explain how a condition can remain while the capabilities and opportunities available to address it can change. Amalia, now 17 and starting university, continues to live with type 1 diabetes, but she also has knowledge, technology, and a network of people that have enabled her to build her own path. For the director, her story reflects an idea that can also be applied to cities: “We cannot always choose the conditions we start with, but we can create the conditions that make what comes next possible.”