This article examines an urban project in Medellin, Colombia's second city, that sought to form social life by forming space: the city's metropolitan railway (Metro), which started operations at the end of 1995 and became the impetus of the inner city's renewal during the 1990s. The article begins with some background information on Medellin's urban crisis and an explanation of the methods by which the author generated and analyzed her empirical data. It then seeks to expose some of the unspoken assumptions and connotations carried by the keywords that influenced Medellin's 1990s public debates. It goes on to give empirical evidence of how contested Medellin was discursively and materially re-constructed and re-signified during the 1990s in order to rise like a phoenix at the turn of the century. It deals with the Metro's architectural and educational strategies directed to "recapture" Medellin's public space and to rebuild social cohesion. Recapturing public space meant, above all, revitalizing the inner city by stimulating commercial investment. Finally, it concludes that conventions for dealing with diversity were reached in the discursive public sphere. The revitalized material public space, by contrast, became a barometer of how far people involved in the 1990s debates had actually been empowered to negotiate basic constitutional civil rights with the state. This paper seeks to give evidence of parallel potentials in Medellin's condition of modernity: self-destruction together with self-reflection. (Contains 3 figures and 19 footnotes.)