The seventh session of the World Urban Forum, started Saturday, is set to discuss a wide range of urban issues facing the world today inColombia’s second largest city and 2013′s most innovative city of the year, Medellin.

Colombia, led by its second largest city Medellin, has the most unequal urban areas in Latin America, according to the United Nations. While Latin America as a whole has been making strides to combat inequality, lowering rates of unequal income distribution across the region over the past decade, Colombia has bucked the trend, experiencing a 15 percent increase in inequality in urban areas over the last 20 years.

The Medellin mafia, fragmented through bitter infighting, has called a truce and made an agreement with their rivals the Urabeños, seeking to rebuild the criminal hegemony once enjoyed by the legendary underworld figure known as "Don Berna." However, creating a Berna replica, which relied on strong connections with the country's elite, may prove difficult.

Medellin authorities announced Thursday that Colombia’s second largest city aspires to be the principal technological innovation city of Latin America by 2021 aspires to be the principal technological innovation city of Latin America by 2021.

Would you mind speaking a little louder?” asks the great master of painting as he works through the morning in his studio in Paris, waiting for a phone call from his native Colombia. “I might be going a little deaf,” he remarks. It’s not every day one gets to talk to Fernando Botero (Medellín, April 19, 1932), without doubt the most important Colombian artist alive, known worldwide and considered a key figure in the history of art.

Earning the title ‘City of the Year 2012′ the capital of Antioquia has been and praised for having implemented innovative and sustainable measures for improving the quality of life for its close to 2 million inhabitants. As Colombia’s second largest city and one of the vital engines of economic growth in country, Medellín has always taken pride in being a key hub for banking and mining companies as well as an attractive place to do business, given an ideal location close to the coffee axis and the coasts of both the Pacific and Caribbean.