Medellín is a study in contrasts. Visit the El Poblado comuna (or neighborhood), and the city feels worthy of the “miracle” moniker that’s been applied to its comeback economy.

High-rise apartments punctuate the sky. Open-air restaurants are filled with people—an unimaginable scene when gunfights between Pablo Escobar’s sicarios and government forces meant sitting outside was a potential death sentence. The Museo de Antioquia rivals any in the world and features more than 188 works by one of Medellín’s other famous citizens—sculptor and painter Fernando Botero.

Now streaming on The Miracle of Medellín After decades of violence, Medellín has become one of South America’s most dynamic cities.

Go beyond the upscale El Poblado and the other Medellín—the noise, pollution and chaos of the more notorious comunas—begins to reveal itself.

Poverty, crime and income inequality—systemic problems in the city before cocaine was added to the mix—are still prevalent. Neighborhoods such as Comuna 13 and Comuna 9 are made up of ramshackle houses with tin roofs and stucco-covered brick perched on the steep hills. Here, Medellín’s economic comeback feels more elusive. The divide between rich and poor is higher here than the rest of Colombia as defined by the Gini coefficient, which represents income distribution. The lower the Gini number, the more economically equal a society is considered to be. Medellín’s Gini number has dropped from .54 to .50 from 2008 to 2012. Colombia’s average is .49. By comparison, the United States’ Gini number was .41 in 2013.

But stop. Listen closely. You’ll hear the distinctive sounds of Spanish-laced hip-hop emanating from Casa Kolacho in Comuna 13. Turn a corner and you’ll be met with the riotous beauty of graffiti that has become the community’s defiant symbol of rebirth. You begin to see why Medellín is a model for other cities trying to put their violent pasts behind them. It’s one of the very few cities torn apart by narco-terrorism to make a comeback.

The local government has begun to contribute to revitalizing neighborhoods where once the illegal economy of drugs and crime were the only ways out of the slums—or at least the only way to make money. An escalator has been built to connect the people at the top of the steep hill with those at the bottom, in an effort to bridge the city’s topography.

“I don’t want a segregated city that is not one city but 15 different cities,” says Medellín’s mayor Aníbal Gaviria Correa. “Communities and neighborhoods where the quality of life and security are much worse than others.”

He admits that while Medellín has come a long way from the violent, decimated city it was in the 1990s, “there is so much left to do, despite today having historically lower levels of both extreme poverty and violence.” The city’s murder rate has dropped from 381 per 100,000 in 1991 (almost 40 times higher than the U.N.’s marker for an epidemic of violence), to less than 27 per 100,000 in 2014. That is lower than U.S. cities such as Baltimore, Maryland.

But the deep economic divide that the Medellín Cartel capitalized on still exists. For the city’s poorest residents, the illegal economy—the economy of drugs in particular—was and still is a way to rise up and out of extreme poverty.

The intensity of the crisis and the sheer number of people killed in the violence has shaken Medellín to its core. And while no one would want any city to go through what Medellín did, the horrific crisis here has forced the government and social institutions to be more creative in their efforts to bring the city back.

The local government has invested in traditional ways, with money for the escalators, schools, roads and other public works. But it may be the government’s willingness to accept that acts of seeming defiance like graffiti and hip-hop are in fact acts of economic power that will move the city forward.

“The movement to make art a part of culture and creating spaces for dance, to sing, to do graffiti and more has given rise to youth engaging in such activities,” says Chota, a graffiti artist who goes by a single name. But unlike graffiti artists elsewhere who learned their craft under threat of arrest for defacing property, Chota was actually schooled in the art of graffiti. “When I was in 11th grade, the opportunity to participate in art programs was provided. Because I liked drawing, I became involved with graffiti and fine-tuned my techniques,” he says.

One of his murals, called America and representative of South America as opposed to North America, features a face where the neck is made of leaves, the hair is painted to represent weeds and a lotus flower defines the crown of the head.

“Art has become something that has helped communities resist violence,” he says. “But it is also a way for the city itself to gain a different reputation away from being a dangerous and violent place to a place where young people can have a prosperous outlook of the future.”

In Comuna 13, hip-hop can provide a path to that future and may protect young people from getting involved in gangs. The irony is that the community has embraced a musical form that is defiant, anti-establishment and born out of despair—and often comes from the very place, the United States, that provided the market for cocaine. Here it is the music of hope. “We work with kids who have never been involved in gang violence,” says Jeihhco, a hip-hop artist who helped start Casa Kolacho. “These are kids who are living surrounded by violence, but have been fortunate enough not to be living it. We have become an option here in Medellín. Violence is still rampant. Gangs still exist, stronger than ever. Fortunately, we’re also stronger than ever.”