Atificial Boundaries: a week in Caracas

Our first week in Caracas confronts us with the contradictions between a city described by many anxious stories of soaring crime rates, extreme poverty, a harsh political-social divide, and our own experience and observation of a much more subtle and nuanced story of a city full of optimistic, engaged and resourceful people, trying to make sense of a vastly complex urbanization process.

The conceived boundaries that surface during many of our conversations, intuitively give the impression that these boundaries might act as self-fulfilling prophecies. Perceptions driven by fear, blurry statistics (numbers on the murder rates varying from 60 to 500 violent deaths a week), and rigid classifications seem to lead to a voluntary confinement into various sub-groups in the city. Aflredo Brillembourg stated: “How Goethe described architecture as frozen music, Caracas can be described as frozen politics” (UrbanThinkTank, 2005), to this, although related to politics, we argue it is necessary to add the notion that the relationship might not be so top down, but that the individual interpretations of the complex urban condition of Caracas are largely influencing the shape of the city. While the wealthy barricade their homes and shops behind electric fences, the relatively poor confine themselves to their barios to protect their ranchios: gates, barbed-wire, and subversive graffiti capture the image of this territorial struggle. Obviously many of these actions have their political counterpart, but as it seems, a lot might be the product of a vicious cycle of exaggerated stereo-typification.

The insights and understanding we’re creating of Caracas is in various ways relevant to our study in Vargas. First of all the existence of human activity in the Vargas region in a great extent is validated through its commercial relationship with Caracas. Another similarity is the linear orientation of both urban formations, although incomparable in scale, both cities are limited by natural boundaries to a linear orientation. Both linear cities, as well as other cities in Venezuela and Latin-America, have witnessed the large growth of informal self-constructed houses (ranchios) becoming the majority of the housing ‘market’. 

Besides these comparisons, an ironical fact about the Vargas region is that the land suitable for construction is all a direct outcome of a natural process of reoccurring landslides from the Avilla mountain range that creates fan-shaped land in the ocean. This naturally raised the question if such a precarious site should even be reconstructed.  Needles to say re-habitation of the area was already on its way during these discussions.  

Next week we’ll move to Tanaguarena (Vargas), this relatively mildly hit area will be our departure point to explore the whole strip state of Vargas; from the totally devastated and never rebuilt Carmen de Uria, to the historic harbor and commercial center of  La Guaira. 

Too see pictures of our current adventures click here.

URBANTHINKTANK, A. B., HUBERT KLUMPNER (2005) Informal City - Caracas Case, Berlin.