Abstract
Caracas, a city that has been shaped by decades of spatial, social and political division, struggles daily to overcome its complex legacy. Despite government attempts to combat these severe disparities among the population, urban form combined with constrained social imaginations have resulted in the routine replication and deepening of division in the city.Leaving behind the urban dichotomies normally used to describe contemporary cities, which further exacerbate the idea of difference, ‘in-between spaces’ are identified as areas of encounter among ‘strangers’, capable of engendering new relationships and building citizenship.Creativity, in all its senses, is seen as an excellent mechanism for transforming and reshaping the urban and social fabric in these ‘in-between spaces’, revealing multiple languages that are responsible for generating a change of paradigm in the cities of tomorrow.
Highlights
In a recent article titled ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’, Brenner and Schmid (2015) state that the concept of what we call ‘city’ needs to be reworked to embrace and understand the new changes and dynamics that affect urban agglomerations.In analysing the above idea, this paper incorporates critical views on the city of Caracas, presented as a privileged scenario from where to understand the mechanisms that produce urban inequalities in contemporary cities.The Venezuelan capital was forced to expand the colonial grid out from its historical centre as new settlements –slum areas, housing for the lower-middle classes, country houses for the elites, among others– began to spring up on the outskirts of its traditional city limits
This uneven growth followed the disparity of urban fabrics and forms, the unequal sprawl and the extension of the city, an indication of the fragmentation of the territory that allows academics and urban practitioners to define the city as contrasting poles: “the notions of formality and informality were appropriated by architects in order to describe squatter settlements developing around Latin American cities” (Hernández et al, 2010, p. 16)
The notion of Zwischenstadt or “in-between city” (Sieverts, 2003) has been coined to define the socio-spatial landscape of what is called ‘in-between space’, and that includes the part of the city that is perceived as not quite traditional city and not quite traditional suburb
Summary
In a recent article titled ‘Towards a new epistemology of the urban?’, Brenner and Schmid (2015) state that the concept of what we call ‘city’ needs to be reworked to embrace and understand the new changes and dynamics that affect urban agglomerations.In analysing the above idea, this paper incorporates critical views on the city of Caracas, presented as a privileged scenario from where to understand the mechanisms that produce urban inequalities in contemporary cities.The Venezuelan capital was forced to expand the colonial grid out from its historical centre as new settlements –slum areas, housing for the lower-middle classes, country houses for the elites, among others– began to spring up on the outskirts of its traditional city limits. The government implemented specific urban plans, its main focus was to develop the area by promoting highways, avenues and new residential developments for the middle-classes, which has led to a shortage of public facilities and open public spaces.
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