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Paysage urbain et relations socio-spatiales à Caracas

Published on December 17, 2009 by Julien Rebotier

At the town level, the urban landscape of Caracas presents the specifics of a socioeconomic mosaic in an intra-mountainous valley situated at about 1000 metres above sea level, south of the Avila mountain range (background of photos 1 and 2), which separates the city from the Caribbean Sea. The valley, being too narrow for the frenetic urban growth of the 1940’s, quickly spilled over to the south, east and west, and was built up heterogeneously without ever really being regulated by the authorities. The old sugar cane and coffee haciendas were transformed into land parcels – the urbanizaciones – thus presenting the socioeconomic profile of at least the middle class (foreground of the first photo, background of the second, third and fourth photos). The urban population grows at a rapid rate (more than 5% per year for almost 20 years between 1940 and 1960). Like in many other places in Latin America, the more working-class districts have to resolve housing problems in a city where there is a shortage in the supply. When the land is not parcelled out, the poor can invade and occupy by squatting: this is what they call the barrios de ranch (background of photo 1, foreground of photo 2), which today hold over half of the population of Caracas on only a third of the metropolitan land.

This dynamic of urbanization launched in the 1940’s led the population to overspread on the hills encircling the valley of Caracas, and has thus contributed to the interlacing of both wealthy and working-class dwellings. In the cracks of these urbanizaciones – in the quebradas, i.e. gullies carved by mountain torrents – the barrios flourish and occupy space. We even find some assailing the hills, which are called colinas when inhabited by the rich, and barrios – or cerros – when occupied by the poor. Hence, places that are topographically identical have different names according to the wealth of its inhabitants.

The urban landscape of the valley is a succession of hills (cerros and colinas) that mediates very heterogeneous populations. Nonetheless, this spatial proximity does not mean intermixture, even though the image of a crossbreed society, “integrated” or café con leche (coffee with milk) was the main socio-political narrative during the mythical period of “exceptional democracy”. Ever since the end of dictatorship in 1958, Venezuela has known a period of uninterrupted democracy which continues up to this day – a true exception in a continent largely affected by coups d’état and other military regimes responsible for the torments of the 1970’s.

The myth of an “exceptionally” plural and democratic society cannot stand contradictory evidence at the local scale. The climate of insecurity that emerged in Venezuela after the urban crises of the 1980’s (following the State’s drawback, the petroleum counter-shocks and the structural adjustments) inscribes fear on the landscape, and reveals – as in the chemical process of the photograph – the broader socio-spatial fractures (photos 3 and 4). According to one’s socio-spatial place, one does not visit certain neighbourhoods. The illusion of social serenity or of intermixture does not hold up. For sure, functional ties exist – but over these, mistrust and fear largely preside.

The urban mosaic no longer nourishes the myth of social harmony and diversity, but becomes an element of vulnerability. The people of the more affluent neighbourhoods feel cornered and in constant fear of an invasion by the cerros (a metonym that designates the populations on the hills, the barrios). The logic of fear implies a safe withdrawal that is manifested in the constructed environment of wealthier neighbourhoods. Urban custom-like barriers look like wartime checkpoints (photo 4); cameras and barbed wire (photo 3) in turn fuel the feeling of fear in the landscape of insecurity of the residential boroughs.

The socio-spatial contours of an unequal society are not “invented” by the emergence of insecurity and urban risks that date from the 1980’s. They are, on the contrary, made visible by different processes of territorialisation of urban risks. The territories and the social significance invested in spatial forms must necessarily be contextualized. In Marcel Roncayolo words, geography (social, political, or of risks…) is time in space.

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