Thinking about Caracas’ future necessarily implies considering our society’s future. What kind of society will support it, generate it and traduce it spatially? Each society organizes its space according to territorial scales, based on its nature and political, economic, social and cultural contents. That is the historical dialectic relationship between space and the society producing it. Accordingly, it is necessary that a political, non nineteenth century model should prevail, of which its process and result be decentralized, democratic.

Caracas and the slums. Independently from the political model being established from power, the slums’ priority consideration in the city of the future imposes its assumption as the society’s great urbanism priority. One may not keep ignoring this priority at a political, union, professional levels, and at many universities; it deserves attention form 47% of the Caracas population, not shaping another city, incorrectly named «the informal one»; on the contrary, its inhabitants are a significant part of the city’s urban dynamic structure holding them.

Citizenship from the power. One must shape citizenship from the power. And in its conditions one finds the auspice of a restorative thinking of the Caracas slums, based on a permanent policy of urban inclusion generating a less polarized social wealth at the capital by the Venezuelan Government.

There is no ideal future city. There is no ideal society. That is a desideratum. Villanueva said 50 years ago that more important than making a city, is to think how the society supporting the city will be. In this thought of the maestro there is evidence of the unequivocal relationship between space and the society generating it under its different territorial scales.

Caracas and the future formal optics. Caracas may not be thought in its future only under the isolated formal optics. The good architecture of the city of Caracas should be fostered from the public, institutional and private sectors, and its mutual conjunction and understanding are ideal for the quality of architectural production, one being conceived as a mean for the production of urban spaces exalting with their results a high architectural and urbanism quality. From the power it must be assumed and understood that without this permanent imbrication and demands the city’s architecture and urbanism won’t have any glorification.

City, power and culture. The city is the territorial basis of progress, of intelligence, of urban culture, of all representing social advance. From the heads of power the vectors aiming at that goal should be fostered.

Human organization in national and municipal power, as well as its actors’ cultural level, must improve in the future in order that Caracas may count with «thinkers-executors» allowing to transcend local and metropolitan scales, in order to equally project Caracas in its international presence’s reconquest.

There is almost always a relationship between the culture in power and the urban planning and architectural results in the cities whose management is interwoven with knowledge, culture, education and the soul’s necessary sensibility required in order to understand architecture in and for the city.

Public space and future Caracas. Future enjoyment of public spaces will depend on the valuation maintained of their city by caraqueños. One must seek an amiable, secure city in order to relive the caraqueño’s moral and existential valuation, of what its city is expected to be, and to be able to give it its soul. In the future, the caraqueño must nourish its soul in order to permanently struggle, seeking to reach in the future a level of fullness multiplying its citizens’ enjoyment’s offer.

Future Caracas and the private sector. Without private property nor private production there is no development. Of course, the State must regulate, in the goods sense, its operation with social purpose, Historically, the city and business are indivisible, on top of the toning that they give to the city.

Caracas and its future projects. One must open Caracas’ «door to the sea», currently ignored. It is necessary to develop its shores’ costal skyline. Great Caracas must overrun what is provincial and local, and think from the power about its international character and its position on the Caribbean. That would give it a major economic turnout, especially to the metropolis and the country.

New investments must be made in infrastructure, big macro projects transforming the city and transforming the country, joined by the new information and communication technologies, massive and efficient transportation collective public systems in order that Caracas may fulfill its future innovative and high prospective productivity role. Nowadays, knowledge is what induces the nations’ progress and the great ideological added value.

Finally, the model to be followed is the innovative thinking one, based on knowledge development. If this model is not successfully developed, the future of Caracas will remain in torpor, under temporary social and spatial drowsiness.

100 commemorating actions

William Niño Araque

Defined as an optimist without remedy, William Niño Araque always defended that Caracas was a splendid open laboratory and a privileged city to live in. In 1993 he published an article in El Diario de Caracas in which
he proposed «one hundred ideas», concrete urban ideas,
as a requirement for the city’s transformation and to
place it on its holy place.

Caracas… needs an abbot to make it sacred, an archangel to protect it, a cardinal to put order in it, a monk to clean it, a gardener to trim it, a carpenter to varnish it, a conqueror to discover it, a discoverer to seduce it, a passion to heal its injuries, to make it tidy, sacred, beautiful, passable, virginal and possible, made of architecture.

The choice of a repertoire of 100 actions or announcements commemorate the architectural events acting over an already created city, one highly dense, with minimal available spaces, and with the sole resource of disorganization. This end of century’s challenge (the new century) is to build on what has already been built, reordering, welding, recovering, mending, sanitizing and revitalizing what already exists.

Opening Caracas’ door to La Guaira. Defining the law for the protection of the highway as a landscape prelude facing the Caribbean. Put order in the door-buildings pointing out Catia’s access to he city. Include in the regulations an architectural strategy governing the city’s growth and allowing the inclusion of typologies; corridor building, corner building, bridge building, patio building.

Maintain as a priority the culmination of the Vargas Park and the realization of the Fifth Centenary Square,declare those today’s city’s central pieces. Eliminate the ugly statue of Bolívar at the Vargas park. Eradicate the Nuevo Circo bus terminal at La Hoyada and declare it a cancelled chapter of Caracas’ history.

Assume the eastern freeway with its huge and displaced landscape potential as a symbol of the city, fostering in it the continuity of new events opening the city towards the North, South, East and West.

Recover the La Estrella square at San Bernardino, revalue the Titania and Astor buildings.

Implant seven promenades in some sort of law of the street: 1. Pérez Bonalde square, Sucre avenue, The Calvary; 2. Artigas square, San Martín, O’Leary; 3. The Lions bridge, La Paz avenue, Madariaga square; 4. O’Leary square, Vargas park, Venezuela square; 5. the Three Graces square, Los Ilustres promenade, Los Próceres; 6. Sabana Grande, Chacaíto, Altamira, 7. Parque del Este, Petare.

Use El Silencio’s experience as the most significant contribution of Caracas’ condition; the horizontal block and the closed block around a patio, something that could be reproduced at other sectors of the city. Foster the execution of urban monuments dedicated to its great promoters: Luis Roche, Manuel Mujica Millán, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Luis Malaussena and Carlos Guinand Sandoz.

Declare the Savoy, Polar and Coca Cola signboards at the Venezuela square as monuments. Recover the Bello Monte and Las Mercedes Art Deco bridges. Make public the Bicentenary square. Walk during four hours a week (mayor’s duty). Restore the old PanAm building of the Urdaneta avenue. Intervene along the horrible Lecuna and North San Agustín avenues.

Clean, relocate and recover of El Paraíso’s La India splendor and axis. Point out Petare as one of the city’s doors, demarcate its acropolis. Restore the Simón Bolívar Center’s towers. Recover the Narváez Dolphins’ water, Restore the Humboldt hotel.

Eradicate, irrevocably, the peddlers’ progressive invasion, visually contaminating the city’s main multiple axis. Retake the Museo del Oeste in its condition of balcony-terrace. Transform the heavy, outdated, bastard and destructive ordinances carried out by donkeys, into light, flexible regulations, under the command of virtuous people.

Protect La Candelaria as a singular landmark. Promote a new interest towards unexplored sectors as Gramovén, La Silsa and Los Flores. Assume La Urbina, Santa Rosalía, San José o Parque Central, as the paradigm of brutal, ugly and clumsy experiences.

Typologically repeat the experience of the Altolar building. Retake Alcock’s idea to recover a series of locations within a system spread along the Guaire river. Recover the city’s Caribbean atmosphere starting from water and arborization. Take off the hindrances or «works of art». Eliminate the visual pollution blocking the sidewalks. Open the city’s perspectives towards the mountain. Recover its brooks and streets. Create a city, without extending its dominions, but recovering its forgotten fragments.

Recover the North-South street going from the Country Club towards the Tamanaco hotel. Build urgent communication bridges over the Guaire river. Free the viaduct on top of the Tamanaco as a visual extension of Las Mercedes main avenue and develop a small square and a fountain in that confined space. Recover El Calvario and the normal use of the Cagigal Observatory as something to be used every day by citizens. Restore the water of all the city’s fountains. As an ethical and honorable condition, save Las Guaycas house at Campo Alegre as the first monument of Caracas’ modernity… cut, weld, sew… place the city at its holy place.

Caracas… needs an abbot to make it sacred, an archangel to protect it, a cardinal to put order in it, a monk to clean it, a gardener to trim it, a carpenter to varnish it, a conqueror to discover it, a discoverer to seduce it, a passion to heal its injuries, to make it tidy, sacred, beautiful, passable, virginal and possible, made of architecture.

The choice of a repertoire of 100 actions or announcements commemorate the architectural events acting over an already created city, one highly dense, with minimal available spaces, and with the sole resource of disorganization. This end of century’s challenge (the new century) is to build on what has already been built, reordering, welding, recovering, mending, sanitizing and revitalizing what already exists.

Opening Caracas’ door to La Guaira. Defining the law for the protection of the highway as a landscape prelude facing the Caribbean. Put order in the door-buildings pointing out Catia’s access to he city. Include in the regulations an architectural strategy governing the city’s growth and allowing the inclusion of typologies; corridor building, corner building, bridge building, patio building.

Maintain as a priority the culmination of the Vargas Park and the realization of the Fifth Centenary Square,declare those today’s city’s central pieces. Eliminate the ugly statue of Bolívar at the Vargas park. Eradicate the Nuevo Circo bus terminal at La Hoyada and declare it a cancelled chapter of Caracas’ history.

Assume the eastern freeway with its huge and displaced landscape potential as a symbol of the city, fostering in it the continuity of new events opening the city towards the North, South, East and West.

Recover the La Estrella square at San Bernardino, revalue the Titania and Astor buildings.

Implant seven promenades in some sort of law of the street: 1. Pérez Bonalde square, Sucre avenue, The Calvary; 2. Artigas square, San Martín, O’Leary; 3. The Lions bridge, La Paz avenue, Madariaga square; 4. O’Leary square, Vargas park, Venezuela square; 5. the Three Graces square, Los Ilustres promenade, Los Próceres; 6. Sabana Grande, Chacaíto, Altamira, 7. Parque del Este, Petare.

Use El Silencio’s experience as the most significant contribution of Caracas’ condition; the horizontal block and the closed block around a patio, something that could be reproduced at other sectors of the city. Foster the execution of urban monuments dedicated to its great promoters: Luis Roche, Manuel Mujica Millán, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, Luis Malaussena and Carlos Guinand Sandoz.

Declare the Savoy, Polar and Coca Cola signboards at the Venezuela square as monuments. Recover the Bello Monte and Las Mercedes Art Deco bridges. Make public the Bicentenary square. Walk during four hours a week (mayor’s duty). Restore the old PanAm building of the Urdaneta avenue. Intervene along the horrible Lecuna and North San Agustín avenues.

Clean, relocate and recover of El Paraíso’s La India splendor and axis. Point out Petare as one of the city’s doors, demarcate its acropolis. Restore the Simón Bolívar Center’s towers. Recover the Narváez Dolphins’ water, Restore the Humboldt hotel.

Eradicate, irrevocably, the peddlers’ progressive invasion, visually contaminating the city’s main multiple axis. Retake the Museo del Oeste in its condition of balcony-terrace. Transform the heavy, outdated, bastard and destructive ordinances carried out by donkeys, into light, flexible regulations, under the command of virtuous people.

Protect La Candelaria as a singular landmark. Promote a new interest towards unexplored sectors as Gramovén, La Silsa and Los Flores. Assume La Urbina, Santa Rosalía, San José o Parque Central, as the paradigm of brutal, ugly and clumsy experiences.

Typologically repeat the experience of the Altolar building. Retake Alcock’s idea to recover a series of locations within a system spread along the Guaire river. Recover the city’s Caribbean atmosphere starting from water and arborization. Take off the hindrances or «works of art». Eliminate the visual pollution blocking the sidewalks. Open the city’s perspectives towards the mountain. Recover its brooks and streets. Create a city, without extending its dominions, but recovering its forgotten fragments.

Recover the North-South street going from the Country Club towards the Tamanaco hotel. Build urgent communication bridges over the Guaire river. Free the viaduct on top of the Tamanaco as a visual extension of Las Mercedes main avenue and develop a small square and a fountain in that confined space. Recover El Calvario and the normal use of the Cagigal Observatory as something to be used every day by citizens. Restore the water of all the city’s fountains. As an ethical and honorable condition, save Las Guaycas house at Campo Alegre as the first monument of Caracas’ modernity… cut, weld, sew… place the city at its holy place.

Caracas has remarkable qualities in its physical context, with the beauty of its natural environment, the closeness of the sea. It is a geometric place of the American continent.

The city is an important value for the nation’s development, in fact, the main development resource that a country has are its cities. The pattern of the cities’ occupation in Venezuela appeared over the zone of the coast-mountain and Caracas is Latin America’s 17th. largest city behind several Latin American regional capitals. Where does Caracas begin and end? Caracas is part of a mega-region going from Guatire to Puerto Cabello. The mega-regions are an urban continuum defined in terms of economic product, that is to say, for its economic capacity.

During the fifties, Caracas was the city of the future. Caracas’ recovery as a city able to generate wealth, as a product city, is a condition for the country’s development. Caracas must guarantee a population with high quality educational levels, dignified jobs and high incomes.

Caracas accepts more population. Housing developments may not be punctual interventions, but rather renewal in urbanism within a city plan. For it, there must be a common North independent from political partiality.

The slums are the most important problem in Caracas, inasmuch as half its population lives in them. This situation may not extend itself more. The slums’ inhabitants have gained citizenship through their sustained effort. One must avoid physical and cultural segregation, and guarantee that the slums’ inhabitants become citizens.

The slum must be recognized as a way of living in Caracas, and that cultural barrier must be torn down integrating those slums to the city. In the so-called barrios there must be a simultaneous effort of infrastructure transformation with cultural action. It has to be possible in Caracas to have the formal city’s inhabitant go to the barrio and enjoy it as a space as dignified and interesting as that where he has normally lived.

Caracas requires a most audacious action for a public transportation multimodal such as the Transmetrópoli, and a rationalization and modernization of the transportation system, an increased pedestrian and cycler mobility, and a regulated motorcycle use, reducing the use of private vehicles to the minimum. Use of the automobile must be limited, either by means of taxes or restriction to the entering specific zones,

Caracas offers also other extraordinary resources: the marvel of the Caribbean Sea, one that should be cleaned. One has to see Caracas with the shoreline, as part of it. La Guaira does not endure the invasion of private transportation. It should be possible to get to the harbor, to the airport, to the beach, to productive activity by public transportation.

Public space is the place where to encounter the entire city, without it there is no way to talk about a city. Caracas must recover its public spaces in a hurry.

Nobody may discuss the quality of Sabana Grande’s physical recovery with the PDVSA-La Estancia project, yet Sabana Grande lost its spirit, and policies should be implemented allowing said spirit’s recovery. Sabana Grande had a better spirit when it had vehicles traffic. Shops moved to shopping centers and the people move without objective. Bookshops, coffee houses… have disappeared. That spirit must be recovered.

The proposal of bids for La Carlota’ project brings about a different way of seeing and developing the city. La Carlota is a factor that may leverage the development and expansion of Caracas beyond the park’s limits, among other things, allowing the North-South communications, ending La Carlota’s role as a plug within the city.

Some legal instruments of urbanism must be generated in Caracas, such as the recovery of the value added or the transfer of rights, allowing the owner of a heritage building to be able to offset the eventual earnings of the property’s demolition with an incentive for him to preserve it. That would allow for heritage recovery, public space recovery, non-rentable spaces, spaces for educational activities or roads, without negatively affecting the owner and without having a wasteful State paying for all those expropriations.

The first thing to attack in the city is the software problem, and then the hardware, as Mokus said; in other words, first the citizenship culture and then the physical problem.

The notion of capital must be assumed

Oscar Tenreiro

Tenreiro’s signature during his life and work has been his resolve; a bridge between desire and realization. A passionate architect, tireless fighter, consistent and critical, he has mended the lack of dissemination of architecture ideas with his long presence in press, where he writes about matters concerning architecture and Venezuelan society.

Graduating from Universidad Central de Venezuela in 1960, he taught Architectural Design, and he is currently a profound admirer of Le Corbusier.

It is pivotal to promote the creation of an urban regulation for the city’s downtown, for the foundational grid, the original squares; a set of rules that allows that zone to develop in a uniform and coherent way. The parish (municipal) planning was forgotten, and it is desirable to retake them in order to promote the rebuilding of the city in terms of volume, reaffirming the idea of the block as perimeter and of the alleyway-corridor, which would give its identity back to downtown Caracas.

The rescue of the creeks and ravines must occur –the Anauco creek, the ravine of Catuche in the southernmost part of town; also, the issue of building a more walking friendly zone in the central quarters of the city has to be resolved, as well as controlling and limiting the vehicular access to that area in order to prevent pollution, chaos and disorder. Transit must be segmented and subject to borderlines.

Citizenship has to be assumed. Caracas is the capital of Venezuela, and as such, it must be treated preferentially. Caracas must be a prosperous city, in an everlasting process of growth, without that implying the misconception that populism has brought with regards to Caracas, which leads to the wrong idea that what is done in Caracas impedes things from being done in the other major cities of the country. The capital needs to be acted upon.

We, the Caraqueños, must finance change in Caracas. A prosperous city implies dynamic private investment, one that produces taxes for the municipalities and enables these to have financial capabilities. It is impossible to keep thinking that Caracas will transform thanks to non-refundable investments provided by the state. The slums must stop being the object of the government’s investments. Something must be done with the city’s marginal areas; the formal city must invade the slums, which means that the slums must produce tax revenues.

The foundational checkerboard requires a very audacious strategy of winning public space, enhanced through diverse urban projects. Pedestrianizing implies winning public space, but such space must also be won in other ways. Expropriation is a mechanism that gives a modern state the fundamental tool to achieve a city’s development, just as it was done in the cases of El Silencio or the Bolívar Avenue. All major urban interventions in Caracas have required expropriation.

Centrality is an asset in any town. What must be done with the Bolívar Avenue? What has to be changed in what was done before? Demolition is an urban criterion for the city’s improvement and coherent development.

The projects drawn for the city’s parks and public spaces must be retaken and reassumed: the West Park, the North Park
—located in the zone adjacent to the National Pantheon, where it was intended to start building on the terrains of the Fleury family—, the United Nations Park, the terrains occupied by the La Araña highway connection, and, of course, La Carlota park.

The area comprised by El Junquito, a space of great landscaping and leisure value, must be made more accessible to visitors, which is true for the zone of El Hatillo as well.

An improvement to the technical and economic capacity of the municipalities that manage large green areas is required; all of this accompanied by the support of the central government.

The Guaire River must be sanitized and can no longer be a waste collector. When will the river be cleaned? The Guaire is not a river anymore, it is stream instead; a place where water from the rain is collected and travels at a very high speed across the city.

A park that is not financially self-sustainable is a utopia. Private investment builds cities. La Carlota is a public space that should include an active park, which should include areas of ritual character, civic, meant for large gatherings; institutional facilities that must be self-financing based on urban conditions that allow the development of the whole park to be capitalized.

Municipalities should endorse respect for architecture and for the dignity of the city’s buildings. Moreover, the common citizen should foster the maintenance and the enhancement of the city’s buildings and their façades.

Caracas must be integrated to Venezuela’s central coastline. The floods opened a new opportunity for the coast that was not taken into advantage. The coastline’s rescue plan must be implemented, and quality beach services must be built whilst rescuing La Guaira’s historic quarters, its roadways, and investing in the villages near the shore. It would be ideal to endorse mass transportation from Caracas to the coastal towns of Chuspa or La Sabana, bringing back the idea of the train to La Guaira that once operated between the two cities.

It is crucial to act in a systematic manner for a period of 20 years over the area of El Tuy, an important reserve for Caracas with great potential. It is necessary to revisit and resume the Ciudad Losada Plan.

Fuerte Tiuna has no use as a military complex. The military use must be relocated, and that area with great potential must be driven towards its integration with the city.

It is pivotal to promote the creation of an urban regulation for the city’s downtown, for the foundational grid, the original squares; a set of rules that allows that zone to develop in a uniform and coherent way. The parish (municipal) planning was forgotten, and it is desirable to retake them in order to promote the rebuilding of the city in terms of volume, reaffirming the idea of the block as perimeter and of the alleyway-corridor, which would give its identity back to downtown Caracas.

The rescue of the creeks and ravines must occur –the Anauco creek, the ravine of Catuche in the southernmost part of town; also, the issue of building a more walking friendly zone in the central quarters of the city has to be resolved, as well as controlling and limiting the vehicular access to that area in order to prevent pollution, chaos and disorder. Transit must be segmented and subject to borderlines.

Citizenship has to be assumed. Caracas is the capital of Venezuela, and as such, it must be treated preferentially. Caracas must be a prosperous city, in an everlasting process of growth, without that implying the misconception that populism has brought with regards to Caracas, which leads to the wrong idea that what is done in Caracas impedes things from being done in the other major cities of the country. The capital needs to be acted upon.

We, the Caraqueños, must finance change in Caracas. A prosperous city implies dynamic private investment, one that produces taxes for the municipalities and enables these to have financial capabilities. It is impossible to keep thinking that Caracas will transform thanks to non-refundable investments provided by the state. The slums must stop being the object of the government’s investments. Something must be done with the city’s marginal areas; the formal city must invade the slums, which means that the slums must produce tax revenues.

The foundational checkerboard requires a very audacious strategy of winning public space, enhanced through diverse urban projects. Pedestrianizing implies winning public space, but such space must also be won in other ways. Expropriation is a mechanism that gives a modern state the fundamental tool to achieve a city’s development, just as it was done in the cases of El Silencio or the Bolívar Avenue. All major urban interventions in Caracas have required expropriation.

Centrality is an asset in any town. What must be done with the Bolívar Avenue? What has to be changed in what was done before? Demolition is an urban criterion for the city’s improvement and coherent development.

The projects drawn for the city’s parks and public spaces must be retaken and reassumed: the West Park, the North Park
—located in the zone adjacent to the National Pantheon, where it was intended to start building on the terrains of the Fleury family—, the United Nations Park, the terrains occupied by the La Araña highway connection, and, of course, La Carlota park.

The area comprised by El Junquito, a space of great landscaping and leisure value, must be made more accessible to visitors, which is true for the zone of El Hatillo as well.

An improvement to the technical and economic capacity of the municipalities that manage large green areas is required; all of this accompanied by the support of the central government.

The Guaire River must be sanitized and can no longer be a waste collector. When will the river be cleaned? The Guaire is not a river anymore, it is stream instead; a place where water from the rain is collected and travels at a very high speed across the city.

A park that is not financially self-sustainable is a utopia. Private investment builds cities. La Carlota is a public space that should include an active park, which should include areas of ritual character, civic, meant for large gatherings; institutional facilities that must be self-financing based on urban conditions that allow the development of the whole park to be capitalized.

Municipalities should endorse respect for architecture and for the dignity of the city’s buildings. Moreover, the common citizen should foster the maintenance and the enhancement of the city’s buildings and their façades.

Caracas must be integrated to Venezuela’s central coastline. The floods opened a new opportunity for the coast that was not taken into advantage. The coastline’s rescue plan must be implemented, and quality beach services must be built whilst rescuing La Guaira’s historic quarters, its roadways, and investing in the villages near the shore. It would be ideal to endorse mass transportation from Caracas to the coastal towns of Chuspa or La Sabana, bringing back the idea of the train to La Guaira that once operated between the two cities.

It is crucial to act in a systematic manner for a period of 20 years over the area of El Tuy, an important reserve for Caracas with great potential. It is necessary to revisit and resume the Ciudad Losada Plan.

Fuerte Tiuna has no use as a military complex. The military use must be relocated, and that area with great potential must be driven towards its integration with the city.

Caracas must be seen as a unit; the sum of the coast of Vargas and Caracas, divided by a grand park, which is the Ávila. Caracas must have a coordinating plan, a catalog of actions; a plan that guides. The document Avances del Plan Estratégico. Caracas Metropolitana 2020 defines a set of acting guidelines, where the idea of a governable Caracas comes to importance.

Governable Caracas. It is imperative to comply with the strategies that will give birth to a governable Caracas. The social efficacy of the urban interventions over Caracas depends on the institutional framework, on clear legislation and norms being both attractive and stimulating in their nature, but also of effective governance. The term «governance» explores the limits of the state trying to develop a wider vision over its own authority and how such authority is exercised, just as it explores the shifting boundaries between state and civil society. The scope of urban governance is that of policies and effective decisions where the collaboration of several actors is mandatory; decisions that cannot be carried out individually.

governability depends on the institutional structures of government, and on governance; in other words, it depends on the mechanisms (relational management) for the integration of society (multiple actors) for the making of decisions, and for the resolution of disputes. Without governance, this meaning relational management, and without a responsible governability covenant between the actors, it will be a daunting task to achieve the social efficacy of the urban interventions needed for Caracas.

Experience shows that conceiving urban planning as a mechanism to be implemented by force –dictated from the apex of power– would mean that the advancement of Caracas would only be partially applicable to situations where there is scarce urban development. Given the complexity of the city nowadays, and the extensive development of the urbanization process, an attempt to apply urban policies being excessively centralized would lead to the halt and delay, or to the irrelevance of the public action of urban management.

It is necessary to distribute municipal powers at two levels: the metropolitan level, where local powers are assigned and which, in the legislator’s judgment, must be performed by the metropolitan scope; and those powers that remain in the municipal scope. The law will determine the amount of resources assigned to the metropolitan entity and other corresponding powers.

Defining the competences belonging to the metropolitan government is a task that must stem from the consensus of the different spheres of government involved, and such task must be founded on cross-sector studies of technical and financial character on the forms of management, financing sources, the establishment of tariffs and payment collection mechanisms, especially on those network services (water, electricity, etc.) that go beyond the metropolitan area.

The future social panorama of the city must promote a global vision, participation, deliberation, transparency and proactivity, collaboration with mutual benefit, negotiation and networking work. There must be a change in the institutional arrangement of government that the Metropolitan Mayor’s Office has, and all decisions taken must be made binding for the national and local governments, both municipal and metropolitan. A plan, if is not binding, is useless.

In the Strategic Plan a set of responsibilities or competencies are suggested, such as urban ordering, housing, structural roadway design, integration of public spaces, land registry, taxation aspects, and, above all, having a say and a vote on each of the public utility companies of the city. From the Plan’s lines of action, the following are noted by their importance:

Caracas accessible and on the Move. Prioritizing the traffic flow, diminishing the pollution levels, stimulating the use of public transport and other non-motorized systems of transportation, favoring pedestrian movement. Projects that aim at building and completing arterial express ways, collectors, highway connections, and bridges are also within the proposals; new strategies for public and mass transportation, cycling, and new strategies and projects in the matters of management, and legal and institutional aspects are envisioned by the Plan as well.

An integrated and safe Caracas. Strategic guidelines and projects for public spaces, green areas, parks, garden, public squares, boulevards and drives. A Metropolitan axis, new equipment, and urban amenities. Strategic guidelines and projects for the re-habilitation of slums, as well as civic safety, disarmament, and prevention.

An environmentally sustainable Caracas. Risk management, integrated water resources management, residual and solid waste disposal.

An entrepreneurial and productive Caracas. A science and technology plan, productive zoning definition and proper equipment to areas where it is duly required.

A Caracas of citizens. Educational campaigns in matters of road safety; the preservation of public spaces, celebration of cultural events, etc.

Caracas is a wonder as a proposal of a city and it also enjoys a plethora of conditions to become even better. Caracas needs common sense. I do not believe in urban planners, and the tradition of well-executed public works has to be restored.

We must reassume Galia’s idea of uniting Caracas through a system of parks on its perimeter, whilst using the Ávila and creating a ring surrounding Caracas. The system proposed by José Miguel Galia framed Caracas and allowed people to travel by foot, on horseback or bicycle, without having to go through traffic.

The Altamira tunnel was a proposal to link Caracas with urban developments on the other side of the Ávila. Those developments would have been on the other side of the tunnel, at Tacagua. The shoreline is part of Caracas, as stated by William Niño. And Caracas’ recreation lies on the central shoreline.

A logical idea would be to link Caracas with the shoreline through the cable car. Arriving by car or on foot to Los Caobos Park, walking along the ravine and turning that ravine next to the Colegio de Ingenieros into a pedestrian walkway to the cable car in order to enable people to spend t time at the beach, at Camurí, and return on the same day.

It is important to rescue the central shoreline’s recreational system, commended by the governor’s office in 1961, which included Catia la Mar, Naiguatá and Macuto, for their proximity (Revista SVA, number 14, Nov-Dec. 1963). The plan envisioned the restoration of the old fountains of Macuto, and the intense planting of vegetation to maximize the shades. The Macuto sea front promenade went from Miramar to Las 15 Letras, and it was intended to prolong it to the Álamo and Puntas de Brisas, considering that any element placed there would have been obstructive to the beaches.

Yet another idea worth being rescued is that of Camurí Chico, which would have been the extension of the larger beach, with an important dimension and to be connected to Macuto, in order to establish the Macuto-Camurí Chico recreational complex.

When arriving at La Carlota from Los Caobos, a perspective of the city with Petare on the background is opened, with a mountain closing it. Among my ideas is the design of the eastern highway’s landscaping, all the way from the Botanic Garden to Petare.

Regarding the Poliedro, this included a project from Soto, which would have been Latin America’s most important initiative in the integration of the arts. In the surroundings of the Poliedro, on the very edge of it, a work of art by Soto called «The wheat field» was proposed, conceived with aluminum bars buried on the soil following a progression.

With the Pawa building I proposed to the mayor’s office the idea of uniting pedestrianly, through a walkway under the shade of the trees, the Paseo Las Mercedes shopping center with the Centro Ciudad Comercial Tamanaco mall, thus taking advantage of the lost space where housing buildings are built by canalizing the Baruta brook. This is a lost opportunity.

With regards to the Alfredo Sadel public square, it was foreseen to connect pedestrianly from Las Mercedes to the Francisco de Miranda avenue, eliminating all the sidewalk separations in Las Mercedes. By doing that, public space was recovered.

The city must not rely exclusively on the hands of its developers; if it were so, the architect becomes just an arranger. Caracas is in the hands of its mayors, who are the ones defining the city’s physiognomy. In Caracas, if an idea is not built in three years, all the conditions will suffer change…in that sense, the idea will change as well. Ideas must be undertaken in the shortest possible time.

All projects must strive to give something to Caracas. Architects must always consider the question of location whilst providing something for the city or the landscape. This should be the norm.

The monument must be respected: the caraqueño must feel the monument, perceive its values, know how to listen to it and preserve it.

The monument as heritage is very fragile.

The tangible monument is extremely fragile.

The more ancient and valuable, the more fragile it gets.

It is an asset that stands defenseless facing earthquakes.

Defenseless when facing natural calamities.

Defenseless facing the devastating impact of war.

Defenseless facing change, which is not always correctly
implemented by the so-called urban reorganizations.

Defenseless when facing inadequate use.

Defenseless when facing ignorance.

Defenseless when facing speculation.

Defenseless when facing tourism.

Defenseless when facing the despise that does not value its meaning and authenticity.

Defenseless when facing conservative negligence.

Defenseless when facing adjective culture.

Defenseless when facing the decisions of incompetent politicians.

But the most serious and, almost always, authorized danger is that of the monument’s vulnerability faced with the talentless architect’s intervention, who with creative presumption, deforms it and degrades it with the mark of his own mediocrity.

Caracas should be a city where civic education is the central element featuring it. Civic education entails civility.

Caracas has unique geographic conditions imposing a way of acting that must be respected. The actions over Caracas have privileged the flattening of the topography, meaning that the terrain has not been understood. We must base ourselves on the geographic space and stop changing it at will in order that we may interpret the city properly and build a powerful image of it. Caracas belongs to the range of cities implanted on a set of topographic, geographic and environmental conditions that are privileged and amazing, just as in Rio de Janeiro. The mountains, the weather, the intense green of the tropical vegetation, the height, makes a green that appears as «could almost be eaten».

In Caracas a city plan that observes the genealogy of the trees should be followed, and then we should consider which architecture could be raised between those trees. We must recognize its history through its trees.

Caracas has developed itself in periods marked by a very important architectural imprint. Not only the colonial town must be considered, there is also architecture of a more recent past, like those buildings from the 40’s, which ask for restoration. The architecture of the 1950’s and 60’s are real values of this city.

Many of the architectural landmarks of present day Caracas belong to the 50’s and 60’s.

The plans must take the brooks into account. Tomás Sanabria, for example, drew almost all the brooks in the 50’s, when they were nearly virginal and scarcely intervened. Today, most of the brooks are undermined, sunken of or dug over. In the valley there are more than 22 brooks that come from the north, and a few others from the south, which open countless possibilities. Improving the city would mean using the ravines as a public space whilst connecting them to the central axis that is the Guaire River, which should be cleansed.

One must improve urban mobilization in Caracas, not just referring to highways, complex distribution systems or subterranean systems of transport. Mobilization must be organized starting from reference points marked by nature, topography, vegetation; all that in order to accomplish a varied and rich offering of mobilization systems. To improve the quality of life in Caracas, it is important to recognize the watercourses as potential riverside walkways, as spaces of urban pilgrimage, of recreation and encounter. The Guaire River is a main artery, and as such, its possibilities must be studied with close attention.

There are key urban projects whose repercussions are capable of modifying the city’s urban quality. The project of the Rental Zone of Plaza Venezuela is an urban development project of a great lot of land that will help solve the node of Plaza Venezuela, where a big public square is envisioned, the square of citizenship: a public space of important dimensions that we hope turns into a place of reunion and into a referential point for the inhabitants of Caracas. An urban project shared by all, and felt as their own by a great majority.

Culture means incorporating public space to education, and that a citizen-shaping element is created; the use of everybody’s space. The city’s projects for its public spaces should go in line with the population’s characteristics: spaces for the elders, for children, for adults, and all those spaces should be harmonically integrated.

Benjamin said that the utopia, that idea of building a future, is the only way of conceiving it. It is very hard to build a city without an idea, without utopia, without a wishful city.

In Latin American cities, the informal is uninterruptedly developed and has no longer been a casual phenomenon. These first decades of the century will be fundamental, specifically when developing its capacity to overcome the economic and political as determining factors and hardly effective under terms of prompt and assertive improvements for emergent urban models, and being able to transcend to what is human on top of the infrastructural as an agent inherent to the city’s integral development. The social organizational and participation practices will be strengthened as long as they may solve the problems starting from a resources’ economy. As a reprogrammable body, Caracas shall have to be upgraded by its inhabitants’ demands. It will be understood as an active cartography being able to make visible in real time the individual requests and giving them relevance in tune with collective ones. Yet, definitely, it may not be the result of an individual or of an individual process, and it shall rather have to connect with and involve the other social agents making up the system who will transmit knowledge through concerted confrontation and debate.

The architect’s role in the city’s construction. Architecture is only a support for the consolidation of self-management and social, cultural and environmental development. The city —Caracas— is no longer a problem of experts. It now implies negotiation, consensus, agreements and collective understanding. What is emergent, causal, transitory and obsolescent becomes now a tragedy but at the same time the keys to redefine contemporary Latin American urbanism. It is a matter of developing strategies to operate on the conflict and absorb disaster; our role is more to get closer to chaos than to stability.

Urgencies: Calling citizens’ agitation in order to promote a policy of what is urban, the identification and reconfiguration of emergent dynamics of use. The street is the key for the renovation of metropolitan tissues but it is also to redefine what is social, starting from the individual’s collective role in the city. Mobility is a platform to support emergent modes of informal occupation and to live at the margins of speed. It is some sort of public space, ephemerous, temporary, mobile or transitory.

The logics of a redefinition of urban lands is found by recovering territory with categories such as multiple purpose or multiple programmatic and with the emancipation of the potential implied in the obsolete, the abandoned or the unregulated. Urban residues such as interstices, emptiness, thresholds and undetermined limits, are the future places.

Future visions: It must be clear that there are no certitudes for what is urban. Totalizing theories may not last in view of the dynamism imprinted by its changing status. Its transformations’ recurrences shall produce crisis on any set of rules, regulations or legislation: the city will never have rules without exceptions; for that, it shall have work on the design of the tools or instruments required to make evident the social demand. What is indeed true is that it shall be for its inhabitants to determine, ever with greater consistency the conditions on which to develope their ways of life or dwelling modes. Public administration shall be bound to avail itself of mechanisms with which to relate and interact with citizens and users, the urban street as a multiple programmatic platform. The street is the key to renovate the metropolitan tissues, but it is also to redefine what is social starting from what is collective of the individual in the city. The street potentially shows itself as a territory for survival. It is structure, speed and directionality. Unconscious transit lies under it, one in which the encounter and the eventual are frequent, but essentially, as any other urban land, reprogrammable. Answering with anticipation to the latent dynamics and potentialities. Disciplines shall have to amplify themselves epistemologically relocating their foundational contents. A progressively greater number of fields of study shall join the construction of the city, understanding it as a collective project. The territory, drawn by multiple hands, shall be configured and defaced, misconfigured and reconfigured. The sequence of events will shape instantaneous urbanisms and emerging scenarios in transition periods. The urban land’s reprogramming, the territories’ reanimation and activation will develop the preparatory interventions and the pattern or gene that will anticipate or lead future occupancies. Lots, areas, spaces or vacant environments will be part of the logistic choreography that will amplify the location’s dynamics.

We shall constantly give a critical and analytical look to the built environment and to the land’s reprogramming: Caracas no longer seen as a collection of objects but rather understood from its human, environmental, geographical, technological, cultural, artistic or care resources. During the forthcoming decade all of this will occur without renouncing to a better city project or without the implicit denial of a better future. Caracas will not cease to be a provoking text and a pretext for research; otherwise it will lead to disorder or at least to agitation. Ultimately, at least, the street is still ours.

_CCS, global city

The world is an urban archipelago, a world of cities. That is how we understand it, and with that in mind we project it. In terms of governance, it seems that global situations would be placed at the local sphere. Since the city is the sole minimal and individual unit of that global archipelago, we could state that to each single body belongs a single brain; a unique body where there is thought, deliberation, decision, government and management of the city.

_CCS, Caribbean city

Capital city of a country of land and a country of water. CCS is the capital of Venezuela, we knew it, and that is more a responsibility than a privilege. The largest accumulation of knowledge and capacity of action must translate itself into the proposal of projection systems, management methods and sustainability of the city applicable to other places. It is worth noticing the Caribbean condition of CCS, the belonging of CCS to a region with a globally transcending name, the Caribbean. In a world where state borders are diluting; where the certainties of natural and geographical differences are vindicated, on the one hand, and the conception of cities as the place of advanced democratic societies, CCS has a role in the future which is leading that water country known as the Caribbean. Caribbean and Venezuela must be united into a single idea bringing a renewed interest by the rest of the world.

_CCS, city region

We have before our eyes an everyday city acting as a lineal metropolis; maybe it is too soon yet, some may think of it as inconceivable, but in the territory of space and time to which we are bound lies a continuing urban experience with flows of greater or lesser intensity that pose themselves over the territory with the shape and function of a corridor integrating Maracaibo with Barquisimeto, the conurbation of Valencia-Maracay and the coast of Puerto Cabello with the west of Caracas, and the east meeting the sea again in Barcelona, Cumaná, Carúpano. A boulevard that extends itself from the sea to the sea, one going through the valley of the Guaire, served by a high speed metropolitan train that will take us from CCS to any one of its extremes in 90 minutes. CCS will be 180 minutes long.

_CCS, mobility of peace

From the scale of the lineal metropolis, to the urban scale of redefined CCS, the personal judgment that we have on the quality of our mobility is the judgment that we will pass on to our city. The cities have ceased being photographic spaces to become cinematographic sets; its actors, its inhabitants, they move, and that condition is today the citizen’s most obvious feature. CCS wishes a calmer mobility in its immediate future, community services that allow the citizen to abandon the suffering of individual transportation, which is unsustainable and chaotic.

_CCS, the water formulates the city

The watercourses are the DNA of our city; water models the land, it gives its shape and it provides the formula for its development and sustenance. The city has been a defensive artifice, facing the unconquerable dangerous nature, the idea built the civitas. Today the anthropic scenario is complete, nature equals urban landscape, and its shape is that of the public space. At CCS, its watercourses, its brooks that flow into the Guaire, or that flow into the sea definitely and daily, are a resource allowing us to think in a dynamic net, to stay or pass by, to enjoy and walk through the city. The metro-brooks will offer us, sooner than later, a new mobility of peace. They will take us to the sea, add our coast to the city, and CCS will finally be a city of two waters.

_CCS, foreseen city

The projected city, foreseen, idealized, the city of blueprints and plans; in CCS they are not few, they’re many, always different and in the quest for innovation, but alike in their objectives. The realty industry generates different models for diverse clients and consumers, but just as the topographical city, it does not search for happiness. It solves housing, but it forgets coexistence. These cities or citadels must dilute their limits and share them, to build public spaces of relation over them. Well-equipped public spaces, since coexistence, the exercise of citizenship, need tools that make it possible. Buildings and public spaces build a city; if they are missing, the city will be no more than a refuge.

_CCS, the found city

The topographic city, the fractal city, grows, climbs, without neither blueprints nor plans, as the coral reef by the association of equals. This city which I don’t like calling informal, has excellence in its genes, taking care of its interiors and exteriors would suffice; this means, improving its family and neighbor services. As in the case of the foreseen city, we will have to endow it with the necessary specialization and hierarchy that defines the urban being useful to its inhabitants.

_CCS, public space-time

Time goes by and things go along our side. In the city we live following the rhythm that the city offers. Time is the right measure of the city. The experience of the city is the sum of spaces of time, the time of displacement, of commute, of work, of food, of leisure, of sleep, of dreams. That is why we say that CCS will be, from Maracaibo to Carúpano, a city measuring 180°.

_CCS, its inhabitants

In that CCS of tomorrow, time should be a public service, just as public space is a service to the community nowadays. The plans of the future shall be maps of time that optimize the quality of that redefined resource, the instruments of virtual reality will be the new interface, they will help us define landscapes, personalized scenarios in a shared space and time.

_CCS, the infrastructures

Caracas will be another one, a new, Babylon. Hanging gardens will be held by monumental structures. The sustainable CCS, which will have abandoned the mobility of chaos, nurtures from artificially recuperated nature; the highways turned into dynamic parks, equipped, useful, from top to bottom. Along the metro-brooks, new courses of citizenships will be added.