Urban Disputes in 21st Century Caracas: Challenges and Potentialities in the Social Production of the City

Abstract

During the last decade Venezuelan cities have experienced important transformations associated with “formal” and “informal” real-estate market expansions, new schemes for oil rent redistribution and the emergence of new subjectivities which, articulated to social popular movements, intervene in the city and the urban in order to transform it. In this article we analyze two cases which exemplify distinct processes that have contributed to the social production of urban land and the city during the last decade: Pioneer Camps, and Venezuela’s Great Housing Mission. Based on qualitative studies and the revision of existing bibliography this analysis highlights the “logics” that converge, in conflicting ways, in the social production of space in the city. They allow us to look into the ways in which urban social inequalities are reproduced and/or transgressed and the potentialities of social practices that, deployed over territories, propose new ways of inhabiting a city historically marked by fragmentation, segregation and exclusion.