Pedagogical Urbanism and the Right to the City in Caracas

This paper examines the Caracas metro transit system as a spatial expression of the exercise and capture of political power in Venezuela. Initially conceived by modernizing elites in the mid-twentieth century as means of rationalizing the capital city and its inhabitants, the metro has since its inception been as much an instrument of social engineering as an element of urban planning. The paper tracks the metro from its origins in Latin American positivism, to its ambiguous role in the neoliberalization of the 1980s and 1990s, to its status in more contemporary claims and counter-claims for a more inclusive ‘right to the city.’ While the metro plays a key interventionist role across all of these moments I contend that these iterations are driven by competing understandings of collective life and the transformative power of the urban environment. The metro, in other words, is more than transit infrastructure. It is, rather, both agent and terrain in the imagining, pursuit, and reaction to social change.