Ciudad Guayana
Angotti
Ciudad Guayana
From Growth Pole to Metropolis,
Central Planning to Participation
Thomas Angotti
iudad Guayana in Venezuela is one of the most important examples in Latin America of a city shaped by centralized planning. It was to be an industrial “growth
pole,” attracting jobs and people away from the rapidly growing metropolitan regions
in the north of the country. It was an element in a broader strategy of national economic planning and import substitution aimed at laying the foundation for a diverse
economy to replace export dependency. It was part of the developmentalist approach
that was common throughout Latin America in the 1950s, filled with optimism about
the benefits of economic growth and social progress and the ability of government to
play a leading role in building economic independence.
In three and a half decades, the city expanded to thirty times its original population.
Today, Ciudad Guayana is a rapidly growing city in the process of becoming a metropolitan region.
Over the past ten years, planning for Ciudad Guayana dramatically shifted from a
comprehensive, rational model focused on economic and physical growth to a participatory, community-based model centered on holistic human development. This shift
was led by a radical political movement with roots among labor and Catholic workers.
Its early proponents rejected both the highly centralized approach and neoliberal
alternatives.
In its infancy Ciudad Guayana had been a leading example of the rational
“top-down” model in Latin America. It was made possible by profits from the oil boom
in Venezuela, which made the nation a major player in the global economy and facilitated the growth of government at the national level. Today, Ciudad Guayana is recognized as an example of a possible new “bottom-up” participatory model. This shift is an
important untold story, especially outside of Venezuela, that provides a window into
critical changes in political economy at national and global levels. The shift coincides
with the latest wave of global capitalist expansion that has weakened the direct participation of national governments in economic development, a shift that created the
space for the new planning approach in Ciudad Guayana. In this article, I will seek to
analyze the shift in planning models in the context of broader national, hemispheric,
and international trends.
In a country (and hemisphere) where master plans are traditionally done by professionals without open public discussions, the new Ciudad Guayana plan was a
C
Abstract
Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela is one of the
leading examples in the world of a city
planned in accordance with the principles
of comprehensive rational planning. It
was started in the 1960s as a “growth pole”
in an isolated part of Venezuela, built
around a large steel plant and hydroelectric projects. In the 1990s, the model of
planning shifted from centralized to decentralized as a result of the election victories of a radical political party and
neoliberal restructuring that weakened
central government. The story of this dramatic change contains lessons for planning in the context of the recent wave of
expansion in the global economy.
Thomas Angotti is a professor and chairperson of the Pratt Institute Graduate Center
for Planning and the Environment.
Journal of Planning Education and Research 20:329-338
© 2001 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
329
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revolutionary departure from standard practice. The process
began shortly after Ciudad Guayana chose its first elected
mayor in 1989. It entailed hundreds of meetings with community groups and elected neighborhood associations. For the
first time, planning ideas were written up and distributed for
public discussion. The planning process developed parallel
with and in relation to the budgetary process, and participation was a major component in both.
A large part of the Ciudad Guayana story is the successful
shift in planning process. Perhaps because of this shift, however, the substance of the new Ciudad Guayana plan reads like
no other plan in Venezuela and very few in Latin America. It
moves boldly beyond narrow physical planning to issues of
political economy. It focuses on environmental and quality-oflife concerns, social solidarity, and equity. These are the elements that led Harnecker (1994) to associate the reforms in
Ciudad Guayana with an emerging trend of “governments of
popular participation” that differ substantially from authoritarian and elitist right-wing governments and populist governments of both the Right and the Left. According to Harnecker,
Ciudad Guayana’s popular participation reflects an attempt to
“find solutions for those who were always poor and powerless,
without abandoning concern for the city as a whole” (p. 5).
䉴 Rational Comprehensive Plan
Government planners made the first plans for Ciudad
Guayana in the 1960s with the participation of advisers contracted from the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies.
This coincided with the onset of the Alliance for Progress, in
which North American technological expertise was considered a necessary accompaniment to national economic
growth.
My purpose is not to analyze in detail the original plans or
pass judgment on them, or to assess how and why they were or
were not implemented. That has been done elsewhere.1 Nor is
my purpose to explore the various critiques and modifications
of rational planning theory (see Faludi 1973; Paris 1982) or to
contribute to the bashing of rational planning as part of the
current neoliberal adulation of the so-called marketplace. Furthermore, I do not wish to repeat the well-established demonstrations that growth pole and import substitution theories did
not yield the results they promised.
I believe the most important lessons here are in understanding how and why the planning process has changed so dramatically. This requires us to assess how planning has shaped
and been shaped by the physical, economic, social, and political environment. It is also important to consider planning in
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Ciudad Guayana relative to planning in other Venezuelan and
Latin American cities and to avoid using noncontextual models as ideals against which all planning should be measured. If
we must judge planning, perhaps the fundamental question
we should ask is within its historical context: to what extent did
planning contribute to a process of making a more efficient,
equitable, and sustainable city?
In the following section, I show how the original plan for
Ciudad Guayana, placed in its historical context, was a
path-breaking effort, a progressive attempt to create an alternative to the impoverished, dependent metropolis then common in Latin America. The rational comprehensive planning
model was a necessary accompaniment to the massive government investments in industry. Without a sizable comprehensive planning effort, these investments could have been compromised. The comprehensive plan was partially successful; its
failures, however, are sizable.
We can also see that the recent efforts to democratize planning and address economic inequalities in Ciudad Guayana
are path breaking in their time. They lead and parallel more
general trends in Latin America and other developing regions,
and correspond with the evolution of Ciudad Guayana from a
city into a major metropolitan region. Another example of
democratic local planning may be seen in the participatory
budgeting process developed by the Workers Party governments over the past ten years in Porto Alegre, Brazil (Abers
1996, 1998). The Porto Alegre experience contrasts starkly
with Brasilia—Brazil’s example of comprehensive rational
planning from the same era in which Ciudad Guayana was created (see Epstein 1973). The seeds of other efforts in participatory planning may be found in left-wing and other local governments throughout Latin America, but it is still too early to
call this a major new paradigm or trend. Indeed, in the 1990s
the more prevalent trend has been toward “strategic planning”
initiatives throughout Latin America. These initiatives often
start with the business/military approach to planning that
emphasizes economic growth and capital expansion. They
usually include public participation, and some adopt significant environmental and social content, but the mission is usually to market one’s city within the competitive global
environment.
The new planning approach in Ciudad Guayana explicitly
sets out to improve the quality of life and to alleviate inequalities. These were not the overarching goals of the first Ciudad
Guayana plan, but in its time and in its own way the plan partially achieved these goals. At the very least, the original plan
has outlived its usefulness. The new planning process, however, is still relatively untested, and our assessments of it must
be tentative. At the time of this writing, Venezuelan voters just
Ciudad Guayana
approved a new constitution, and it remains to be seen how the
new national government of Hugo Chávez will affect local government and planning.
This is not to deny either the serious problems of Ciudad
Guayana today or the responsibility of the planners for creating them. Peattie’s (1987) lucid analysis and critique highlighted the historic oversights in the
highly centralized planning process as
well as the planners’ prejudices that
were codified in official policy. Peattie
showed how planning for Ciudad
Guayana was driven by the process of
capitalist accumulation and the process of legitimization of elite power.
Planning for the city was driven by policies that favored primary industry and
high-profile public works projects at
the expense of the needs of the
region’s people, and without their
participation.
In the following, I will briefly review
the historical context, look at Ciudad
Guayana today, and then analyze the
shift to a new planning model and possible consequences for the future.
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The new oil-fed economy also raised fears among elites that
Venezuela’s economy would grow hopelessly dependent on oil
exports and that the central and southern regions of the country would be abandoned as the cities in the northern mountain
region continued to grow. In 1960, the majority of Venezuela’s
export earnings came from oil, and more than half of the pop-
䉴 Historic Context and the
Early Plans
The first proposals to plan and
build a new city in the south of VeneFigure 1
zuela arose in the late 1950s in a political environment of growing calls for
national economic independence. The government of Rómulo
Betancourt, which followed years of military rule, projected
the vision of a democratic nation able to determine its own
future, reviving the tradition of scientific positivism prevalent
throughout Latin America. Since the 1940s, the oil boom in
Venezuela had been transforming one of the most rural and
impoverished nations in Latin America into one of the most
urban and wealthy. By the late 1950s, the growth of government participation in the oil industry (the industry was completely nationalized in 1976) created a new oligarchy and middle class fed by oil profits whose future was linked to global
capitalism. Venezuela’s state-run oil company, which produced the majority of government revenues, became a fullfledged transnational corporation and wedded government to
the global marketplace (Petras, Morley, and Smith 1977).
ulation lived in the five large cities in the northern mountain
and coastal regions—Caracas, Valencia, Maracay, Barquisimeto, and Maracaibo (see Figure 1). “Primate city” theory
implied that the small number of very large cities in the north
was dysfunctional and would eventually concentrate all the
population. Ciudad Guayana was to be part of a strategy to
encourage urban development in the south and relieve growth
pressures in the north (see Negrón 1991; Angotti 1998).
Throughout Latin America in this period, there emerged
various forms of dependency theory, which was critical of economic dependency on the more developed nations, particularly the United States (Chilcote 1982). Dependency theory
was a response to the postwar wave of globalization.
Developmentalist alternatives advocating import substitution
strategies and national economic planning, which originated
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in the period after World War II, were given new meaning
when the Cuban Revolution took place in 1959. These ostensibly national strategies would not only spur national economic
growth, they would offer a peaceful alternative to revolution as
part of the broader Alliance for Progress promoted by the
United States. The approach in Brazil was very similar to that in
Venezuela: centralized planning mechanisms were adopted,
and a new city in the nation’s interior (Brasilia) was built. However, Venezuela’s efforts were guided by a civil regime that
Figure 2
advocated a more democratic concept of state-led development compared with the military governments in Brazil and
other countries.
In 1959, Betancourt created a commission to study development of the Guayana region, a largely unpopulated area in the
south of the country rich in mineral deposits, including the
vast Orinoco River valley and a large jungle region bordering
Brazil and Guyana. In 1960, the government created the
Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG), a public corporation with powers to plan, build, and manage a major urban
center. The government would then transfer 36,150 hectares
of land to the new corporation (Primer Congreso Nacional de
Arquitectos 1971).
In 1960, there were several small settlements in the area
designated as the new Ciudad Guayana. San Félix was a fishing
village with some 20,000 people located along the banks of the
Orinoco River. About ten kilometers (six miles) away, across
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the Caroní River, was a small mining camp, Puerto Ordáz,
where a large steel mill was being built. In 1961, the entire State
of Bolívar, where Ciudad Guayana was located, had a total population of 214,000. In that year, the state created the municipality of Caroní, which included the small settlements of San
Félix, El Roble, Dalla’Costa, Castillito, Puerto Ordáz,
Matanzas, and Caruachí (Primer Congreso Nacional de
Arquitectos 1971).
The central vision of the future Ciudad Guayana that lay
beneath the government actions was
that of an industrial city with a large
steel plant that would create a multiplier effect, expanding opportunities
for other industries and services.
Direct government investment was to
have created a strategic heavy industrial sector that would stimulate manufacturing and light industry, resulting
in a diversified independent economy
no longer reliant on industrial
imports. This was in the context of a
national economic plan prepared
under the President’s Office of Coordination and Planning. Another key
move was to build a series of hydroelectric dams in the region that would minimize dependence on oil for domestic
energy generation. These industrial
and public works projects were perhaps the main reason for the Ciudad
Guayana plan, which helps explain
why the priorities of planners were to
spur and rationalize investment and
economic growth (see Peattie 1987).
The MIT-Harvard team, including John Friedmann, Lloyd
Rodwin, and Donald Appleyard, served from 1961 to 1966 and
worked with Venezuelan planners to produce a physical master
plan for the new city. The basic concept behind the first plan
was to connect the two existing settlements of San Félix and
Puerto Ordáz with a central development spine that would
serve both commercial and residential functions (see Figure
2). The west side of the Caroní River, where the heavy industry
was located in a vast industrial reserve, would be linked to the
eastern portion, where the majority of the population lived
(see Friedmann 1966; Appleyard 1976; Peattie 1968).
Since 1961, the CVG has planned and managed virtually all
aspects of economic and urban development. It set up industries, mostly government-owned enterprises, and built roads,
schools, health facilities, and housing. It provided all urban
services. The municipality of Caroní, on the other hand, was
Ciudad Guayana
333
mostly a ceremonial entity whose officials were appointed by
the central government but had little involvement in planning
and management.
Ciudad Guayana has become Venezuela’s “Wild West” frontier city. Industry recruited foreign laborers from all over Latin
America, southern Europe, and the United States. An estimated one-third of the industrial workforce is foreign labor.
Workers fleeing political repression in countries such as Chile
and Peru came to work in construction, mining, and manufacturing. By 1970, the population was 148,000; by 1990, it was
577,000; and by the year 2000, it was approximately 800,000.
These figures do not deviate substantially from initial projections by the CVG (Vila 1985, Table 1).
Ciudad Guayana’s dramatic economic growth did not fundamentally alter the structure of dependency on global capitalist development. To some extent, the city became a factory
enclave with stronger ties to the global export market than to
Venezuela’s internal market. This was obvious when global
competition in steel created a serious crisis in this key industry
in the 1980s. Even more devastating, however, was the concurrent drop in oil prices on the international market, which led
to a sharp decline in the Venezuelan government’s main
source of revenue. The oil crisis made it more difficult for the
government and the CVG to finance needed modernization of
industry and expanded urban services.
䉴 Ciudad Guayana Today
2
Ciudad Guayana today is a sprawling metropolis in the
making. It is one of the largest cities in Venezuela. However,
the goal of displacing urban population from the northern
coastal region was not achieved; in fact, a large proportion
(there are no reliable figures) of the city’s immigration was
from outside the country. The leveling off of growth rates in
northern metropolises is hardly attributable to Ciudad
Guayana, and growth rates in medium-sized northern cities
have risen.
Despite its dramatic growth, Ciudad Guayana is in many
ways still a loosely bound collection of physically separate communities and not yet a unified human settlement. There is little civic identity with the evolving metropolitan entity denoted
Ciudad Guayana by officialdom. If one arrives by air, one lands
at the Puerto Ordáz airport. If one lives in San Félix, one considers Ciudad Guayana to be the upper-income area built for
factory workers, professionals, and management. The entire
urbanized area extends along an east-west corridor more than
forty kilometers (twenty-four miles) long, encompassing
scores of communities. Many people, except for the factory
workers and those few who are fortunate enough to own a car,
rarely leave their communities. Peattie (1987) summed up the
situation:
The city as implemented falls considerably short of the
hopes held out for it by its planners. . . . There is a high
degree of social inequality in the city; in this the city does
not differ from Venezuela as a whole, but more than is usual
in Venezuela this is expressed in sharp spatial separation
between rich and poor, and the inequality is thus even more
than usually visible. . . . Thus it is only the planners who
know their product as “Ciudad Guayana”; in the telephone
directory, ticket agency, and common conversation it
appears as distinct settlements, two cities. (P. 153)
Ciudad Guayana is indeed the leading center for “basic”
industry that it was conceived to be. The state-owned steel and
aluminum plants play an important role in the local and
national economies. About 30 percent of the labor force works
in industry, 10 percent less than originally projected, but substantially more than in other Venezuelan cities. The multiplier
effect never occurred, however, and most employment outside
the few large industries is in low-paying services, not other
industries. The benefits of the economic “takeoff” in Ciudad
Guayana were limited mostly to workers and management in
the basic industries (see Rakowski 1989). Unemployment figures are unreliable, but it does appear that unemployment levels are somewhat less than in other Venezuelan cities. As is true
throughout Latin America, official employment data do not
accurately measure employment in the informal sector, which
includes services, contracting out, home-based production,
and other nonsalaried labor that is in part dependent on the
demand for goods and services from the formal sector.
The basic idea of the first physical plan—linking existing
settlements by means of a new development spine—has not
produced the integration of separate communities that was
expected. Vast undeveloped areas still separate residential
communities. What is more, new settlements have spread
beyond the limits anticipated in the original plan, producing
even greater sprawl.
The city that was supposed to reduce oil dependence is
more dependent on motor vehicle use than perhaps any other
city in Venezuela. The only effective means of transportation in
Ciudad Guayana is by automobile, and most residents do not
own one. Pedestrian and bicycle circulation is difficult and
unsafe, as there are few sidewalks, paths, or vehicular traffic
controls. Workers in the factories may commute by bus, but
their commute can be one to two hours long. Most of the buses
are owned or contracted by the industrial enterprises and do
not serve the rest of the population. There is a large fleet of jitneys (por puestos) that is generally inadequate and costly. The
large commercial center, Alta Vista, which was to have been the
central element in the connecting spine, is too far from most
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housing to become the “downtown” it was planned to be, and is
but one of several commercial centers that dot the urbanized
region, although it may be more important for the middle
class. Located on a hill, its modern buildings perched above
the sprawling valley, Alta Vista is a distant icon of the formal
city.
Seventy percent of the population still lives on the San Félix
side of the river, separated by long distances from the jobs on
the Puerto Ordáz side. The original plan anticipated just the
opposite pattern, with most of the population shifting closer to
industry. While in recent years population around Puerto
Ordáz has been growing at a faster pace, and accessibility has
vastly improved with the construction of two new bridges over
the Caroní River (there are now three bridges), the problem of
accessibility to both public and private transportation remains.
If Ciudad Guayana was to have been an example of modern
city development without a vast sector of housing built in violation of codes and without services, as in other Latin American
cities, it has been a partial success. The CVG developed a program to deal with low-income immigrants and squatters, providing sites and services. Although the CVG at times
attempted, usually without success, to evict squatters, it often
helped squatters to regularize their tenancy. As a result, some
15 percent of all housing was built without formal planning
approval, compared with 40 to 50 percent in Caracas and other
Venezuelan cities. Still, some one-third of the population lives
in very marginal circumstances—similar to although possibly
less than the proportion elsewhere in Venezuela (see Scattoni
and Vila 1994). To some extent, this outcome may be attributed to the relative wealth of Ciudad Guayana, but in a nation
where government planning has historically ignored the barrios, no other Venezuelan city has had as ambitious a program
for dealing with and serving existing and potentially “marginal” areas. Still, in Ciudad Guayana, the territorial distribution of poverty is no less segregated than in other Venezuelan
cities. The low-income population is disproportionately
located in the San Félix area, as it was thirty-five years ago, and
in other communities farthest from the industrial zone.
The CVG’s clear spending priority was industry and its strategic objective economic growth. This can be seen in the contrast between the well-served industrial area and the poorly
served residential communities. Also, the best-served residential neighborhoods are the ones built for industrial workers
and managers. This hierarchy was both a conscious element in
the plans and a reflection of existing social inequality. The
CVG had five levels of housing expenditure that differentiated
housing strategies according to social stratum. The amount
provided for the lower strata was never enough to satisfy the
need for low-income housing, thereby placing the CVG in a
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situation of reacting to land invasions instead of anticipating
them.
One important asset of Ciudad Guayana compared with
other Venezuelan cities is the natural environment. Ciudad
Guayana is bordered by a large river and bisected by another
and includes two giant wilderness parks with waterfalls in the
center of the city. Many green spaces remain undeveloped, and
the low-density residential communities have a distinct rural
air, where roosters crow at dawn and people walk and meet in
the streets. However, the sprawling pattern of development has
eaten up a large portion of the land, air pollution is a problem
near the large factories, and raw sewage contaminates the
rivers. Ciudad Guayana is also the center for a growing tourist
industry in the region’s jungles and forests.
Low-income residential communities that existed in the
1960s and were observed and appreciated in the works of
Peattie and Appleyard remain today as they were then, with
some incremental improvements. They are viable communities but are still seen as marginal by the more traditional government planners. Many things have changed around them;
they were bypassed by official planning, for better and for
worse.
䉴 Shift in Planning Model
After completion of the first master plan for Ciudad
Guayana in 1963, there were subsequent revisions in 1969,
1979, and 1985. The first master plan completed with a participatory model is dated 1994.
Dramatic changes in Latin America and Venezuela during
the 1980s created the conditions for an abrupt shift in the planning model in Ciudad Guayana in the 1990s. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank introduced
structural adjustment programs throughout Latin America to
deal with the problems of debt and inflation. Venezuela also
faced a decline in world market prices for petroleum, reducing
the main source of government revenues needed to finance
social spending. The government sought to confront the crisis
by raising domestic gasoline prices, at that time the cheapest in
the world, eliminating price supports and reducing subsidies.
Widespread urban rebellions in Venezuela made further price
increases problematic.
As this succession of events suggests, Venezuela remains
highly dependent on the global market. The wave of global
capitalist expansion that began in the late 1970s facilitated an
economic boom in Venezuela and made possible the continued growth of Ciudad Guayana. However, this new wave of
globalization also produced the crises that called into question
Ciudad Guayana
the prevailing system of economic management and political
governance.
In a further attempt to solve the government’s fiscal crisis,
Venezuela’s leaders turned to strategies of decentralization
and privatization. These policies were consistent with the
IMF/World Bank approach of reducing government involvement in the economy. In the 1980s, the Venezuelan Congress
passed a comprehensive law for the first time permitting local
election of municipal and state officials. The first local
elections were held in 1989. The new law, however, was not
just a strategy of structural adjustment. It responded to widespread criticism of government corruption and inadequate
service delivery due to overcentralization. It was supported
by community movements and large sectors of the Left
because it responded to growing protests from working-class
communities.
The Venezuelan government was also moving to privatize
many government-owned enterprises. The CVG and
state-owned industries in Ciudad Guayana were prime targets.
The CVG would be asked to shed some of its functions and turn
them over to local government. By the mid 1990s, privatization
was under way at the major factories in Ciudad Guayana. Devolution of services to municipal government was much slower
and more difficult, but clearly on the agenda.
The government was widely discredited by both the Left
and the Right and could no longer operate in the old way. This
widespread dissatisfaction ultimately fed two coup attempts in
the early 1990s and led to the subsequent election of coup
leader Chávez in 1999. In Ciudad Guayana, as in many other
localities, local government was as reviled as the national government. Due to austerity measures at the national level, the
CVG’s hegemony in the planning and management of Ciudad
Guayana was threatened. Due to impending elections, the
patronage appointees to city government could no longer be
guaranteed their jobs. Strapped with their institutional histories of top-down decision making, neither the CVG nor the
major parties responsible for governance were able to develop
a strategy for transition to decentralized government. Thus,
the election of local government left open a huge void in political power.
A radical political movement emerged in Venezuela in the
1970s. Led by industrial workers and left-wing Catholics in
Ciudad Guayana, the movement eventually coalesced in a new
national party, La Causa R (LCR). LCR had populist leanings
but brought together a broad range of forces dissatisfied with
government and anxious for a break with the past. It started
among workers at Ciudad Guayana’s industrial plants who
were facing declining wages and corrupt unionism. They got
no support from the two major parties that had alternated control of government since the end of the military dictatorship.
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LCR did not limit its organizing to workplace issues and sought
to address the problems of daily life—transportation, housing,
education, water and sewer, and other services. The workers
formed alliances with community organizations, much as the
Brazilian Workers Party had done (for a history of LCR, see
Maya 1994). By 1989, the year of the first municipal elections,
LCR was the largest party in the region and the only one with a
strategy and popular base for implementing the transition to a
new decentralized system. The first elected mayor of the
municipality of Caroní, Clemente Scotto, was a leader of LCR,
as was the first elected governor of Bolívar.3
Scotto entered city hall and was confronted with urgent
financial, personnel, and organizational problems. He claims
he spent almost all of the first year “putting the house in order.”
In 1991, while undertaking consultations with neighborhoods,
the mayor launched the process of planning for a new master
plan—the Plan de Ordenamiento Urbano (POU).
The new model of planning may not be particularly novel
to planners in the United States who are accustomed to having
community consultations and have access to the history of progressive approaches to local planning (Clavel 1986). But in
Venezuela, where all plans were discussed and finalized in
planning offices with no consultation at all, this turnaround
was nothing less than extraordinary. Furthermore, in most
other Venezuelan municipalities governed by the nation’s two
traditional parties (Acción Democrática and COPEI), no such
turnaround occurred, even years after the 1989 elections.
Scotto brought new professional expertise to city hall to
undertake work on the plan. His planning team was interdisciplinary and included many women, who tended to show a
greater appreciation for a participatory approach than the traditional male planners. The CVG hierarchy, controlled by
Acción Democrática, loudly objected to an initiative that did
not involve them. As a result, the POU technical team ended
up being directed by a triumvirate including planners from
city government, the CVG, and the national planning ministry
(MINDUR). This collaboration evidently turned out to be a
fortuitous one and facilitated intragovernmental cooperation.
Clearly, however, city government retained the political initiative and leadership in the planning process.
The planners charted out four phases to the planning process: prediagnostic, diagnostic, visioning, and development of
the plan. In this sense, the process resembled in part the rational approach with which planners were quite familiar. They
would describe existing conditions in the prediagnostic phase,
work with communities to identify problems in the diagnostic
phase, establish visions for the future in the visioning phase,
and consolidate the process by preparing a formal plan in the
final phase. The planning office contracted with experts at the
Central University of Venezuela (both, significantly, were
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women) to prepare basic plan documentation and catalog
results from neighborhood meetings (Marcano and Foley
1994; Vila 1995).
However, the picture that emerges from my review of planning documents and a series of interviews with participants in
the process is of a process that diverges substantially from the
traditional rational planning model.4 There was no hard and
fast blueprint defining the length of the process or preordaining the results. The team launched extensive rounds of open
meetings in all neighborhoods, and new ideas and proposals
emerged in the process. The local government worked closely
with elected neighborhood associations or parroquias, which
became the official interlocutors with the planning team (the
planning process appears to have given legitimacy to the
parroquias). Newsletters and handouts provided basic information developed by the planning team and reported on the
results of deliberations. An important aspect of the participation was its involvement of the poor neighborhoods around
San Félix and elsewhere. Another key element was involvement of groups and individuals who did not necessarily support the mayor’s election, including some who were drawn
into politics for the first time when they attended a planning
session.
The POU was completed in 1994 and approved after a
required sixty-day period of public hearings. The overall thrust
of the plan revolved around five key objectives (Almacaroní
n.d.):
1. Consolidate Ciudad Guayana as the most important city in
the south of the nation
2. Improve the quality of life of the inhabitants
3. Establish a harmonious relation with nature
4. Contribute to a sense of belonging while respecting cultural diversity
5. Consolidate a local democratic administration with
increasing autonomy
Within each of these categories, the plan details more specific
objectives, programs, and projects. Concretely, the plan seeks
to overcome the problems of internal physical and social fragmentation, lack of jobs and services, environmental deterioration, and a relatively undeveloped civic life.
By the time the plan was approved, the local government
had already established as general practice a process of community participation for discussion and approval of its annual
budget. Each year, detailed budget reports were made available to the public. This was one example among many of how
the participatory process was not limited to plan development.
Although the plan was inevitably uneven and many did not participate, everyone could observe that under the new regime,
open participation was held up as a standard, both in theory
and in practice.
Angotti
In form, the new plan for Ciudad Guayana looks and
sounds like many other modern master plans. In content, however, it deviates from the more traditional physical planning
approaches. Concepts such as “regional integration,”
“sustainability,” “healthy cities,” and “solidarity” point to quality-of-life concerns that go beyond the usual focus on land use
and physical infrastructure. The plan recognizes the “informal
sector” and calls for government to support it. It proposes strategies for increasing accessibility without dependence on the
automobile. Although none of these concepts by themselves is
revolutionary, in the present-day context of Ciudad Guayana
and Venezuela, they represent a revolutionary way of perceiving the role of government and the future of the city.
䉴 After the Plan
After having won a second term in a landslide, and after
serving two terms (six years), Scotto was prevented by term limits from seeking a third term as mayor. Pastora Medina, also of
LCR, became the new mayor. She brought in a new team of
planners who were to prepare the more detailed plans for each
neighborhood that would make up the Plan de Desarrollo
Urban Local (PDUL), which was to be based on the POU. The
new team seriously questioned aspects of the POU and raised
concerns about the ability of government to implement some
of the recommendations. In the midst of considerable internal
debate, there was little progress on the PDUL. By the summer
of 1997, most of the new team had left city government, and
the planning office was reorganized to take up the work again.
After the POU was completed, the person responsible as
liaison from MINDUR to Caroní was replaced by an official
who interpreted more conservatively the conformance of the
POU with national guidelines. He held up its approval. Two
years after submission of the plan, local officials were still awaiting official acceptance. In sum, while the six years of radical
change under the administration of Scotto set in motion a process of participatory planning that has been partially institutionalized, it appears that the forward motion has stopped and
the plans from that period have been called into question.
The new planning director appointed by Medina had been
a manager in a state-owned enterprise. With the POU completed, she was able to take a fresh look at the sometimes
erratic planning process in the previous administration. One
of her new efforts was to develop a manual that established a
process of strategic planning within government (Almacaroní
1997). This seems to indicate a shift toward a corporate model
of planning and away from participatory planning involving
neighborhoods and civic groups; or it may simply mean that
the government has taken a needed breather to put its affairs
Ciudad Guayana
in order. It will be difficult to make any conclusive assessments
on this account until substantial work has been completed on
the PDUL. In the meantime, further changes may come about
as a result of the very recent appointment of Scotto by the new
Venezuelan government to head the CVG. This could speed
up or change the terms of the process of service devolution,
which has up to now been very slow. It has taken more than five
years for the CVG to transfer solid waste collection and management to the municipality of Caroní. The need to raise local
revenues and develop a local management capability have
made devolution a rocky process, and to date this is the only
major service transferred to local government.
䉴 Lessons and Future Prospects
Whatever the final outcome, it is clear that the old
top-down approach to planning and municipal governance
can return only with great difficulty. The expectations for local
involvement have been raised. LCR gained national recognition as a political party because of its work in the Guayana
region, and the party has staked its future on an open, participatory approach to governance. As an indication of the party’s
popularity, the former governor of Bolívar made several serious although unsuccessful runs for president of Venezuela.
However, some of LCR’s luster has worn off due to its alliances
in some instances with traditional political forces and, some
say, adoption of traditional political tactics. In 1997, the party
split over the extent of support for IMF-mandated austerity
measures, including privatization. Most of the party leadership
in Ciudad Guayana has opted for the new party, called Por La
Patria, that formed after the split, which is the most wary of privatization and the Venezuelan government’s management of
the process.
While there is now a growing civic consciousness and a
more pluralistic political environment in Ciudad Guayana, the
possibility remains of returning to the day in which government policies gave clear priority to economic growth instead of
equity. Indeed, the government of Venezuela is opening up the
region around Ciudad Guayana for private mining, while just
to the north near Maturín vast new petroleum reserves will be
tapped. The potential for the return to a model of growth and
planning driven by the needs of enterprise—now mostly private enterprise instead of public—remains very real. The continuing dominance of petroleum exports in the Venezuelan
economy may further limit efforts for local autonomy. What
started as radical democratic changes could be consumed by
neoliberal “reforms” or diluted by the centralist tendencies in
the current government of President Chávez. Thus, as Venezuela and Ciudad Guayana face a new economic boom and
337
political changes in coming decades, it remains to be seen to
what extent the participatory model will be consolidated or
eliminated.
The questions that remain unresolved are as follows: Will
the new model of participatory planning in Ciudad Guayana
be used, in the long run, as a vehicle for structural adjustment
and fiscal austerity instead of democratization? Will it be used
to download the responsibilities of national government without providing adequate resources? Did LCR and the labor and
community movements play into the same neoliberal policies
they forcefully objected to? It would be a mistake to characterize every step toward local democracy as reinforcing global
expansion and government downsizing, and it is a mistake to
overlook real and progressive grassroots opposition to ineffective and corrupt national governments. But it is an open question whether that opposition will consolidate as a long-term
political force and maintain its commitment to independent
development, human-centered planning, and social equity.
On a broader level, the question is whether radical local
changes can influence the globalization process and constrain
global market forces. From the Ciudad Guayana case, we can
see how local efforts can help change national policies and the
balance of political power. As in the recent demonstrations in
Seattle and Washington, D.C. against the World Trade Organization, local activism may also play a role in the struggle to gain
democratic control over the global marketplace and plan for a
better quality of life for all citizens.
Author’s Note: This is a revised and updated version of a paper presented at
the Latin American Studies Association conference in Chicago, September
1998, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, November 1997. Many thanks to the Urban Planning program at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) for the use of its library.
Special thanks go to Ester Marcano, Frank Marcano, and Elisenda Vila at
the UCV, and in Ciudad Guayana to Sunilde Araujo, Yajaira Briceño,
María Nuria De Cesaris, Kathy Rakowski, Luisa Rodríguez, and Clemente
Scotto. Darío Vergara, Kathy Rakowski, and the Journal of Planning Education and Research reviewers provided useful comments on an earlier draft
of this article.
䉴 Notes
1. See Appleyard (1976), Friedmann (1966), Macdonald
(1979), McGinn and Davies (1969), Peattie (1968, 1987), and
Rodwin (1969).
2. In large measure, the analysis of Ciudad Guayana today is
taken from reports generated in the development of the most
recent master plan (Marcano and Foley 1994).
3. For a review of La Causa R’s program of participatory democracy in Ciudad Guayana by the people who created it, and the
problems encountered by the new administration, see Harnecker
338
(1994). For an analysis of the local government’s experience with
public participation, see Cartaya and García (1996).
4. The documents include Almacaroní (1997, n.d.), draft
plans, circulars, newsletters, and reports issued by the planning
teams. Useful studies that evaluate the planning process include
Cartaya and García (1996), Marcano and Foley (1994), and
Scattoni and Vila (1994). Meetings were held with the city’s planning staff, including critics of the planning process, and two former staff members who were central to the process. The new
planning director, former mayor Clemente Scotto, and researchers Ester Marcano, Elisenda Vila, and Kathy Rakowski were also
interviewed. Each meeting and interview was structured around
ten open-ended questions that were made available to the participants in advance.
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