Back to Search
Start Over
Infrastructure and Insurrection: The Caracas Metro and the Right to the City in Venezuela.
- Source :
-
Latin American Research Review . 2017, Vol. 52 Issue 5, p775-791. 17p. - Publication Year :
- 2017
-
Abstract
- This article envisions the Caracas Metro as infrastructure that forms and is formed by political subjectivity and urban space. The first section provides a brief history of the metro as conceived by modernization-minded politicians in the twentieth century. Here the Metro is seen as playing a pedagogical function in accordance with a larger tradition of Venezuelan positivism. The second section examines a shift in the social and political composition of Caracas after El Caracazo of 1989. In response to neoliberalization, social movements reshaped the terrain of politics and the city in a way that can be usefully conceptualized as demands for the right to the city--that subjects have the right to access, shape, and themselves be shaped by the urban environment. I conclude with an analysis of 2014's violent antigovernment protests. The tactics and targets of these protests--barricades and direct attacks on public infrastructure such as the Metro--illustrate the perceived threat democratized urban space poses to traditional elites in the context of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00238791
- Volume :
- 52
- Issue :
- 5
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Latin American Research Review
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 126734100
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.244