The travel path of the Neighborhood Unit: From the US and Europe to . The transfer of the model to planning

Nelliana Villoria Siegert Universidad Simon Bolivar, , Venezuela

The transfer of the Neighborhood Unit (NU) model to the Caracas of the 1950s offers a useful opportunity to trace the adoption of modern planning concepts in Latin America, and it sheds useful light on the little known but important history of Caracas’s urban development. It could be easily assumed that the NU model was transferred to Venezuela directly from the US, where it was created in the 1920s. But this research shows that in fact, it reached Venezuela through European and American cultural channels. By the time the American NU concept appeared in Caracas, it had already been informed by European planning ideas discussed in the CIAM meetings (Villoria, 1998; Mumford, 2000). Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, and Le Corbusier were among the notable and influential practitioners who espoused and supported the NU model at that meeting (Mumford, 2000). This flow of information from Europe and the U.S. provided young and older Venezuelan professionals with an opportunity to absorb the state-of- the-art planning concepts of the time. The growing influence of North American theories and European modernism in Caracas were evident –at least rhetorically— in the Regulatory Plan of Caracas (Plano Regulador de la Ciudad de Caracas 1951). In practice, NUs built by private developers were for the most part, loyal to the original elements of the model, characterized by low-density suburban neighborhood filled with single-family houses. Progressively, Caracas was extended over the virgin landscape of the east and southeast filled with new NUs designed and built by private developers. When the NU model was applied to public housing in Venezuela, changes were made. In order to shelter Caracas’s booming population, planners clearly merged the NU idea with CIAM proposals for dense housing—seen in Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles. Le Corbusier’s plan—high rise housing complexes and community facilities scattered over vast green areas— informed the design of most of these NUs. The application of the NU concept in Caracas shows the results of the merging of planning models, demonstrating how ideas are carried out to radically different regions and adapt to different contexts. It shows American and European influences on Venezuelan planning, and also how these different paradigms and practices helped to transform the Venezuelan landscape in ways that today reflect its particular culture and past.

[email protected] 1 The importing of American and European planning models to Latin America, and particularly Venezuela, is a subject that remains largely unexplored in the literature (notable exceptions include the work of Holston 1989). The transfer of the Neighborhood Unit (NU) model to the Caracas of the 1950s offers a useful opportunity to trace the adoption of modern planning concepts in Venezuela, and it sheds light on the little known but important history of Caracas’s urban development. It could be easily assumed that the NU model was transferred to Venezuela directly from the US, where it was created in the 1920s. But this research will show that in fact, it reached Venezuela through European and American cultural channels. By the time this model was brought to the continent it was the product of the merging of European ideas from the CIAM and North American planning proposals. More importantly, it was a trend that took place in several countries of South America. In order to fully understand the NU model we need to go back to the Europe’s indrustialists’ attempts to create self-contained sub-centers in the periphery of cities. As early as the beginning of the 19th century, a few industrialists realized that a feasible way to locate their industries in order to have access to labor and cut down land development costs it was building new industrial towns in the outskirts of the city where land was cheaper and where they could develop residential areas around their factories. We could say the NU concept dates back to these experiences. According to them this was going to reduce the social chaos created by industries in the overcrowded urban centers, which was a position that was considered philanthropic by some because it showed some preoccupation for the welfare of the workers. Some examples of these initiatives are: New Lanark in Scotland, built by Robert Owen (1810); Saltaire (1863); Bournville for Cadbury’s chocolate factory (1895), and in Germany, Margarethenhohe (1906) for Krupp’s employees. In the US, very similar solutions took place in the outside of Chicago, as you may remember, George Pullman, developed an industrial town that he named after himself. In the late 1880s, Ebenezer Howard would have the vision to put these practical solutions in the form of a more complex planning concept that would influence planning worldwide. Two basic elements of the Garden City idea were planned dispersion —decentralized industries surrounded by a residential town, which combined work and housing in a healthy environment—, and the concept of unity. The latter interests us the most in regards to the NU model. The unity concept would guarantee self-sufficiency and independency of each of these cells that gravitated around the city and were connected to it by collective transportation means. Howard was not proposing isolated units, instead, once these nucleus around the city reached a certain size and complexity, they would give birth to a new town where that population should be accommodated. In this way, settlements would grow by the addition of several cells in a multi-centric organization of towns, surrounded by open space. Later, in the early 1920s, Clarence Perry, a sociologist-planner and member of the New York Regional Plan working group, created a model for the design of residential areas as part of the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs (1929). The NU would offer city residents more open space, recreational opportunities, educational, and commercial facilities; it would also create self-contained, self sufficient neighborhoods in which residents need not travel long distances in order to satisfy basic needs. The NU model was based on the assumption that with the provision of appropriate spaces and functions, residents would naturally associate in order to pursue collective ends; this, in turn, would elicit a strong sense of community. It was informed by several antecedents: the English settlement house and Garden City movements; segregated use zoning; and the community center movement (Rohe and Gates 1985). The NU had six important aspects: appropriate size, identifiable boundaries, provision and critical sitting of open spaces, institutional sites and local shops, and an internal street system. A NU would have a population no larger than that, which could be served by one elementary

2 school, while being large enough in area to allow low residential density. The NU was to be bounded by arterial streets to discourage through traffic. Internally, the residential unit was to be organized around a system of open spaces, parks and recreation areas. The local school were to be centrally located, at a place of roughly equal distance from all residential areas. Shopping districts were to be located at the circumference of the unit in such a way to serve abutting NUs. In addition, the internal street system was to employ cul-de-sacs, to secure residential privacy (Regional plan of New York and its environs 1929). Just like the case with Ebenezer Howard, most of Perry’s ideas were not new, they were mentioned by his predecessors, but his value was to put the idea into a workable solution, a planning model. Perry himself had lived since 1912 in a residential area designed by Frederick law Olmsted Jr. (Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, NY), who based his design concept on Letchworth, the first Garden City (Hall, 1974, p. 53). In 1923, the same year in which Perry presented for the first time his proposal of the NU, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright and the real estate developer Alexander M. Bing traveled to to meet with Ebenezer Howard and visit the English garden cities. From these, they went back to the US with the intention of developing Sunnyside Gardens. Sunnyside Gardens was developed under the sponsorship of the City Housing Corporation (CHC), an entity created by the Regional Plan Association of America (RPAA) in 1924. Later in the 1920s, it was the CHC that acquired the land in New Jersey where what it is considered the first NU was to be developed –Radburn. The designers were again, Stein and Wright. In 1929, when Perry published its work The Neighborhood Unit, a Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community, Gordon Stephenson, a former official of the English Ministry of Town and Country Planning, visited Radburn and returned to England disseminating the NU model (Schubert, 1998). According to Peter Hall, Barry Parker also helped disseminate the NU model in England, but it would be H. Alker Tripp the one who lead the transfer of the model to England. The adoption of the model was reflected in the Greater Plan and the creation of New Towns. The NU was also promoted in public and private housing developments in several cities of Asia, Africa, Australia and Latin America. Other planners who helped spread the NU model in Europe were Thomas Sharps, Frederick Gibbard, Peter Mann (Schubert, 1998), and Anatole Solow, to name a few. Anatole Sollow also participated in the design of Hill, a NU in New Hampshire, and later, was part of the group of foreign professionals who traveled to Venezuela during the 1950s to assist the government in the pursuit of its housing development goals.

The CIAM Contribution

By the time the American NU concept appeared in Caracas, it had already been informed by European planning ideas discussed in the CIAM meetings (Villoria, 1998; Mumford, 2000). In the third CIAM (1930), the NU concept previously advanced in the New York regional plan was proposed as a possible solution to the anticipated housing problem in postwar Europe. Siegfried Giedion, CIAM secretary, reported, “the deliberations of the Third Congress dealt with the question of how to organize whole groups of dwellings into neighborhood units in such a way that human needs could be satisfied and with the further question of what legislative changes were necessary to allow workable solutions” (Dahir, 1947, p. 7071). Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, and Le Corbusier were among the notable and influential practitioners who espoused and supported the NU model at that meeting (Mumford, 2000). Le Corbusier, around the same period of time, had proposed his idea of the Vertical Garden City, a modernist interpretation of the Garden City model that reflected the European planning tradition of denser urban areas. Richard Neutra, who had been participating in the CIAMs since the second meeting, was a

3 strong supporter and the author of several NUs in the U.S., and Walter Gropius, together with Martin Wagner, proposed his own modifications to the model. A central figure in the transfer of CIAM’s ideas to the United States, and later to Latin American countries, was Spanish architect Jose Luis Sert. Sert actively participated in the CIAM congresses from the second meeting onwards. As a student in , he had admired Le Corbusier’s works and had interned in the master’s studio. In 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Sert was exiled and moved to the United States. In The United States of America, the NU idea was becoming popular, and Sert became one of its main proponents. In 1941, he published Can Our Cities Survive? in which he chronicled the conclusions of the fourth CIAM, including its advocacy of the NU model. He later created his own version, which was applied in Latin American cities in the 1940s and 1950s (Sert, 1947).1 Sert, together with Paul Lester Wiener and Paul Schulz, founded Town Planning Associates in 1945, a consulting firm that would plan several developments during the 1950s. Many of these were in South America: Ciudade dos Motores in Brasil (in which CIAM postulates were clearly merged with the NU model); Chimbote in Peru; Medellin in Colombia (with Le Corbusier as consultant); and Puerto Ordaz in Venezuela, among others.

The Venezuelan Context

By the time that the NU was introduced to Caracas, Venezuela had already undergone centuries of foreign influence. From its founding in 1567 until Venezuela’s independence in 1811, Spain had imposed its traditions of religion, urban development, and class structure. Caracas was a small Spanish-resembling city up until the late 1800s. Like is the case all throughout Latin America, Venezuelan cities were characterized by the Spanish grid, in which the most important political, religious and social functions took place in the central plaza. Later, in nineteenth century Latin America, France became the paradigm of elite urban culture (as it has been extensively explored by Almandoz, 1997). Caracas’ planning and architecture became oriented towards the beautification of cities. Europe’s economic, political and cultural influence in Latin America declined after World War I, but a belated expression of French aspirations took place as late as 1939, when four Paris based planners developed the Monumental Plan of Caracas (Plano Monumental de Caracas), or PMC. This plan reflected both the Haussmannian ambitions of Caracas’s Governor and the Beaux-arts urban design techniques of architect and planner Maurice Rotival (Almandoz, 1997, pp. 300-308). Caracas changed rapidly in the early decades of the twentieth century. The discovery of oil in Venezuela in the 1910s quickly brought American capital and culture to Caracas. Oil companies “became increasingly important in Venezuela from the 1920s on; they produced town landscapes and living standards very different from the traditional Hispanic and French ones… [O]ther foreign institutions and mass media helped to spread the sense of a modern ‘American Way of Life’ not only among the wealthy elites but also among the middle classes while contributing to Caracas’ great building boom” (Gonzalez, 1996, 66). With no doubt, oil was the main vehicle that allowed the US presence to intensify in Venezuela, displacing other foreign influences. The presence of American oil companies in Venezuela intensified during the 1950s, when Caracas transformed itself by copying US urban patterns in terms of architecture and planning: motor vehicles multiplied, the city expanded horizontally and away from the dense Spanish urban core, suburbs filled up with country looking neighborhoods, freeways propagated, skyscrapers became the novelty of the times, and the first supermarkets were built. In addition, the country entered the 1950s ruled by a dictator, Marcos Perez Jimenez, determined to bring progress to its constituency and the “rational transformation of the

4 physical environment.” The massive amount of public works ambitioned for the country by Perez Jimenez, together with the oil boom allowed an unprecedented transformation of Caracas. At the same time, oil camps reproduced themselves in other areas of the country. Oil camps were closed communities developed by foreign oil companies to house its employees, and that contained all the services required to function independently from the outside. Examples of North American influence in Caracas’s urban landscape were works by Wallace Harrison, Robert Moses and Donald Hatch (Gonzalez, 1996). Their projects represented three American symbols of the time: oil, cars, and consumption. Wallace Harrison designed the Hotel Avila, a place to host oil entrepreneurs. Robert Moses authored the “Arterial Plan for Caracas” in the late 1940s, which included a system of roads and highways based on the main lines laid out by Rotival in the 1939 PMC. Donald Hatch developed the first supermarket in Caracas, built in Las Mercedes, a bourgeois North American enclave. Oil revenues also boosted the construction industry. Public works were massively developed by the government and materialized by subcontracting the newly created private architecture and planning firms that saw the profit potential of the new planning policies. These partnerships between the private and public sectors also provided the perfect environment for the flow of ideas that foreign officials were bringing to plan the urban development of Venezuela. Quickly, private development firms were using the same concepts and ideas they picked up from their work with the government. Among those ideas, the NU model. In terms of growth, the development of Caracas was marked by a slow start that rushed towards the middle of the century. During the 1930s, new residential subdivisions appeared at the periphery of the city. In the 1940s, neighborhoods were developed in the more remote east areas, replacing vacation homes and offering amenities like social and sports clubs. As the city grew eastwards, a new linear business district developed, pushing away the vitality of the historic city center of the 1940s, now crammed with banks, public offices, cultural and commercial activities. In the 1950s, suburbs developed further to the east and southeast and much infrastructure was built in the city (Villoria, 1998). This was the most intensive era in Caracas’s development, as huge oil revenues were invested in public works (Lopez, 1994, 103- 119). The growth of Caracas during the middle third of the twentieth century was extraordinary. In 1936 Caracas’s population was 163,000; by 1951 it had more than quadrupled, to 700,000. By 1955 the city had a million inhabitants. By 1966 Caracas covered 44.4 square miles, showing a twenty-fold expansion in only three decades (Villoria, 1998).

Re-interpreting and Translating the NU Model

In the late 1940s, European educated Venezuelan officials such as Carlos Raul Villanueva and foreign professionals, such as Maurice Rotival, Francis Violich, Jose Luis Sert and Gaston Bardet, introduced International Style’s teachings merged with north American planning techniques to Caracas’s planning discourse. Maurice Rotival and Carlos Raul Villanueva, one French, and the other Venezuelan, both educated in Europe and two important figures of urban planning and architecture of the time were among the most influential. Their lectures in the Architecture School of Universidad Central de Venezuela and in the newly created official planning institutions provided the knowledge that later would be intensively used by architects and urban planners practicing in the urban development of the Caracas of the 1950s. The U.S. provided not only consultants, such as Francis Violich, but it was also the country chosen by the Venezuelan government to sponsor local professionals to pursue studies abroad through scholarships. Francis Violich and Jose Luis Sert, brought the NU model to Venezuelan

5 design studios, lecturing in architecture schools and in conferences organized by public planning institutions (Villoria, 1998). At this time, Jose Luis Sert and Maurice Rotival came from the US, where the former had exiled following the Spanish Civil War, and the latter was lecturing at Yale University. This flow of information from Europe and the U.S. provided young and older Venezuelan professionals with an opportunity to absorb the state-of-the-art planning concepts of the time. This merging of concepts and ideas, European and North American, resulted in the creation of new interpretations to the NU model. Gaston Bardet, architect-planner from Belgium, proposed organizing the city in steps, in which the neighborhood unit would be the smallest (Bardet, 1953). Thus, the patriarchal step, the domestic step, and the parish step or neighborhood unit would comprise a city organized in the form of a ladder. Similarly, Rotival proposed a “Doctrine and Work Method,” by which the city would be planned at several levels. Each level would be comprised of smaller units: the cooperative group, the NU, the sector, the city, the zone and the region (Rotival, 1957). Jose Luis Sert, who later became one of the main proponents of International Style modernism in South America, created a high density NU model. He also proposed that groups of NUs be part of a larger assemblage, constituting a municipality, township or borough. This larger whole would support more community facilities, such as theaters, administrative offices and secondary schools. Violich, from the University of California at Berkeley, contributed knowledge about new American planning paradigms and techniques: the study of regions, the diagnosis of social problems, and zoning (Martin, 1996). Villanueva, a strong advocate of the International Style modernism in local architecture, became the main link between foreign advisors and public planning agencies and architecture schools. Villanueva was actively involved in public housing and planning as a practitioner, and as a professor in the architecture department at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. Consequently, he was important to the dissemination of the NU concept at all levels of planning action and thought (Villoria 1998).

In the Rhetoric: The Regulatory Plan of Caracas

The growing influence of North American theories and European modernism in Caracas were evident –at least rhetorically— in the Regulatory Plan of Caracas (Plano Regulador de la Ciudad de Caracas 1951). The PRC was the instrument created by the official planning institutions to plan the future growth and development of the booming Caracas of the 1950s. Government advisors Violich, Sert and Rotival introduced in this plan a shift from an aesthetic, physical form centered “urbanism” to a planning process centered on rational methods. Specific objectives of the PRC were to improve the development of residential areas; achieve a better distribution of industrial and commercial districts through rigorous zoning and the creation of shopping centers; and identify and develop recreational areas (Plano Regulador de la Ciudad de Caracas, 1951). This would be achieved via the construction of a road system and the segregation of land uses. This scheme drew directly from CIAM’s Charter of Athens (Le Corbusier 1989), which proposed the “…separation, classification and organization of the different elements which integrate the city in terms of its basic functions: habitation, work, circulation, education” (Plano Regulador de la Ciudad de Caracas 1951: 406). The Plan would affect the valley between El Calvario and Petare. High and medium densities were assigned to the west and southwest of the city, together with industrial and commercial areas. Low-density developments were assigned to the east and southeast, which paved the path for the NU to fit perfectly in the growth of the city. One of the greatest innovations of the PRC was the inclusion of the shopping malls. Shopping malls came to replace

6 the mixed used structure of the more European city center. Shopping malls, introverted cells mainly accessible by motor vehicles where to be the focal points of groups of neighborhoods. The plan conceptually divided Caracas into twelve communities, each one further subdivided into NUs. These units were designed to have all the services necessary for self-containment, while remaining connected to one another via the urban transportation system. The “Doctrine and Work Method” of Rotival was evident in the plan proposal to subdivide Caracas in “sectors,” “communities,” NU s,” and “cooperative groups.” The NU was essentially used as a template to subdivide Caracas into independent, efficient cells. The text of the PRC reflects the ideas of Perry for physical means (MOP-CNU, 1987): “We have agreed to divide the residential areas into communities and these into neighborhood units; the former are represented by the current concept of the (parish) and the latter by a group of families, whose children in school age justify the existence of an elementary school. Taking the school as nucleus of the organism, the dwellings should be located at an appropriate distance from the schools, so that the children can walk without facing any danger. In this area there should also be— at pre-established distances—the complementary services of a human group, such as the mall, the church, the social center, the sport fields, etc., which extension is ruled by the number of residents on the unit.” Thus, the new communities drew upon the existing organizational structure of the Hispanic cities, the parish; and these communities would contain the Nus.

On the Ground: Neighborhood Units in Private and public sponsored Developments

At least three elements paved the way for the NU model to be easily applied in the growth and planning of Caracas: the parish structure, inherited from colonial times, in which dwellings were located around the civic, political and social center represented by a plaza; the land ownership structure of the suburbs, also inherited from the colonial time in which the landscape was subdivided in large extensions of land used as Haciendas, which allowed landowners to developed isolated neighborhoods connected to the rest of the city by roads. Many of the neighborhoods you see today in Caracas respond to the hacienda structure of the colonial times. And finally, the increasing influence of the oil camp structure implanted in the rest of the country. These three elements, shared with the planning models of the time the idea of unity, and self-sufficiency. In practice, NUs built by private developers were for the most part, loyal to the original elements of the model, characterized by low-density suburban neighborhoods filled with single- family houses. They were designed to expedite vehicular circulation, reflecting two major factors. First, vehicle ownership had significantly increased between Venezuela’s upper and middle classes—the groups occupying privately developed residential areas. Second, these developments were often located in suburbs far from the city, making them nearly impossible to reach without some kind of motorized vehicle. Though these residential areas were ostensibly designed as NUs, in many neighborhoods for the wealthy classes, community facilities were replaced by private clubs, golf courses, parks, plazas and, later, malls. While the school served as the community focal point for neighborhood units developed in the U.S., and the PRC’s language emphasized the school’s importance as well, in practice, however, it was the plaza, which became the principal focus in the Venezuelan application. The plaza’s long history in Latin America’s urban culture proved much more powerful than the imported schoolyard, and almost all NUs built in Caracas centered on a plaza in which the local church was located. Progressively, Caracas was extended over the virgin landscape of the east and southeast filled with new neighborhoods designed and built by private developers. Most of the NU s

7 developed by the private sector in the east and southeast of the city were for the middle and upper classes. Subdivisions developed by private developers during the 1950s that exhibit some or most of the main principles of the NU are Montalban I, La California Norte, Cumbres de Curumo, Terrazas de Club Hipico, Prados del Este and La Trinidad. The most significant examples are Montalban I and La California Norte. The former located in the west side of the city and the latter in the east. Montalban I was designed with a center hosting a shopping mall, a Church and a public school. Single-family houses were organized around small plazas and parks. La California Norte contains a center with a plaza, a library and a park, while single-family houses are organized along cul-de-sacs. Terrazas de Club Hipico, although considered a NU in the promotional brochures of the time, is characterized by single-family residences organized along cul-de-sacs with a central park devoted to horse riding activities. Further Prados del Este, according to promotional brochures of the time was designed as a community of four Nus, and finally, la Trinidad was advertised as a satellite city with a commercial/industrial area in the center and several Nus that surround it. In the public sector, the Banco Obrero (BO) —the public institution created by Venezuela’s government in 1928 to provide housing for low-income families— employed the NU as a design concept for public housing. The BO established two planning tools, The Plan Nacional de la Vivienda (PNV) or Housing National Plan, and the Talleres de Arquitectura del BO (TABO) or BO Architecture Workshops, to facilitate the development of numerous public housing complexes. The PNV projected the construction of more than twelve thousand housing units in four years (Plan Nacional de la Vivienda, 1951). The TABOs were groups of architects and engineers—many of whom had graduated from American schools or from the Universidad Central de Venezuela—who designed these residential projects. The late 1940s and 1950s was the most productive period for the BO, during which it developed 111 residential subdivisions, of which 48 were located in Caracas (Villoria, 1998). When the NU model was applied to public housing in Venezuela, Le Corbusier’s ideas entered to play a great role. In order to shelter Caracas’s booming population, planners clearly merged the NU idea with CIAM proposals for dense housing—seen in Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles. Le Corbusier’s plan—high rise housing complexes and community facilities scattered over vast green areas— informed the design of most of these NUs. In fact, some of them were called Nus and some were called Habitation Units by its planners. The large size of public housing complexes was the government’s solution to achieving its policy of “extirpating” the ranchos (Tenreiro, 1995)—or, slum clearance. These NUs were high-density complexes, comprised of multifamily buildings called superbloques. They contained residential towers, with separated pedestrian and vehicular circulation accommodated in aerial hallways and curving streets. Community facilities such as schools, social centers, churches, retail stores and parks were located in the open spaces. The result was that only some of Perry’s original principles survived in public housing developments. Nonetheless, their planners considered them NUs. Rotival and others justified the re- interpretation of the model stating that in an urban area of limited space—such as the Caracas valley—it was better to increase densities, and neighborhood units of low density, single-family houses were appropriate only for the less populated interior of the country (PRC 1951). There was, however, one low density NU developed by the BO in Caracas – Neighborhood Unit Carlos Delgado Chalbaud—designed by Carlos Raul Villanueva in the south of the Caracas valley. In an article authored by Villanueva himself, he propagated Perry’s NU concept and explained how it was used in the design of this public housing development (Villanueva, 1952): “All urban planners nowadays agree that they must not allow too high concentrations of population (…) Within this Neighborhood Units we will try not only to provide people merry and hygienic dwellings, but also we will try to find a way to organize a group of homes that

8 addresses the need of its residents, with the necessary social, educational and commercial services. Houses will be placed around parks and schools (…) Urban planners also recommend within the Regulatory Plan that streets and avenues are clearly and precisely designed (…) children must be able to walk to school without having to cross the streets. These are the principles espoused in the US by Clarence Perry, and in France by Maurice Rotival and Gaston Bardet, and they have served as a base for the planning and design of the Coronel Carlos Delgado Chalbadu NU, developed by the BO.” (Villanueva 1952). In the nation’s interior—where developments were broader urban extensions, with fewer geographic limitations —low density, low scale neighborhood units were far more common (MINDUR-INAVI, 1986).

Conclusion

The erosion of NU model is considered in this paper an important contribution of local and foreign planners to the adaptation of the model to the Venezuelan landscape and political ideology of the times. The ability of the planners, who brought the NU to Latin America, and specifically Venezuela, is further evidenced in the numerous reinterpretations of the model that they were capable to produce in order to match local constraints. An important facet of Venezuelan publicly sponsored NUs was its two distinct versions, each based on geographic conditions. Caracas’s density, topography and large low-income population resulted in high-density complexes of tall multifamily housing. In addition, the massive slum clearance policy that the dictatorship of Perez Jimenez had in mind for the low-income squatter settlements could only be matched with a higher density NU. Moreover, the typology of Nus developed by the private sector in Caracas; show the prevalence of the plaza as a Hispanic-specific feature, so strong, that it would prove to survive the most modern influences in urban planning. Today, these Caracas’ neighborhood units are still there, facing the pressures of commercial development, escalating crime rates that have prompted residents to gate their communities, and battling the annoyance of traffic caused by schools. The latter, a problem affecting also Nus in the US and not foreseen by its creators. The application of the NU concept in Caracas shows the results of the merging of planning models, demonstrating how ideas are carried out to radically different regions and adapt to different contexts. It shows American and European influences on Venezuelan planning, and also how these different paradigms and practices helped to transform the Venezuelan landscape in ways that today reflect its particular culture and past. The parish structure and the hacienda subdivisions inherited from Spanish colonial times, together with the north American oil camp and NU’s influences, share today a common landscape, where foreign models merged with a local culture and a specific social and political dynamic.

9 Bibliographic References

ALMANDOZ, A. (1997). Urbanismo Europeo en Caracas: 1870 – 1940. Caracas: FUNDARTE, Alcadía de Caracas, Equinoccio, Ediciones de la Universidad Simón Bolívar. BARDET, G. (1953). “Conferencia N° 1: Impresión general sobre las tendencias actuales del urbanismo” Revista del Colegio de Ingenieros de Venezuela 204: 13-18. DAHIR, J. (comp). (1947). The Neighborhood Unit Plan: Its Spread and Acceptance. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. DE CHIARA, J. and KOPPELMAN, L. (1975). Urban Planning and Design Criteria (2nd Edition). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company. FREIXA, J. (1979). Josep LI Sert. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili. GONZALEZ C., L. (1996). “Modernity for Import and Export: The United States’ Influence on the Architecture and Urbanism of Caracas”. Colloqui 11(Spring): 64-77. —. 1997. Modernidad y la Ciudad. Caracas, 1953 1958. Universidad Simon Bolivar, Division de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Departamento de Planificacion Urbana, Trabajo de Ascenso. HALL, P. (1974). Urban and Regional Planning. New York: Routledge, 1992. HOLSTON, J. (1989). The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LE CORBUSIER. (1989). Principios de Urbanismo. La Carta de Atenas. Barcelona: Editorial Ariel. LÓPEZ VILLA, M. (1994). “Gestión urbanística, revolución democrática y dictadura militar en Venezuela (1945 – 1958)”. Urbana, 14/15, I/II semester, 103–119 MACHADO DE ACEDO, C., PACHECO, E. and PLAZA, E. (1981). Estado y Grupos Económicos en Venezuela. Su Análisis a través de la Tierra, Construcción y Banca. Caracas: Editorial Ateneo de Caracas. MARTIN F., J. J. (1996). “Construcción urbana, profesiones e inmigración en el origen de los estudios de urbanismo en Venezuela: 1870-1957”. Estudios Demográficos y Urbanos, 33, 11(3): 477-519. MINDUR-INAVI. (1986). Compilación e Inventario de las Viviendas Banco ObreroINAVI. 1928- 1983, Vol II, Período 1946-1958, Caracas. MOP-CNU. (1987). Plano Regulador de Caracas. Estudio Preliminar. Caracas. MUMFORD, E. (2000). The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960. Boston: MIT Press. PERNA, C. (1981). Evolución de la Geografía Urbana de Caracas. Caracas: Ediciones de la Facultad de Humanidades y Educación, Universidad Central de Venezuela. “Plan Nacional de la Vivienda. Banco Obrero”. (1951). Revista del Colegio de Ingenieros de Venezuela, 188, Caracas: CIV, 11-20. “Plano Regulador de la Ciudad de Caracas”. (1951). Crónica de Caracas, Año I, 2, Caracas, AgostoDiciembre: 403-412. “Regional Plan of New York and its Environs”. (1929). New York: New York Regional Plan Association. ROHE, W. M. and GATES, L. (1985). Planning with Neighborhoods. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. ROTIVAL, M. (1957). “La Planificación: Doctrina y Método de Trabajo”. Revista del Colegio de Ingenieros de Venezuela, 249, Caracas: CIV, 13-21. SERT, J. L. (1947). Can Our Cities Survive? An ABC of Urban Problems, Their Analysis, Their solutions, Based on the Proposals Formulated by the CIAM. Cambridge: The Harvard University Press.

10 SCHUBERT, D. (1998) “From Garden Cities ti New Housing Estates and Gated Communities: The Neighborhood Paradigm –Origins-Past-Present-Future.” Technical University of Hamburg, Wellmerstrasse, Germany. Paper presented in the 20th Century Urban Planning Experience, 8th International Planning History Conference, Sidney: University of New South Wales, July 15-18. TENREIRO, O. (1995). “Conversación con el General (R) Marcos Pérez Jiménez”. Ciudad, 1, Caracas: Dirección de Gestión Urbana, Alcaldía de Caracas, 7-32. VILLANUEVA, C.R. (1952). “Funcionamiento de las Unidades Vecinales”, Revista del Colegio de Ingenieros de Venezuela, 192, Caracas: CIV, March 1952, s/p. VILLANUEVA BRANDT, F. (1992). “Apuntes para una Historia de la Urbanización de la Ciudad”. In Caracas. Memorias para el Futuro, edited by Giuseppe Imbesi and ElisendaVila. VILLORIA SIEGERT, N. (1998). “Unidad Vecinal y Desarrollo Residencial en la Caracas de los Años 1950”. Final thesis research presented to Simón Bolívar University to earn the Bachelor Degree in Urban Planning, Caracas, Venezuela.

1 For more information on Jose Luis Sert’s professional work, see Freixa (1979).

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