Revolutionary Urbanism: The Struggle for the Streets of a City Carmen Rojas A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in City and Regional Planning in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ananya Roy, Chair Professor Malo Hutson Professor Richard Walker Spring 2010 ABSTRACT Revolutionary Urbanism: The Struggle for the Streets of Caracas by Carmen Rojas Doctor of Philosophy in City and Regional Planning University of California, Berkeley Professor Ananya Roy, Chair In 1998, Venezuelans elected a radical to be the country’s seventy-third president. Elected through the promise of reform and redistribution, Hugo Chavez crafted a new era of Latin American populist discourse, which called for socializing wealth, leading inline with the needs of the nation’s poorest people, creating meaningful labor opportunities, and humanizing the country’s capital city. His so-called Bolivarian Revolution has been the focus of Latin Americanists, political skeptics, and local radicals around the world. Starting nearly eight years after his first election, this research uses the streets of the city and the stories of street vendors to understand the material impact of this turn in Venezuela. Through interviews, data collection, and ethnography focused on two neighborhoods in the historic center of the city - Cazco Historico and Sabana Grande- of Caracas, I am able to demonstrate how the Chavez regime is failing in its promise to transform the lives of the urban poor. This research identifies the techniques used by the state to organize people with similar class interests against each other, control the movement of vendors, and most importantly maintain its hold on power. This study sheds light on the limits of the revolutionary discourse of the regime. By introducing the concept of Revolutionary Urbanism, this research takes the Bolivarian Revolution to the streets and people of the city to show how the primary interest of the regime is to consolidate power, not redistribute wealth. Using the tropes of people’s power, dignified work, and humanizing the street, the regime has been successful in its goal. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT PAGE 1 INTRODUCTION THINGS FALL APART PAGE 1 CHAPTER I REVOLUTIONARY URBANISM PAGE 23 CHAPTER II PEOPLE'S POWER PAGE 44 CHAPTER III DIGNIFIED WORK PAGE 63 CHAPTER IV HUMANIZING THE STREETS PAGE 78 CONCLUSION THE END PAGE 91 i TABLES, MAPS, AND ILLUSTRATIONS Tables Estimates of Street Vending Population 1988-2002, Caracas Page 24 Maps Downtown Caracas Page 7 La Hoyada Field Site Page 8 Sabana Grande Field Site Page 9 ii ABBREVIATIONS CEDICE Centro de Invetigacion Centro Economico CENDES Centro del Estudio del Desarollo FUNDACOMUN Fundacion de Desarollo Comunitario y Municipal INE Instituto Nacional de Estadistica MVR Movimiento Quinta RepublicA PSUV Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela SISOV Sistema Integrado de Indicadores Sociales de Venezuela UCV Universidad Central de Venezuela iii INTRODUCTION THINGS FALL APART 1 2 CENTRAL CARACAS, 2010 3 LA HOYADA FIELD SITE: SPANS AV FUERZAS ARMADAS TO AV BARALT AND BETWEEWN AV UNIVERSIDAD AND AV URDANETA 4 SABANA GRANDE FIELD SITE: ALONG AV ABRAHAM LINCOLN BETWEEN PLAZA VENEZUELA METRO STATION AND CHACAITO METRO STATION 5 The right to the city manifests itself as a superior form of rights: right to freedom, to individualization in socialization, to habit, and to inhabit. (Lefebvre 1968) …the public space of the modern city has always been a hybrid, and certainly a contradictory, space…in which ideally at least the market meets the anarchy of politics to create an interactive, democratic public (Mitchell 2003). Between 1998 and 2008, Venezuela experienced a mass transformation of political life, social awareness, and economic norms. This period of change was initiated in 1998 with the election of Hugo Frias Chávez to the presidency of the nation and the inception of his national project to raise public consciousness about the social possibilities and economic opportunities available to everyday people within a socialist model of governance. The goal of this new project was to expose citizens to the flaws of economic neoliberalism, which was a mainstay of public and economic policies since the late 1970s, and move them towards what he called a Bolivarian Revolution. The traits of the neoliberalism derided by the newly inaugurated president were sweeping the majority of the global south throughout the 1970s and fixing their grip throughout the 1980s and 90s. From the 1970s onward, the Venezuelan government initiated a process of shrinkage, whereby state subsidies in the area of health, education, transportation, and employment were retracted as a result of global economic shifts and structural adjustment policies imposed in return for International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. The social and political impact of dismantling a patronage state that provided for the most basic needs of its citizens was mass unrest. The end result was a very public breakdown of Venezuela’s democratic system, in which two parties had controlled the electoral landscape for over fifty years. In response to the reduced state, and in the face of increased poverty and extreme wealth inequality in the petroleum rich nation, Chávez would claim, “you, the Venezuelan people, are not to blame; you and I know who is to blame for what has happened to us; I am going to get rid of these people that are around us, don’t doubt it; and what’s more, I will solve all of your problems (Hugo Chávez , Public Speech, August 2005).” This, along with hundreds of other claims, spoke to the heart of disaffection felt by the majority of Venezuelans regarding the corruption scandals surrounding their political institutions and their increasing sense of disenfranchisement and dislocation from political power by the late 1990s (Vivas 1999, 72). The Bolivarian Revolution, as described by the government, is an ambitious three- pronged project that includes participatory citizenship, economic development through mass redistribution, and state expansion to meet the basic needs of the people of Venezuela. Used to identify the current regime with the liberator of Venezuela from Spanish rule, Simon Bolivar, the Bolivarian Revolution is best described as a social 6 democratic revolution, it calls on government to open up the political institutions of the state to public scrutiny and participation. As an economic development project, its imperative is to redistribute the vast oil revenues collected by the state to those who have historically been denied access to this wealth. It also declared a promised to initiate a number of diversification projects, whereby the government would open other opportunities for economic growth and employment that were not reliant on the petroleum sector. As a project of state expansion, it calls for a shifting of state priorities away from the market and private property and towards the nationalization of resources as a means of evening out the socio-economic terrain. In towns and cities, this part of the project resulted in the creation of neighborhood-level councils, to govern local decision- making, expanded government programs for the provision of healthcare, education, and locally produced food. Once enacted, however the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela began to adopt features of petro-populism. In Venezuela, petro-populism is the use of growing revenues provided by the nationalized petroleum production and distribution system to extend access to free public education, institute an “oil for doctors” trade with the island of Cuba to provide an extended network of free healthcare to those most in need, and establish neighborhood level councils of governance run by residents to establish development needs and community priorities. Although in its previous forms, the government of Venezuela used petro-wealth to maintain a relatively stable political, social, and economic landscape, this project moved far beyond the past patronage networks. Through its discourse, the state expanded far beyond most citizens’ expectations. The question remained however, would this be enough to address poverty and close the wealth gap faced by Venezuelans? The years between 1998 and 2008 produced a set of mixed results for this project, not solely the fault of the Chávez government. Since his election, there have been fierce outbursts of opposition and economic crises that resulted in the destabilization of social and political life throughout the country. These economic breaks have hindered the progress of the national government’s project and radically transformed the power dynamics in the country. The two most significant moments of crisis, occurred within the first five years of Chávez ’s regime. The first crisis was the failed coup of April 12, 2002, which was sponsored by leading opposition political figures and resulted in the brief imprisonment of Chávez and his high-ranking staff and officials. On the morning of the day of the coup, “President Chávez was arrested, his resignation was announced and an interim president, Pedro Carmona, was sworn in with a pledge to conduct elections within a year and a personal promise not to be a candidate. He said he wished only to restore democracy to Venezuela.” As detailed in the work of Sylvia and Danaopoulos published shortly after the coup, Carmona “began by dissolving the legislature, firing the Supreme Court and nullifying, by presidential decree, 49 laws