GroundTower , in its form and materials, makes infrastructure visible and celebrates both its utilitarian role of providing basic services and its public role in the civic spaces it creates. It is designed to be recognised as a formal intervention within the barrios, to make legible barrios’ participation in the city.
groundtower critical infrastructure
informal systems | caracas by virginia fernandez rincon
barrios pol itics action necessity community
Striving for subsistence, the growing population of Caracas has radically transformed the city in the course of the past fifty years. The accelerated growth from mass rural migrations left millions to find land, shelter and basic services themselves. The barrios, once thought to be a provisional solution to the housing shortage, are now home to more than half the population of the city. With five times the density of the formal city, barrios condense and multiply all the paradoxes inherent in the capital of a developing country. Overcrowded and invisible, alive and remote, violent and unregulated, these informal settlements, located on steep hills, unstable soil and flood plains, have limited or no access to electricity, water or sanitation, waste removal, transportation or emergency services. Until recently omitted from most census data and official maps, and without land titles or addresses, barrios are also legally excluded from the formal city.
Nicolas leads me through the barrio. He was born here and he waves at everyone, stopping constantly to introduce me to them: the basketball player who tends an abasto, a hairdresser, the local musician – a timbal player, a nurse on her way to work. There are many others without any further description than their names and a friendly handshake cooled by the beer bottles in their hands. We walk the barrio Santa Cruz, one of nineteen barrios at the south- west end of Caracas. We go up steep stairs and down narrow alleys, above creeks and around garbage dumps, always avoiding one particular street, ‘Ahi esta la droga - that’s where the drug is’ Nicolas says. On my second visit and after some convincing, we walk there. ‘No tomes fotos aqui – don’t take pictures here’. Turning the corner a group of girls play, their pink t-shirts a blur as they run. A few metres away, two men on motorcycles are trading what is probably cocaine. They take a look at us, finish and leave — no pictures are taken and the girls never stop playing. It is a sunny Saturday morning, thirty degrees with a bright blue sky.
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