PUNTA CARABALLEDA
MACUTO
LA GUAIRA
MAIQUETIA
CARACAS
MARIPEREZ
LOS PALOS GRANDES
LA FLORIDA
NUEVA CARACAS
CHACAO
EL PARAISO
SAN AGUSTÍN DEL SUR
CEMENTERIO
PETARE
LA VEGA
EL VALLE
The so-called “Monumental Plan for Caracas”, of 1939, was a turning point in the urban history of the capital and a transformation of the traditional city, characterized by the compact checkerboard grid corresponding to the foundational site, in clear contrast with the scale of the natural geographical space that contains it. This transformation, associated with the general road scheme, is partly explained by the modernizing plan and urban reforms of the Gómez period, which generated the conditions for the development of a modern urban planning sensitive to the territorial order (Almandoz 1997, p.74). Indeed, the progressive impulse of public programs in education, health and housing, and the will to set a new urban agenda for Caracas and other cities of the country, will determine a change of scale and form in spatial organization. The protagonist of this modern urbanism that would guide the planning and growth of the city of Caracas was French engineer Maurice Emile Henri Rotival¹, who arrived in Caracas in 1937. Based on the first aerial photographs of the city, taken in 1936, he proposed the Monumental Plan, published in the first issue of the Municipal District Magazine at the end of 1939 and “approved in 1940 as to what corresponded to the road system” (Frechilla 1994, p.359). As we will try to demonstrate, the Monumental Plan expresses a logic of planning linked to the regional scale where, through various operations, urbanism introduces a physical development coherent with the geographical background. This development, expressed in proposals that deal with the integral use of the territory, is supported by
Elbano Mibelli², who promotes the renovation of the capital with the creation of the Urban Planning Directorate of the Federal District, responsible for the realization of an Urban Plan for Caracas. The growth of the State, the complexity of the social structure, the consolidation of the commercial bourgeoisie, together with the requirements of urbanized space for the growing population and the new activities driven by oil revenues, will be clear evidence of the country's sudden economic growth, which will translate into accelerated urban development. This makes it possible for Rotival, together with a group of Venezuelan professionals, to set up a new representative architecture for the central historical core, simultaneously with an idea of a city whose overall vision and road layout privilege the extension and occupation of the longitudinal expanse of the main valley. As evidenced by the cartography, the radical proposal the plan establishes is the rejection of the geometric square module of the block closed by the fragmentation of the land, and the grand enlargement of Bolivar Avenue, transforming the compact order of the traditional city with a linear east-west arrangement, according to the direction of the geography, integrating the road system in the scale of the territory. Coinciding with Martín Fechilla “the first urban development plan prefigures for Caracas an entirely continuous extension of the city, reaching Petare in the East; and a road network, longitudinal and transversal, that gives urban shape with a matrix of superblocks to the entire space of the central Valley” (Frechilla 1994, p.352).
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