Unfalteringly, Luis Cerpa climbs up the dirt
"steps" hollowed out of the hillside to the top
of Barrio 903, a "province" of the giant favela of
Caracas, home to 600,000 people. After getting out
of Hubert Klumpner's old Mercedes A (Klumpner
is one of the two principals of Urban-Think Tank)
we trek up to Luis's neighbourhood, probably safer
than the San Agustín Barrio, which we overflew a
short while ago riding the Metro Cable designed by
Klumpner and his partner Brillembourg.
The only other passenger in the cabin was an 11- or
12-year-old girl, who was fast to answer Luis's questions
as we passed over a basketball court 20 metres
below. "They shot a boy here the other night. Did
you know him?" "Yes, his friend shot him." "Do you
know him too?" "Yes." "Aren't you afraid to go up
here alone?" "No, this is my neighbourhood." "But
the boy who died was from this neighbourhood,
too." "Yes, he was born here."
In the cafe where we met before boarding the Metro
Cable with Hubert, Luis spoke candidly of the
Barrio as an error de planificación. He represents the
most informed portion of Barrio inhabitants. Even
in jeans and a T-shirt his appearance is groomed
– short, steel-grey hair and a few blingy rings on
his fingers, possibly indicating his non-attackable
authority, at least in his neighbourhood. He doesn't
realise his contradiction, which I silently noted to
myself, as he explains that the barrios are very old,
having began to spring up when immigration from
the countryside started in the late '40s, and they've
never stopped growing since. So it is not a planning
error, but just another example of capitalist no regulatión,
if indeed capitalism was ever interested in
regulatión. The barrios have gradually encircled the
middle-class city, practically besieging it.
How many times has contemporary architecture
changed "styles" or "trends" in the past 50 years?
Modern, late modern, post-modern, neo-modern,
critical regionalism, deconstructivism, genericism...
while in the Caracas barrios, the barriadas of
Lima, or the shanty towns of Mumbai, nothing has
changed in the way of building and living, if this
is living: an inconceivable condition for whoever
has not seen it before.
After a long ascent on foot (the only way to reach
places not yet served by the Metro Cable), we finally
arrive at a small clearing slightly larger than the
ones in front of the houses. From this "terrace" of
Barrio 903 (its altitude in metres), there is a better
view of the "informal" landscape, as Klumpner
and Brillembourg elegantly call the Barrio, where
the laws of gravity have been subverted. Here,
buildings that shouldn't stay standing somehow
manage to do so, just like the circa 200,000 inhabitants
who succeed in living here against all odds.
Nobody should have to live without water, electricity,
sewerage, hospitals, schools, or even a place to
go and pray for someone to remember you.
Someone must have heard a few prayers made in
some anonymous place, and sent Klumpner and
Brillembourg to work here. The design concept is
simple, pragmatic and anti-demagogical. Is it feasible
to restructure the building situation of spontaneous
slums where hundreds of thousands of
people live, about 50 per cent of Venezuela's population?
Clearly not. Hence the idea of a transit
system connecting the Barrio to the valley – both
a public service (for those who work in the city,
for the elderly who are unable to visit relatives due
to the 2.5-hour walk that separates them, for children
who want to get out of the ghetto) and a tourist
attraction (why not?): a connection between
urban formality and suburban informality, an
opportunity for small renewal projects. So, on 12
April 2007, a citizens' council of the San Agustín
community defined the social programme that
will accompany each of the five Metro Cable stations:
San Agustín, El Manguito, La Ceiba, Hornos
de Cal and Parque Central will also give the Barrio
a gymnasium, a multifunctional hall and a social
centre. The rest – the mission of achieving construction
– was left to the designers, who by then
had become one with the locals.
Some messages cannot be conveyed with words,
and the signals that Luis sends to the people of
his barrio are unspoken and implicit. Looking at
these architects walking with me and saying hello
to people like I do, one notices they have no
expensive shirts or hand-sewn leather shoes, no
Rolexes or Porsches. Hubert's suggestion was useful:
"Just take off the fanciest things." Discarding
the superficiality of our objects for complicated
rituals can be good for the heart. It may feel less
broken after seeing rats as big as lapdogs dancing
atop the garbage that is dumped from the heights
of the hovels; after repeatedly hearing the jocular
salute between Luis and the homeboys – permanently
waiting for some unknown event outside
their houses – as they mimic a few shots ringing
from a pistol; after listening to a teacher who looks
too old for her years, but has a room as big as the
conference room at Domus, the only school for
the Barrio children, as she proudly shows their
assignments and continues to mark them.
For those who have forgotten that pop is the essence
of all that is contemporary, and that the distance
between project and icon is short, there is the image
that I see from Hubert's car on the way back. On the
wall of an underpass, in that city centre of sorts, a
new mural of ceramic mosaic has grown, Trencadís
as they'd call it in Barcelona, where it embodies
the nightmares of Jujol and Gaudí. It portrays a
young, curly haired Simón Bolívar showing a boy
the Metro Cable cable cars flying over the city, over
smiling verdant plains, under a blue sky with clean
air: a socialist utopia of Caracas that for now is still
confined to government speeches and the artist's
imagination. In reality, this ville fatale is more like
a cross between Los Angeles with its interminable
freeways that always bring you to the same place,
basically nowhere; Rome in the '60s, when the only
infrastructure was built for a future that never came;
and Havana, where I've never been, but which must
have similar broken-down buses, the same inhabitants
who call everyone hermano, the same fear of not
knowing what will happen tomorrow, or knowing
that nothing will happen at all.
So I return to my five-star hotel and begin to write
this article at a table in the dining room. I write
because it's what I can do best. I write so I don't forget
the Barrio of San Agustín, the girl on the Metro
Cable, Luis Cerpa, his brother, and all the inhabitants
of Barrio 903. I also write so as not to forget
Hubert Klumpner, Alfredo Brillembourg and
their shiny, generous utopia, which has become
reality, at least for once.
Founded in 1993, Urban-
Think Tank is headed
by Alfredo Brillembourg
and Hubert Klumpner,
both teachers at Columbia
University in New York and
principals of S.L.U.M. Lab,
an academic research studio.
Urban-Think Tank. Fly me to my barrio
Metro Cable is an anti-demagogical project for hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of the Caracas barrios: no water, no Internet. A transit line for real life that is beyond all virtual imagination.
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- Stefano Casciani
- 22 April 2010
- Caracas