Ciudad Guayana: From Growth Pole to Metropolis, Central Planning to Participation

By Tom Angotti, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela is one of the leading examples in the world of a city planned in accordance with the principles of comprehensive rational planning. It was started in the 1960s as a “growth pole” in an isolated part of Venezuela, built around a large steel plant and hydroelectric projects. In the 1990s, the model of planning shifted from centralized to decentralized as a result of the election victories of a radical political party and neo-liberal restructuring that weakened central government. The story of this dramatic change contains lessons for planning in the context of the recent wave of expansion in the global economy.

Tom Angotti is Professor and Chairperson of the Pratt Institute Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. He is Americas Editor for Planning Practice and Research, Participating Editor for Latin American Perspectives, and Editor of Planners Network. His is author of Metropolis 2000: Planning Poverty and Politics (Routledge, 1993) and Housing in Italy (Praeger, 1977) and numerous journal articles on planning, community development and Latin America. He has worked as an urban planner at city and state levels and as a consultant in Europe and Latin America.

Tom Angotti

Pratt Institute

Graduate Center for Planning & Environment

200 Willoughby Ave.

Brooklyn, NY 11205

718-399-4391

718-399-4332 (fax)

tangotti@pratt.edu

Ciudad Guayana: From Growth Pole to Metropolis, Central Planning to Participation[1]

Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela is one of the most important examples in Latin America of a city shaped by centralized planning. It was to be an industrial "growth pole," attracting jobs and people away from the rapidly growing metropolitan regions in the north of the country. It was an element in a broader strategy of national economic planning and import substitution aimed at laying the foundation for a diverse economy to replace export dependency. It was part of the developmentalist approach that was common throughout Latin America in the 1950s, filled with optimism about the benefits of economic growth and social progress and the ability of government to play a leading role in building economic independence.

In three and a half decades, the city expanded to thirty times its original population. Today Ciudad Guayana is a rapidly growing city in the process of becoming a metropolitan region.

Over the last 10 years, planning for Ciudad Guayana dramatically shifted from a comprehensive, rational model focused on economic and physical growth to a participatory, community-based model centered on holistic human development. This shift was led by a radical political movement with roots among labor and Catholic workers. Its early proponents rejected both the highly centralized approach and neo-liberal alternatives.

While in its infancy Ciudad Guayana had been a leading example of the rational “top-down” model in Latin America. It was made possible by profits from the oil boom in Venezuela, which made the nation a major player in the global economy and facilitated the growth of government at the national level. Today Ciudad Guayana is recognized as an example of a possible new “bottom-up” participatory model. The story of this shift is an important untold story, especially outside of Venezuela, that provides a window into critical changes in political economy at national and global levels. The shift coincides with the latest wave of global capitalist expansion that has weakened the direct participation of national governments in economic development, a shift that created the space for the new planning approach in Ciudad Guayana. In this article I will seek to analyze the shift in planning models in the context of broader national, hemispheric and international trends.

In a country (and hemisphere) where master plans are traditionally done by professionals without open public discussions, the new Ciudad Guayana plan was a revolutionary departure from standard practice. The process began shortly after Ciudad Guayana chose its first elected mayor in 1989. It entailed hundreds of meetings with community groups and elected neighborhood associations. For the first time planning ideas were written up and distributed for public discussion. The planning process developed parallel with and in relation to the budgetary process, and participation was a major component in both.

A large part of the Ciudad Guayana story is the successful shift in planning process. Perhaps because of this shift, however, the substance of the new Ciudad Guayana plan reads like no other plan in Venezuela, and very few in Latin America. It moves boldly beyond narrow physical planning to issues of political economy. It focuses on environmental and quality of life concerns, social solidarity and equity. These are the elements that lead Marta Harnecker to associate the reforms in Ciudad Guayana with an emerging trend of “governments of popular participation,” that differ substantially from authoritarian and elitist right-wing governments and populist governments of both right and left. According to Harnecker (1994:5), Ciudad Guayana’s popular participation reflects an attempt to “find solutions for those who were always poor and powerless, without abandoning concern for the city as a whole.”

The Rational Comprehensive Plan

Government planners made the first plans for Ciudad Guayana in the 1960s with the participation of advisors contracted from the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies. This coincided with the onset of The Alliance for Progress, in which North American technological expertise was considered a necessary accompaniment to national economic growth.

My purpose is not to analyze in detail the original plans or pass judgement on them, or to assess how and why they were or were not implemented. That has been done elsewhere (see Appleyard, 1976; Friedmann 1966; Macdonald, 1979; McGinn & Davies, 1969; Peattie, 1968, 1987; Rodwin, 1969). Nor is my purpose to explore the various critiques and modifications of rational planning theory (the reader is referred to Faludi, 1973 and Paris, 1982) or to contribute to the bashing of rational planning as part of the current neo-liberal adulation of the so-called marketplace. Furthermore, I do not wish to repeat the well-established demonstrations that "growth pole" and import substitution theories did not yield the results they promised.

I believe the most important lessons here are in understanding how and why the planning process has changed so dramatically. This requires us to assess how planning has shaped and been shaped by the physical, economic, social and political environment. It is also important to consider planning in Ciudad Guayana relative to planning in other Venezuelan and Latin American cities, and to avoid using non-contextual models as ideals against which all planning should be measured. If we must judge planning, perhaps the fundamental question we should ask is within its historical context, to what extent did planning contribute to a process of making a more efficient, equitable and sustainable city?

In the following section I would like to show how the original plan for Ciudad Guayana, placed in its historical context, was a pathbreaking effort, a progressive attempt to create an alternative to the impoverished, dependent metropolis then common in Latin America. The rational comprehensive planning model was a necessary accompaniment to the massive government investments in industry. Without a sizeable comprehensive planning effort these investments could have been compromised. The comprehensive plan was partially successfully; its failures, however, are sizeable.

We can also see that the recent efforts to democratize planning and address economic inequalities in Ciudad Guayana are pathbreaking in their time. They lead and parallel more general trends in Latin America and other developing regions, and correspond with the evolution of Ciudad Guayana from a city into a major metropolitan region. Another example of democratic local planning may be seen in the participatory budgeting process developed by the Workers Party governments over the last ten years in Porto Alegre, Brazil (Abers, 1996, 1998). The Porto Alegre experience contrasts starkly with Brasilia -- Brazil’s example of comprehensive rational planning from the same era in which Ciudad Guayana was created (see Epstein, 1973). The seeds of other efforts in participatory planning may be found in left and other local governments throughout Latin America, but it is still too early to call this a major new paradigm or trend. Indeed, in the 1990s the more prevalent trend has been towards “strategic planning” initiatives throughout Latin America. These initiatives often start with the business/military approach to planning that emphasizes economic growth and capital expansion. They usually include public participation, and some adopt significant environmental and social content, but the mission is usually to market one’s city within the competitive global environment.

The new planning approach in Ciudad Guayana explicitly sets out to improve the quality of life and the alleviate inequalities. These were not the overarching goals of the first Ciudad Guayana plan, but in its time and in its own way the plan partially achieved these goals. At the very least the original plan has outlived its usefulness. The new planning process, however, is still relatively new and our assessments of it must be tentative. At the time of this writing Venezuelan voters just approved a new constitution and it remains to be seen how the new national government of Hugo Chávez will affect local government and planning.

This is not to deny the serious problems of Ciudad Guayana today, and the responsibility of the planners for creating them. Lisa Peattie's lucid analysis and critique (1987) highlighted the historic oversights in the highly centralized planning process as well as the planners' prejudices that were codified in official policy. Peattie shows how planning for Ciudad Guayana was driven by the process of capitalist accumulation and the process of legitimization of elite power. Planning for the city was driven by policies that favored primary industry and high profile public works projects at the expense of the needs of the region's people, and without their participation.

In the following I will briefly review the historical context, look at Ciudad Guayana today, and then analyze the shift to a new planning model and possible consequences for the future.

Historic Context and the Early Plans

The first proposals to plan and build a new city in the south of Venezuela arose in the late 1950s in a political environment of growing calls for national economic independence. The government of Rómulo Betancourt, which followed years of military rule, projected the vision of a democratic nation able to determine its own future, reviving the tradition of scientific positivism prevalent throughout Latin America. Since the 1940s, the oil boom in Venezuela had been transforming one of the most rural and impoverished nations in Latin America into one of the most urban and wealthy nations. By the late 1950s, the growth of government participation in the oil industry (the industry was completely nationalized in 1976) created a new oligarchy and middle class fed by oil profits, whose future was linked to global capitalism. Venezuela’s state-run oil company, which produced the majority of government revenues, became a full-fledged transnational corporation and wedded government to the global marketplace (Petras, Morley & Smith, 1977).

The new oil-fed economy also raised fears among elites that Venezuela's economy would grow hopelessly dependent on oil exports and that the central and southern regions of the country would be abandoned as the cities in the northern mountain region continued to grow. In 1960, the majority of Venezuela's export earnings came from oil and more than half of the population lived in the five large cities in the northern mountain and coastal regions -- Caracas, Valencia, Maracay, Barquisimeto and Maracaibo. "Primate city" theory implied that the small number of very large cities in the north were dysfunctional and would eventually concentrate all the population. Ciudad Guayana was to be part of a strategy to encourage urban development in the south and relieve growth pressures in the north (see Negrón, 1991; Angotti, 1998).

Throughout Latin America in this period, there emerged various forms of dependency theory, which was critical of economic dependency on the more developed nations, particularly the United States (Chilcote, 1982). Dependency theory was a response to the post-War wave of globalization. Developmentalist alternatives advocating import substitution strategies and national economic planning, which originated in the period after World War II, were given new meaning when the Cuban Revolution took power in 1959. These ostensibly national strategies would not only spur national economic growth; they would offer a peaceful alternative to revolution as part of the broader Alliance for Progress promoted by the U.S. The approach in Brazil, which initiated centralized planning and a new city in the nation's interior (Brasilia), was very similar to that of Venezuela. However, Venezuela's efforts were guided by a civil regime whose conception of state-led development was not tied to the military visions of national power as it was in other countries.

In 1959, Venezuela's President Rómulo Betancourt created a commission to study development of the Guayana region, a largely unpopulated area in the south of the country rich in mineral deposits, including the vast Orinoco River valley and a large jungle region bordering on Brazil and Guayana. In 1960, the government created the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG), a public corporation with powers to plan, build and manage a major urban center. The government would then transfer 36,150 hectares of land to the new corporation (Primer Congreso Nacional de Arquitectos, 1971).

In 1960, there were several small settlements in the area designated as the new Ciudad Guayana. San Félix was a fishing village with some 20,000 people located along the banks of the Orinoco River. About ten kilometers (six miles) away, across the Caroní River, was a small mining camp, Puerto Ordáz, where a large steel mill was being built. In 1961, the entire State of Bolívar, where Ciudad Guayana was located, had a total population of 214,000. In that year, the state created the municipality of Caroní, which included the small settlements of San Félix, El Roble, Dalla'Costa, Castillito, Puerto Ordáz, Matanzas and Caruachí. (Primer Congreso Nacional de Arquitectos, 1971)

The central vision of the future Ciudad Guayana that lay beneath the government actions was that of an industrial city with a large steel plant that would create a multiplier effect, expanding opportunities for other industries and services. Direct government investment was to have created a strategic heavy industrial sector that would stimulate manufacturing and light industry, resulting in a diversified independent economy no longer reliant on industrial imports. This was in the context of a national economic plan prepared under the President's Office of Coordination and Planning (CORDIPLAN). Another key move was to build a series of hydroelectric dams in the region that would minimize dependence on oil for domestic energy generation. These industrial and public works projects were perhaps the main reason for the Ciudad Guayana plan, which helps explain why the priorities of planners were to spur and rationalize investment and economic growth (see Peattie, 1987).

The MIT-Harvard team, including John Friedmann, Lloyd Rodwin, Donald Appleyard and Lisa Peattie, served from 1961-1966 and worked with Venezuelan planners to produce a physical master plan for the new city. The basic concept behind the first plan was to connect the two existing settlements of San Félix and Puerto Ordáz with a central development spine that would serve both commercial and residential functions. The west side of the Caroní River, where the heavy industry was located in a vast industrial reserve, would be linked to the eastern portion, where the majority of the population lived (see Friedmann, 1966; Appleyard, 1976; Peattie, 1968).

Since 1961, the CVG has planned and managed virtually all aspects of economic and urban development. They set up industries, mostly government-owned enterprises, and built roads, schools, health facilities and housing. They provided all urban services. The Municipality of Caroní, on the other hand, was mostly a ceremonial entity whose officials were appointed by the central government but had little involvement in planning and management.

Ciudad Guayana has become Venezuela's "Wild West" frontier city. Industry recruited foreign laborers from all over Latin America, southern Europe and the United States. An estimated one-third of the industrial workforce is foreign labor. Workers fleeing political repression in countries like Chile and Peru came to work in construction, mining and manufacturing. By 1970, the population was 148,000, by 1990 it was 577,000 and by the year 2000 will approximate 800,000. These figures do not deviate substantially from initial projections by the CVG (Vila, 1985, Cuadro 1).

Ciudad Guayana’s dramatic economic growth did not fundamentally alter the structure of dependency on global capitalist development. To some extent, the city became a factory enclave with stronger ties to the global export market than to Venezuela’s internal market. This was obvious when global competition in steel created a serious crisis in this key industry in the 1980s. Even more devastating, however, was the concurrent drop in oil prices on the international market, which led to a sharp decline in the Venezuelan government’s main source of revenue. The oil crisis made it more difficult for the government and CVG to finance needed modernization of industry and expanded urban services.

Ciudad Guayana Today[2]

Ciudad Guayana today is a sprawled metropolis in the making. It is one of the largest cities in Venezuela. However, the goal of displacing urban population from the northern coastal region was not achieved; in fact, a large proportion (there are no reliable figures) of the city's immigration was from outside the country. The leveling off of growth rates in northern metropolises is hardly attributable to Ciudad Guayana, and growth rates in medium-sized northern cities have risen.

Despite its dramatic growth, Ciudad Guayana is in many ways still a loosely bound collection of physically separate communities and not yet a unified human settlement. There is little civic identity with the evolving metropolitan entity denoted Ciudad Guayana by officialdom. If you arrive by air, you will land at the Puerto Ordáz airport. If you live in San Félix, you consider Ciudad Guayana to be the upper-income area built for factory workers, professionals and management. The entire urbanized area extends along an east-west corridor over 40 kilometers (24 miles) long, encompassing scores of communities. Many people, except for the factory workers and those few who are fortunate enough to own a car, rarely leave their communities.

Lisa Peattie sums up the situation:

The city as implemented falls considerably short of the hopes held out for it by its planners.... There is a high degree of social inequality in the city; in this the city does not differ from Venezuela as a whole, but more than is usual in Venezuela this is expressed in sharp spatial separation between rich and poor, and the inequality is thus even more than usually visible.... Thus it is only the planners who know their product as "Ciudad Guayana"; in the telephone directory, ticket agency, and common conversation it appears as distinct settlements, two cities. (1987, 153)

Ciudad Guayana is indeed the leading center for "basic" industry that it was conceived to be. The state-owned steel and aluminum plants play an important role in the local and national economies. About 30% of the labor force works in industry, ten percent less than originally projected, but substantially more than in other Venezuelan cities. The multiplier effect never occurred, however, and most employment outside the few large industries is in low-paying services, not other industries. The benefits of the economic "take-off" in Ciudad Guayana were limited mostly to workers and management in the basic industries (see Rakowski, 1989). Unemployment figures are unreliable, but it does appear that unemployment levels are somewhat less than in other Venezuelan cities. As is true throughout Latin America, official employment data do not accurately measure employment in the informal sector, which includes services, contracting out, home-based production, and other non-salaried labor that is in part dependent on the demand for goods and services from the formal sector.

The basic idea of the first physical plan -- linking existing settlements by means of a new development spine -- has not produced the integration of separate communities that was expected. Vast undeveloped areas still separate residential communities. What is more, new settlements have spread beyond the limits anticipated in the original plan, producing even greater sprawl.

The city that was supposed to reduce oil dependence is more dependent on motor vehicle use than perhaps any other city in Venezuela. The only effective means of transportation in Ciudad Guayana is by automobile, and most residents do not own one. Pedestrian and bicycle circulation is difficult and unsafe, as there are few sidewalks, paths or vehicular traffic controls. Workers in the factories may commute by bus, but their commute can be one to two hours long. Most of the buses are owned or contracted by the industrial enterprises and do not serve the rest of the population. There is also a large fleet of jitneys (por puestos) which is generally inadequate and costly. The large commercial center, Alta Vista, which was to have been the central element in the connecting spine, is too far from most housing to become the "downtown" it was planned to be, and is but one of several commercial centers that dot the urbanized region, though it may be more important for the middle class. Located on a hill, its modern buildings perched above the sprawling valley, Alta Vista is a distant icon of the formal city.

Seventy percent of the population still lives on the San Félix side of the river, separated by long distances from the jobs on the Puerto Ordáz side. The original plan anticipated just the opposite pattern, with most of the population shifting closer to industry. While in recent years population around Puerto Ordáz has been growing at a faster pace, and accessibility has vastly improved with the construction of two new bridges over the Caroní River (there are now three bridges), the problem of accessibility to both public and private transportation remains.

If Ciudad Guayana was to have been an example of modern city development without a vast sector of housing built in violation of codes and without services, as in other Latin American cities, it has been a partial success. The CVG developed a program to deal with low-income immigrants and squatters, providing sites and services. Although they at times attempted, usually without success, to evict squatters, they often helped them to regularize their tenancy. As a result, some 15% of all housing was built without formal planning approval, compared to 40-50% in Caracas and other Venezuelan cities. Still, some one-third of the population live in very marginal circumstances -- similar, though possibly less than, the proportion elsewhere in Venezuela (see Scattoni ed Vila, 1994). To some extent this outcome may be attributed to the relative wealth of Ciudad Guayana, but in a nation where government planning has historically ignored the barrios, no other Venezuelan city has had as ambitious a program for dealing with and serving existing and potentially "marginal" areas. Still, in Ciudad Guayana the territorial distribution of poverty is no less segregated than in other Venezuelan cities. The low-income population is disproportionately located in the San Félix area, as it was 35 years ago, and in other communities farthest from the industrial zone.

The CVG's clear spending priority was industry and its strategic objective economic growth. This can be seen in the contrast between the well-served industrial area and the poorly served residential communities. Also, the best-served residential neighborhoods are the ones built for industrial workers and managers. This hierarchy was both a conscious element in the plans and a reflection of existing social inequality. The CVG had five levels of housing expenditure which differentiated housing strategies according to social stratum. The amount provided for the lower strata was never enough to satisfy the need for low-income housing, thereby placing the CVG in a situation of reacting to land invasions instead of anticipating them.

One important asset of Ciudad Guayana compared to other Venezuelan cities is the natural environment. It is bordered by a large river and bisected by another, and includes two giant wilderness parks with waterfalls in the center of the city. Many green spaces remain undeveloped, and the low-density residential communities have a distinct rural air, where roosters crow at dawn and people walk and meet in the streets. However, the sprawled pattern of development has eaten up a large portion of the land, air pollution is a problem near the large factories, and raw sewage contaminates the rivers. Ciudad Guayana is also the center for a growing tourist industry in the region's jungles and forests.

Low-income residential communities that existed in the 1960s and were observed and appreciated in the works of Lisa Peattie and Donald Appleyard remain today as they were then, with some incremental improvements. They are viable communities but are still seen as marginal by the more traditional government planners. Many things changed around them; they were bypassed by official planning, for better and for worse.

The Shift in Planning Model

After completion of the first master plan for Ciudad Guayana in 1963, there were subsequent revisions in 1969, 1979 and 1985. The first master plan completed with a participatory model is dated 1994.

Dramatic changes in Latin America and Venezuela during the 1980s created the conditions for an abrupt shift in the planning model in Ciudad Guayana in the 1990s. The IMF and World Bank introduced structural adjustment programs throughout Latin America to deal with the problems of debt and inflation. Venezuela also faced a decline in world market prices for petroleum, reducing the main source of government revenues needed to finance social spending. The government sought to confront the crisis by raising domestic gasoline prices, at that time the cheapest in the world, eliminating price supports and reducing subsidies. Widespread urban rebellions in Venezuela made further price increases problematic.

This succession of events demonstrates the extent to which Venezuela remained dependent on the global market. The wave of global capitalist expansion that began in the late 1970s facilitated an economic boom in Venezuela and made possible the continued growth of Ciudad Guayana. However, this new wave of globalization also produced the crises that called into question the prevailing system of economic management and political governance.

In a further attempt to solve the government’s fiscal crisis, Venezuela's leaders turned to strategies of decentralization and privatization. These policies were consistent with the IMF/World Bank approach of reducing government involvement in the economy. In the 1980s, the Venezuelan Congress passed a comprehensive law for the first time permitting local election of municipal and state officials. The first local elections ever were held in 1989. The new law, however, was not just a strategy of structural adjustment. It responded to widespread criticism of government corruption and inadequate service delivery due to overcentralization. It was supported by community movements and large sectors of the left because it responded to growing protests from working class communities.

The Venezuelan government was also moving to privatize many government-owned enterprises. The CVG and state-owned industries in Ciudad Guayana were prime targets. The CVG would be asked to shed some of its functions and turn them over to local government. By the mid-1990s, privatization was underway at the major factories in Ciudad Guayana. Devolution of services to municipal government was much slower and more difficult, but clearly was on the agenda.

The government was widely discredited by both left and right and could no longer operate in the old way. This widespread dissatisfaction ultimately fed two coup attempts in the early 1990s and led to the subsequent election of coup leader Hugo Chávez in 1999. In Ciudad Guayana as in many other localities, local government was as reviled as the national government. Due to austerity measures at the national level, the CVG's hegemony in the planning and management of Ciudad Guayana was threatened. Due to impending elections, the patronage appointees to city government could no longer be guaranteed their jobs. Strapped with their institutional histories of top-down decisionmaking, neither the CVG nor the major parties responsible for governance were able to develop a strategy for transition to decentralized government. Thus, the election of local government left open a huge void in political power.

A radical political movement emerged in Venezuela in the 1970s. Led by industrial workers and left wing Catholics in Ciudad Guayana, the movement eventually coalesced in a new national party, La Causa R (LCR). LCR had populist leanings but brought together a broad range of forces dissatisfied with government and anxious for a break with the past. It started among workers at Ciudad Guayana’s industrial plants who were facing declining wages and corrupt unionism. They got no support from the two major parties that had alternated control of government since the end of the military dictatorship. LCR did not limit its organizing to workplace issues and sought to address the problems of daily life -- transportation, housing, education, water and sewer and other services. The workers formed alliances with community organizations, much as the Brazilian Workers Party had done (see López Maya, 1994 for a history of LCR). By 1989, the year of the first municipal elections, LCR was the largest party in the region and the only one with a strategy and popular base for implementing the transition to a new decentralized system. The first elected mayor of the Municipality of Caroní, Clemente Scotto, was a leader of LCR, as was the first governor of Bolívar State.[3]

Scotto entered city hall and was confronted with urgent financial, personnel and organizational problems. He claims he spent almost the first year putting the house in order. In 1991, while undertaking consultations with neighborhoods, the mayor launched the process of planning for a new master plan -- the Plan de Ordenamiento Urbano (POU).

The new model of planning may not be particularly novel to planners in the United States who are accustomed to having many community consultations. But in Venezuela, where all plans were discussed and finalized in planning offices with no consultation at all, this turnaround was nothing less than extraordinary. Furthermore, in most other Venezuelan municipalities governed by the nation's two traditional parties (Acción Democrática and COPEI), no such turnaround occurred, even years after the 1989 elections.

Scotto brought new professional expertise to City Hall to undertake work on the plan. His planning team was inter-disciplinary, and included many women, who tended to show a greater appreciation for a participatory approach than the traditional male planners. The CVG hierarchy, controlled by Acción Democrática, loudly objected to an initiative that did not involve them. As a result, the POU technical team ended up being directed by a triumvirate including planners from city government, the CVG and the national planning ministry (MINDUR). This collaboration evidently turned out to be a fortuitous one and facilitated intra-governmental cooperation. Clearly, however, city government retained the political initiative and leadership in the planning process.

The planners charted out four phases to the planning process: pre-diagnostic, diagnostic, visioning, and development of the plan. In this sense, the process resembled in part the rational approach with which planners were quite familiar. They would describe existing conditions in the pre-diagnostic phase, work with communities to identify problems in the diagnostic phase, establish visions for the future in the visioning phase, and consolidate the process by preparing a formal plan in the final phase. The planning office contracted with experts at the Central University of Venezuela (both of them, significantly, were women) to prepare basic plan documentation and catalogue results from neighborhood meetings (Marcano & Foley, 1994; Vila, 1995).

However, the picture that emerges from my review of planning documents and a series of interviews with participants in the process is of a process that diverges substantially from the traditional rational planning model.[4] There was no hard and fast blueprint defining the length of the process or pre-ordaining the results. The team launched extensive rounds of open meetings in all neighborhoods, and new ideas and proposals emerged in the process. The local government worked closely with elected neighborhood associations, or parroquias, which became the official interlocutors with the planning team. In fact, the planning process appears to have given legitimacy to the parroquias. Newsletters and handouts provided basic information developed by the planning team and reported on the results of deliberations. An important aspect of the participation was its involvement of the poor neighborhoods around San Félix and elsewhere. Another key element was involvement of groups and individuals that did not necessarily support the mayor’s election, including some who were drawn into politics for the first time when they attended a planning session.

The POU was completed in 1994 and approved after a required 60-day period of public hearings. The overall thrust of the plan revolved around five key objectives (Almacaroní, n.d.):

1) Consolidate Ciudad Guayana as the most important city in the south of the nation

2) Improve the quality of life of the inhabitants

3) Establish a harmonious relation with nature

4) Contribute to a sense of belonging while respecting cultural diversity

5) Consolidate a local democratic administration with increasing autonomy.

Within each of these categories, the plan details more specific objectives, programs and projects. Concretely, the plan seeks to overcome the problems of internal physical and social fragmentation, lack of jobs and services, environmental deterioration, and a relatively undeveloped civic life.

By the time the plan was approved, the local government had already established as general practice a process of community participation for discussion and approval of its annual budget. Each year, detailed budget reports were made available to the public. This was one example among many of how the participatory process was not limited to plan development. Though inevitably uneven and leaving many outside its orbit, no one could maintain that under the new regime open participation was not held up as a standard, both in theory and practice.

In form, the new plan for Ciudad Guayana looks and sounds like many other modern master plans. In content, however, it deviates from the more traditional physical planning approaches. Concepts such as "regional integration", "sustainability", "healthy cities", and "solidarity" point to quality of life concerns that go beyond the usual focus on land use and physical infrastructure. The plan recognizes the "informal sector" and calls for positive support of it rather than benign neglect. It proposes strategies for increasing accessibility without dependence on the automobile. Though none of these concepts by themselves are revolutionary, in the present-day context of Ciudad Guayana and Venezuela, they clearly represent a revolutionary new way of perceiving the role of government and the future of the city.

After the Plan

After having won a second term in a landslide, and after serving two terms (six years), Clemente Scotto was prevented by term limits from seeking a third term as mayor. Pastora Medina, also of LCR, became the new mayor. She brought in a new team of planners who were to prepare the more detailed plans for each neighborhood that would make up the Plan de Desarrollo Urban Local (PDUL), which was to be based on the POU. The new team seriously questioned aspects of the POU and raised concerns about the ability of government to implement some of the recommendations. In the midst of considerable internal debate, there was little progress on the PDUL. By the summer of 1997, most of the new team had left city government and the planning office was reorganized to take up the work again.

After completion of the POU, the person responsible as liaison from MINDUR to Caroní was replaced by an official who interpreted more conservatively the conformance of the POU with national guidelines, and held up its approval. Two years after submission of the plan, local officials were still awaiting official acceptance. In sum, while the six years of radical change under the administration of Clemente Scotto set in motion a process of participatory planning which has been partially institutionalized, it appears that the forward motion has stopped and the plans from that period called into question.

The new planning director appointed by Medina had been a manager in a state-owned enterprise. With the POU completed, she was able to take a fresh look at the sometimes erratic planning process in the previous administration. One of her new efforts was to develop a manual that established a process of strategic planning within government (Almacaroní, 1997). This seems to indicate a shift towards a corporate model of planning and away from participatory planning involving neighborhoods and civic groups; or it may simply mean that the government has taken a needed breather to put its shop in order. It will be difficult to make any conclusive assessments on this account until substantial work has been completed on the PDUL. In the meantime, further changes may come about as a result of the very recent appointment of Clemente Scotto by the new Venezuelan government to head the CVG. This could speed up or change the terms of the process of service devolution, which has up to now been very slow. It has taken over five years for the CVG to transfer solid waste collection and management to the municipality of Caroní. The need to raise local revenues and develop a local management capability have made it a rocky process, and to date this is the only major service transferred to local government.

Lessons and Future Prospects

Whatever the final outcome, it is clear that the old approach to planning and municipal governance can return only with great difficulty. The expectations for local involvement have been raised. LCR gained national recognition as a political party because of its work in the Guayana region, and has staked its future on an open, participatory approach to governance. As an indication of the party's popularity, the former governor of Bolívar State made several serious, though unsuccessful, runs for President of Venezuela. However, some of the LCR's luster has worn off due to its alliances in some instances with traditional political forces and, some say, adoption of traditional political tactics. In 1997, the party split over the extent of support for IMF-mandated austerity measures, including privatization. Most of the party leadership in Ciudad Guayana has opted for the new party, called Por La Patria, that formed after the split, which is the most wary of privatization and the Venezuelan government's management of the process.

While there is now a growing civic consciousness and a more pluralistic political environment in Ciudad Guayana, the possibility remains of returning to the day in which government policies give clear priority to economic growth instead of equity. Indeed, the government of Venezuela is opening up the region around Ciudad Guayana for private mining, while just to the north near Maturín vast new petroleum reserves will be tapped. The potential for the return to a model of growth and planning driven by the needs of enterprise -- now mostly private enterprise instead of public -- remains very real. What started as radical democratic changes could be consumed by neo-liberal “reforms.” Thus, as Venezuela and Ciudad Guayana face a new economic boom in coming decades, it remains to be seen to what extent the participatory model will be consolidated or eliminated.

The broad question that remains unresolved is: will the new model of participatory planning in Ciudad Guayana be used, in the long run, as a vehicle for structural adjustment and fiscal austerity instead of democratization? Will it be used to download the responsibilities of national government without providing adequate resources? Did LCR and the labor and community movements play into the same neo-liberal policies they forcefully objected to? It is a mistake to characterize every step towards local democracy as reinforcing global expansion and government downsizing, and it is a mistake to overlook the real and progressive grassroots opposition to ineffective and corrupt national governments. But will that opposition consolidate as a long-term political force and maintain its commitment to independent development, human-centered planning and social equity?

On a broader level, the question is whether radical local changes can influence the globalization process and constrain global market forces. From the Ciudad Guayana case, we can see how local efforts can help change national policies and the balance of political power. As in the recent demonstrations in Seattle and Washington, D.C. against the World Trade Organization, local activism may also play a role in the struggle to gain democratic control over the global marketplace and plan for a better quality of life for all citizens.

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[1]This is a revised and updated version of papers presented at the Latin American Studies Association conference in Chicago, September 1998, and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, November 1997. Many thanks to the Urban Planning program at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) for use of their library. Special thanks to Ester Marcano, Frank Marcano, and Elisenda Vila at the UCV, and in Ciudad Guayana to Sunilde Araujo, Yajaira Briceño, María Nuria De Cesaris, Kathy Rakowski, Luisa Rodríguez, and Clemente Scotto. Darío Vergara and Kathy Rakowski provided useful comments on an earlier draft.

[2]In large measure, the analysis of Ciudad Guayana today is taken from reports generated in the development of the most recent master plan (Marcano and Foley, 1994).

[3]For a review of LCR's program of participatory democracy in Ciudad Guayana by the people who created it, and the problems encountered by the new administration, see Harnecker, 1994. For an analysis of the local government's experience with public participation, see Cartaya and García, 1996.

[4] The documents reviewed include Almacaroni, (1997, n.d.) draft plans, circulars, newsletters and reports issued by the planning teams. Useful studies that evaluate the planning process include Cartaya & García (1996), Marcano & Foley (1994), and Scattoni & Vila (1994). Meetings were held with the city’s planning staff, including critics of the planning process, and two former staff members who were central to the process. The new planning director, former mayor Clemente Scotto, researchers Ester Marcano, Elisenda Vila and Kathy Rakowski were also interviewed. Each meeting and interview was structured around ten open-ended questions that were made available to the participants in advance.