Inhabiting the Impossible: The Urban Discontinuity Between Petare and La Urbina in Caracas, Venezuela

Abstract

This research approaches Caracas barrios, complex places loaded with disparate connotations in their integration into the city. The morphological segregation of the territory through urban and architectural elements generates discontinuities between the limits of the planned sector, which follow formal processes, and the barrios, which grow through self-production processes, giving rise to a significant fragmentation of the urban fabric. At the same time, within these limits, many essential activities for the city take place simultaneously, and there are even certain situations that promote synergies between inhabitants on both sides. The limit between Petare and La Urbina is presented as a specific case study in which this border condition integrated into the urban heart is observed in detail. On the one hand, the main objective of the article is to make this limit visible through a detailed morphological description supported by novel cartographies, in both of which its main contribution lies. On the other hand, based on secondary sources, the research builds a theoretical framework that brings closer the concepts of limit and discontinuity and explains the formation of the barrios in Caracas to contextualize the case study; and analyzes some examples of urban interventions that resolve similar discontinuities in other places with the secondary objective of opening the way to future interventions that can reverse the discontinuous condition of the observed fragment.