Fragmentos de una Barranquilla que no fue: restituciónes de una ciudad abortada entre 1935 y 1939

Abstract

Between 1935 and 1939, a key timeframe in the consolidation of Barranquilla as a river and sea port, the barranquilleros envisaged the final stage of their project of modernity; turning towards the future, they imagined projects they could put in motion with the revenues from the new port, theorized the guidelines for the city’s growth and, based on the economic boost of the time, predicted the final rise of Barranquilla as Colombia’s biggest and most prominent city. Eight months later, Hitler invaded Poland, destabilizing a mainly European world system of which Barranquilla was both outpost and periphery. The imagined projects were abandoned, and the predictions remained ghosts of what could have been. This article, besides an exercise capable of forgotten unbuilt cultural products, aims also to drain from them the ideological bases that reigned the city and its peoples during their conception.