Postwar & Welfare-Modernist (1945–1975)

Ciudad Guayana (Joint Center Plan)

1961– · Venezuela · Latin America · National modernization and capital-city building · Planned by CVG with the MIT–Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies
The Joint Center's 1964 comprehensive physical concept for Ciudad Guayana, strung along the 23 km Avenida Guayana.
The Joint Center's 1964 comprehensive physical concept for Ciudad Guayana, strung along the 23 km Avenida Guayana. · © Joint Center for Urban Studies / CVG — used with credit · Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard (Willo von Moltke) with Corporación Venezolana de Guayana, 'Comprehensive physical concept for the city of Ciudad Guayana', 1964; via Fundación Arquitectura y Ciudad

Core idea

A resource-frontier growth-pole city planned while it was already growing

Why it matters

The classic test case of rational planning meeting informal reality

Description

Founded in 1961 at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroní rivers, Ciudad Guayana was planned by the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana with the MIT–Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies as a heavy-industry growth pole uniting the company town of Puerto Ordaz and the spontaneous settlement of San Félix along a linear spine, Avenida Guayana.

Significance

Ciudad Guayana became planning literature's most scrutinised experiment in development planning — above all through Lisa Peattie's The View from the Barrio, which contrasted the planners' city seen from the air with the lived city on the ground. It stands for both the ambition and the blind spots of 1960s growth-pole doctrine.

What became of it

Grew into one of Venezuela's largest cities, but the planned east–west integration never fully overcame the divide between planned Puerto Ordaz and popular San Félix.

Sources

Open it on the interactive timeline →
hub.toekom.st — History of Urbanism · an interactive timeline of 850 planned cities across 6,000 years.