Grad School Reflections: Segregation A La Carte in Latin America

As I read both Clara Irazabal’s “A Planned City Comes of Age: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana Today,” and Nora Libertun de Duren’s “Planning A la Carte” I couldn’t help but think: “Is this a planning success or a planning failure? Was it the plan that failed or was it the system that caused the plan to fail?”

Plans for the most part start off with good intentions, the problem is that good intentions of what “ought to be” are subjective, and they are in the eye of the beholder. Another other problem is that plan as you may, a plan is simply not enough to produce or ensure what “ought to be.” Ciudad Guayana and the gated communities of Buenos Aires give us two examples of how planned cities and communities are not what they were meant to be.

In the case of Ciudad Guayana I think the system caused the plan to fail. And by the system I mean the political culture and political will pushing the project forward. Irazabal discusses how the economically-based idea of development resulted in a “somewhat inhuman quality: scattered, large buildings in vast areas, the social classes clearly separated with the poor marginalized outside the planned areas.” I find it ironic how the recently elected national democratic government of Venezuela invited planners from MIT and Harvard and put their best people on the team to plan a city that did not include the poor and created a spatially awkward landscape of scattered buildings. Did they think that poverty would somehow disappear or fix itself over night?

The excessive fiscal avarice and myopic planning vision of the municipalities in the Buenos Aires metropolitan region are the main reasons that I think the gated communities of Buenos Aires are a planning failure. While the municipal flexibility to rezone land uses for development projects spurred the development of gated communities, the municipalities should have been more exigent and required developers to pay higher development fees so that municipalities could put in place distributional programs for the un-gated poor. In the end, as seen in the picture above, gated communities have created more class segregation and distributional disparities within Buenos Aires than the good that came from the increased local income from tax-payers and permits, job creation, and infrastructure development provided by developers in exchange for project approval. Evidence of these distributional disparities can be seen in this video news story: http://www.france24.com/en/20100814-report-argentina-buenos-aires-gated-communities-barbed-wire-violence linking the public safety issues in Buenos Aires today to the segregation of the ‘haves’ and ‘haves nots’ exacerbated by gated communities.

Poverty is an extremely complex issue that planners need to plan for unlike the case of Ciudad Guayana. Similarly, planners need to think of more comprehensive plans and consider long-term effects and not just worry about how to increase revenue and or put in place piece-mail infrastructure like the case in the suburban gated communities of Buenos Aires.