RE-drawing equity. ASLA Students Award 2010
The most tangible condition of a city like Caracas is the vast difference lived and perceived between formal and informal city. Thinking about integrating both seem almost intractable problem, so we propose to achieve conditions that approximate both realities through the public space, including parks as the place of representation of equity, covering the integration of art and Landscape quality economically feasible with a response to the needs of communities.
In Caracas, more than 80% of the population lives in areas of origin and informal occupation, called “Barrios”. These are neighborhoods where informality is the rule, such as the lack of basic services. These “Barrios” are implanted in abrupt topographies that makes very difficult to connect them with the rest of the city and are located in zones intervened in a way that increase the risk in case of natural events. This neighborhoods are characterized for a really high crime and dropout rates and it is in itself a different way of making a city where the references of public and private space are converted, transformed in pursuit of their own needs.
Caracas has 1.2 m2 of green areas per capita. The WHO sets as optimal 15 m2 of green areas per capita or at least 10 m2. The population density of the municipality is 3831 people per km2 and the group of children and adolescents represent 57% of the total population. This lack of public spaces promoted a vision of interventions focused in generation of meeting places, focusing on the largest population living in the “Barrios” in Caracas, which are children and adolescents. These spaces would not only recreational in nature unless they can become trainers of new citizenship, and thus start drawing spaces of equity needed to reconcile the fact of making city and its inhabitants.