A Fragmented Metropolis: Caracas, Halfway Between Poverty and Globalization

Abstract

Caracas is transforming itself, spreading over the Metropolitan Region, fragmenting at a socio-territorial and institutional level because of the new dynamics that globalization has imposed over all fields of society. Beyond a dual city, divided in two excluding socio-territorial scenarios product of social polarization, the metropolitan territory is characterized by the coexistence of "multiple cities" where a true social apartheid of popular groups live together with exclusive ghettos for high and middle sectors, that are new districts of command linked to globalization and areas of poverty. In this context, old and new-found forms of urban violence, changes in the way of life together with the trends toward privacy and atomization, emerge as the characteristics of a diversified and polarized metropolitan society in its different spaces, including the construction and appropriation of the city.

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