Bristol University Press
6 Sequencing Like a State: Ciudad Guayana and the Infrastructures of Arrival
Abstract
Between 1961 and 1966, a group of planners and social scientists from the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies built a midsized industrial city from scratch on a ‘resource frontier’ in post-dictatorship Venezuela. Rather than compose an old-style ‘model town’, the Joint Center sought to document the planning process itself, necessarily elapsing over time, and abstract its lessons for application to American cities and their futures. This chapter examines how they fundamentally reconceived urban and regional fabric in terms of mobility, rhythm, process, and flow. It focuses on a high-speed road, the Avenida Guayana, as a piece of region-making infrastructure and an experiment in choreographing the visual sequence of automobility as an information-rich chain of approaches and arrivals. Along transnational circuits of the Center’s own making, the Avenida Guayana offered Cold War urbanists a way to link the felt temporality of everyday life with the presumed political temporality of stepwise state ‘modernization’. The chapter argues that the transnational debates that constellated around this city still animate attempts to theorize the place of planning as a fundamentally future-making proposition.
Abstract
Between 1961 and 1966, a group of planners and social scientists from the Harvard–MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies built a midsized industrial city from scratch on a ‘resource frontier’ in post-dictatorship Venezuela. Rather than compose an old-style ‘model town’, the Joint Center sought to document the planning process itself, necessarily elapsing over time, and abstract its lessons for application to American cities and their futures. This chapter examines how they fundamentally reconceived urban and regional fabric in terms of mobility, rhythm, process, and flow. It focuses on a high-speed road, the Avenida Guayana, as a piece of region-making infrastructure and an experiment in choreographing the visual sequence of automobility as an information-rich chain of approaches and arrivals. Along transnational circuits of the Center’s own making, the Avenida Guayana offered Cold War urbanists a way to link the felt temporality of everyday life with the presumed political temporality of stepwise state ‘modernization’. The chapter argues that the transnational debates that constellated around this city still animate attempts to theorize the place of planning as a fundamentally future-making proposition.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents iii
- List of Figures and Tables v
- Notes on Contributors vii
- Acknowledgements xii
- Time for a Global Infrastructure Turn 1
- Rhythmic Infrastructure 25
-
Infrastructural Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- Usable Infrastructure Pasts: Mobilizing History for Urban Technology Futures 49
- Shifting Regimes of Historicity and the Control of Urban Futures through Infrastructures: Continuities, Ambivalences, and Tensions in the Anthropocene 72
- Extensions as Infrastructure: The Temporalities between Subjugation and Liberation in Jayapura, West Papua 95
-
Development Times and the Making of Urban Worlds
- Sequencing Like a State: Ciudad Guayana and the Infrastructures of Arrival 119
- The Times of Infrastructure Fundamentalism: Future Profits, Slow Operations, Long-Term Impacts 140
- Dissonant Times: The Land–Infrastructure–Finance Nexus in Post-Mubarak Egypt 160
-
Times of Disruption/Disrupting Times
- The Multiple Temporalities of Self-Healing Infrastructure: From the F-15 Fighter to the Smart Urban Microgrid 185
- Speed, Suspension, and Stasis: Waiting in the Shadow of Infrastructure 207
- Desynchronized Infrastructures of Care: Suburban Imaginaries Re-Examined 227
- Disrupting Infrastructure: Space, Speed, and Street Governance 249
- Urban Infrastructure In and Out of Time 270
- Index 285
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Contents iii
- List of Figures and Tables v
- Notes on Contributors vii
- Acknowledgements xii
- Time for a Global Infrastructure Turn 1
- Rhythmic Infrastructure 25
-
Infrastructural Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- Usable Infrastructure Pasts: Mobilizing History for Urban Technology Futures 49
- Shifting Regimes of Historicity and the Control of Urban Futures through Infrastructures: Continuities, Ambivalences, and Tensions in the Anthropocene 72
- Extensions as Infrastructure: The Temporalities between Subjugation and Liberation in Jayapura, West Papua 95
-
Development Times and the Making of Urban Worlds
- Sequencing Like a State: Ciudad Guayana and the Infrastructures of Arrival 119
- The Times of Infrastructure Fundamentalism: Future Profits, Slow Operations, Long-Term Impacts 140
- Dissonant Times: The Land–Infrastructure–Finance Nexus in Post-Mubarak Egypt 160
-
Times of Disruption/Disrupting Times
- The Multiple Temporalities of Self-Healing Infrastructure: From the F-15 Fighter to the Smart Urban Microgrid 185
- Speed, Suspension, and Stasis: Waiting in the Shadow of Infrastructure 207
- Desynchronized Infrastructures of Care: Suburban Imaginaries Re-Examined 227
- Disrupting Infrastructure: Space, Speed, and Street Governance 249
- Urban Infrastructure In and Out of Time 270
- Index 285
