Utopian modernism turned on its head in Caracas, where residents have made fifty-year-old superblock housing projects into the locus of sprawling improvised settlements.
[...] In the city's San Francisco Valley, these slums, where nearly half of Caraqueños live, dramatically run up against a series of gargantuan buildings with punchy red, yellow, blue, and white facades cut out from the hillside-superbloques. Each of these housing projects is forty meters tall and over eighty meters long. Nearly swallowed by ranchos, they are vestiges of modernist urbanism long since colonized by the realities of twentieth-century Caracas.
The last Venezuelan dictator, General Marcos Pérez Jiménez, oversaw the construction of the superblocks. The project was the concrete centerpiece of the New National Ideal, an ambitious renewal program intended to foment "the rational transformation of the physical environment." In the capital, this entailed a massive endeavor to rid the city of its metastasizing slums. Between Pérez Jiménez's fraudulent election in 1952 and downfall in 1958, the state built 28,763 housing units, many of them contained in Caracas' eighty-seven superblocks. The jewel was 23 de Enero, host to thirty-eight of them. Inaugurated in 1955 with the moniker 2 de Diciembre, in celebration of the dictator's assumption of power, the parroquia was rechristened 23 de Enero in 1958, to commemorate his flight from the country. It now stands as an ironic monument to the dictator and a continuing refutation of his legacy.
This admixture of Latin America's two most prevalent forms of shelter, modernist housing blocks and improvised slum dwellings, is not unique, but the scale, site, history, and density of 23 de Enero-over eighty thousand residents live in the parroquia's superblocks and ranchos-make it exceptional. [...]
Thanks to Matt Sledge
FULL STORY: The City that Built Itself

Alabama: Trump Terminates Settlements for Black Communities Harmed By Raw Sewage
Trump deemed the landmark civil rights agreement “illegal DEI and environmental justice policy.”

Planetizen Federal Action Tracker
A weekly monitor of how Trump’s orders and actions are impacting planners and planning in America.

The 120 Year Old Tiny Home Villages That Sheltered San Francisco’s Earthquake Refugees
More than a century ago, San Francisco mobilized to house thousands of residents displaced by the 1906 earthquake. Could their strategy offer a model for the present?

In Both Crashes and Crime, Public Transportation is Far Safer than Driving
Contrary to popular assumptions, public transportation has far lower crash and crime rates than automobile travel. For safer communities, improve and encourage transit travel.

Report: Zoning Reforms Should Complement Nashville’s Ambitious Transit Plan
Without reform, restrictive zoning codes will limit the impact of the city’s planned transit expansion and could exclude some of the residents who depend on transit the most.

Judge Orders Release of Frozen IRA, IIJA Funding
The decision is a victory for environmental groups who charged that freezing funds for critical infrastructure and disaster response programs caused “real and irreparable harm” to communities.
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
Clanton & Associates, Inc.
Jessamine County Fiscal Court
Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies (IHS)
City of Grandview
Harvard GSD Executive Education
Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commissions
Salt Lake City
NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service