6 - Sequencing Like a State: Ciudad Guayana and the Infrastructures of Arrival

Summary

To plan is an inherently temporal proposition: it is to make a series of claims about the future. That temporality has a history all its own, one inseparable from the design and execution of specific infrastructural projects: arrangements of material objects, in particular places, positioned to impart form, motion, and rhythm to everyday life. This chapter routes the history of twentieth-century urban and regional planning – a rich seedbed of ‘futures past’, despite the field's absence from Koselleck's ([1979] 1985) well-known treatment – through 15 miles of highway that established the central spine of Ciudad Guayana, an industrial New Town purpose-built in the early 1960s along a putative ‘resource frontier’ in north-eastern Venezuela. That road, Avenida Guayana, became a central political technology and rhetorical touchstone in the broader developmentalist programme put forth by President Romulo Betancourt. As infrastructure, it at once indicated the state-sanctioned course of urbanization and intervened to materialize it in three dimensions: it ‘promised’ a particular technopolitical future (Anand et al, 2018) and, gesturally at least, worked to make it ‘present’ (Rutherford, 2020). At each stage in its realization, this chapter shows, the city's stewards indexed minute aspects of the highway's physical form – and its visual perception, typically from the window of a moving vehicle – to processes unfolding at regional, national, and transnational scales. Throughout, the chapter argues for the place of transit infrastructures as instruments productive of political temporality. It also demonstrates how certain leading critiques of planning and development took shape through encounters with those very same instruments. In equal measure, Avenida Guayana participated in the making and unmaking of global urban futures.

The case of Ciudad Guayana affords perspective on how infrastructures configuring physical movement once converged, unstably, with Cold War ideas about social and economic mobility – and with American modernization theorists’ overwrought ambitions to prescribe the stadial sequences by which other states would emerge into industrial ‘maturity’. In that conflict's long aftermath, the episode remains an instructive, if ambivalent, object lesson in how the imposed temporalities of development, seldom if ever linear, can swerve, stall, and break down upon contact with a recalcitrant site.