Towards COVID-19, an urban revolution? Caracas city during the pandemic

Abstract

This essay aims to present several reflections on the situation of the “Gran Caracas” between March and June 2020, during the pandemic period declared by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. These considerations on the city, understood as a complex and self-organized system, tell of an urban revolution in our territory, from organized communities that oppose the hegemonic models of world urbanization, to a divergence in the production and local supply models on the territory. Although it may seem that SARS-COVID-19 is a threat to urban actions that would be inhibited by confining measures in order to control the virus, we observe bottom-up and always community-based experiences that resist and become stronger in the midst of the present challenges. We are interested in these experiences since they contribute to the necessary discussion about the transformation of our urban environment. This study is based on a complex thought, which tries to weave the interactions and contributions of a subject (the community) that co-creates its reality (the city as a system) revealing, once again, the potential of creative people. Finally, some considerations are raised about these proposals and their possibilities, framed in the deep struggles for the vindication of the rights to territory, to life, to culture and to the city, and that in David Harvey's words (2013, pág. 16) cross the path of an urban revolution.