“The City of Tomorrow Must Reckon with the Lives and Living Habits of Human Beings”: The Joint Center for Urban Studies Goes to Venezuela, 1957-1969

Abstract

This essay explores the forgotten history of the founding of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Harvard University and the challenges it faced in putting its multidisciplinary urban studies method to work, in Venezuela, in the early 1960s. The first part “Cambridge, Massachusetts” details the Center’s creation and the mix of personal and professional relationships that shaped its structure and mission. The second part “Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela” retraces the Center’s role in building Ciudad Guayana. While the existing scholarship has portrayed the Center’s expedition to Venezuela as a botched experiment in midcentury utopian modernism, there’s more to the story. Building on recent work that has uncovered a converging transatlantic critique of the “urban renewal order,” this essay sheds light on why the Center went to rural Venezuela, where there weren’t supposed to be many people, to hone a new planning technique that purported to “reckon with the lives and living habits of human beings.”