ABSTRACT
Venezuela’s oil boom of the 1970s was followed in the 1980s by the collapse of oil revenues. Policies of economic liberalization and associated increases in labour market income inequality further widened the gap between rich and poor described by Galeano, with extreme poverty in Caracas rising from 12.7 per cent in 1987 to 20.5 per cent in 1998. An increase in violence that began circa 1990 accelerated abandonment of public spaces by those who had the option; as fear became a dominant element in the daily lives of residents, the wealthy and parts of the middle class isolated themselves in private cars and gated and segregated residential enclaves (Lacabana and Cariola 2003; Briceño-León 2007). In other words, like metropolitan areas1 throughout the world transformed by the
integration of national economies and societies into global-scale economic flows of trade, finance and (to a lesser extent) people, Caracas became a more deeply divided city – divided inter alia by income, housing tenure and quality, employment status and safety. Those transformations provide the raw material for this chapter.
