| Caracas, Venezuela 2013 |
| Informal settlements lack cartographic information. In most cases, their organic growth and continuous change of their urban fabric makes it hard to keep track. At the same time, political and armed conflicts make it very complex to map slums after their growth declines. In the case of Petare, the local government (Municipio Sucre) counts with cartographic GIS data that was essential to develop this project. Nonetheless, at the moment no official maps of Petare Norte have been published. Therefore, the goal of this project is to relate accessibility, dangerous areas and location of public spaces in the context of one of the biggest informal settlements of South America: Petare Norte located in the eastern edge of Caracas (Venezuela). The definition of accessibility in this case is related to the fact that the whole settlement works as an island where formal public transport only reaches the edges. Consequently, to transit inside the slum informal buses (jitneys or camioneticas) are used and cost three times the price of the subway. Even though there are many risks when living in informal settlements, danger is defined as those hotspots where homicides have taken place. Finally, public spaces as understood by the local government are public squares, parks, boulevards and sports facilities. On the other hand, ‘spontaneous public spaces’ are defined as those places where the community has build their own facilities or simply acknowledges as community spaces. The first map relates the access route networks with the homicide points. By doing this it shows a network color coded by level of danger. It was surprising to find that the most transited roads were not safer, but on the contrary, most of the homicides happened along them. The second map combines the homicides with the public spaces, to show again that both of them are along the main routes. The third analysis map takes further the idea of understanding the underlying structure of the urban form by relating the houses to the created route network. This map shows an approximation to ‘urban blocks’ in relation to municipal and spontaneous public spaces. Finally two subways type diagrams (hypothetical maps) abstract the main roads from their organic nature to summarize the previous three maps. These diagrams can become a tool to navigate this complex urban form. Both maps select the six routes used by the local jitneys as simplified geometry lines. On the first map the logic: a ‘station’ is created every time the main road encounters a public space, when it encounters a secondary road or main stairway it is symbolized as small stick suggesting continuity or connection with public spaces. Historically subway maps used monuments as station names and they were represented in the therefore in these place public spaces can be those reference points and stations. On the second map, instead of symbolizing public spaces the names of the people who died are shown with a cross. By counting the amount of deaths within a route the routes are color coded, allowing you to have a fast reading of the most dangerous routes.
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