Barrio Women’s Gendering Practices for Sustainable Urbanism in Caracas, Venezuela

Abstract

This chapter aims to examine the sustainability of los pobladores’ community building approach. The chapter presents how these pobladores, a women dominated urban movement, mobilized capital—other than that received as land, materials and state loans—to build and refurbish their housing projects. It follows los pobladores, through both participatory observation and video from the good days of the oil bonanza in 2010 to the meagre days of plummeting international oil prices in 2015. The chapter presents how los pobladores women performed their gendering practices as congruent with a material feminist planning approach set in the context of the current urban revolution. In this context the rainy seasons introduced the post-humanist turn that pushed the government to adopt a massive housing programme, La Gran Mision Vivienda Venezuela, GMVV. In exploring some expressions of barrio women’ s sustainable urbanism the chapter discusses how barrio women’s activism constitutes a diffractive phenomenon that gendered the organization of work. This is an approach that shaped a sustainable community building by disrupting male dominances both in revolutionary activism and in building the urban space.