- Maracaibo: A Latin American Petroleum City Planning    1253 kb by    Quijano, Elisa & Rodriguez, Ethel | emq56@yahoo.com    Short Outline Evaluating Maracaibo´s urban planning exercise in three key moments: the 20’s: petroleum camping planning; the 50’s: the modern regulating plan applications, the XXI century: an extended metropolitan city, converted in a city of promoters. Abstract During the XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries, the privileged location of Maracaibo next to the lake of the same name, has converted it in one of the most dynamic western Venezuelan harbors specialized in distributing coffee and cacao from Andean states and the north of Santander to the Caribbean and worldwide. At the beginning of the XX century, Maracaibo was transformed into an administrative center thanks to the discovery of important petroleum fields, provoking an abrupt and rapid growing of the city which it was not prepared for it, nor physically or administratively. Thus, planning had become in a controlling and solving tool of urban problems, whether for the imperative need of facing those generated by the oil industry and those of getting underway theories and methods of planning as part of the generalized international events. This paper evaluates the urban planning exercise, taking Maracaibo as a study case, along its three key moments of development: the 20’s decade when petroleum camping planning emerged as a growing of the traditional city; the 50’s decade with a cohesive city because of the modern regulating plan application and the XXI century with a metropolitan city which it has extended “ad infinitum”, converted in a city of promoters (Peter Hall). The analysis of documental-regulation sources, local developments plans among others, photographs and self experience is one of the main tools that will permit to characterize and evaluate the above moments and the consequences of planning in relation to the life quality improvements of dwellers. Until now, some of the best successes are the action results of public transportation. The demand of mobility is so huge that turning the territory regulation into an efficient system has become in a “desideratum”. Keywords Maracaibo, petroleum city, latinamerican planning Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2006: Cities between Integration and Disintegration   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper