A Review of A Promising Past: Remodeling Fictions in Parque Central, Caracas

A beacon of modern urban transformation and a laboratory of social reproduction, Parque Central in Caracas is a monumental enclave of 20th-century Venezuelan oil-fueled progress. The monumental urban structure also symbolizes the enduring architectural struggle against entropy, acute in a country where the state routinely neglects its role in providing sustained infrastructural maintenance and social care. Like other ambitious modernizing projects of the Venezuelan petrostate, Parque Central’s modernity was doomed due to the state’s dependence on the global oil economy’s cycles of boom and bust.

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