bladerunner in the tropics

touch down in caracas. fade in. another metropolis.

behind humboldts’ precious round and lush mountains of the Avila national park, crawls a real Bladerunner city, a bladerunner of the tropics.
light is fragmented by the oil-slick glass buildings, and filtered by the tropical vegetation that spreads its roots throughout the city.
caracas is unforgiving. it has little interest in its history and not much expectation in its future.
it breathes in the present. its inhabitants are creatures of adaptation. their city is organic, and is forever unpredictable. people work today for a tomorrow that never dawns, while today is harsh, and fickle.
they build their houses in laberinthine patterns, on land they borrow from the city, with a loan that charges no interest. limitiation? limit’s don’t bow to square footage. limits are set by necessity or when the last brick has been used.

the third discovery of the new world, it is the city that every city will become.

caracas is everywhere.

it is invisible because it ignores and rubbishes ‘noble’ european urban models, and because somehow it lacks economic, political or cultural superiority in the field of western debate.
it discards and picks up as quickly as a magpie building its nest.
culture is volatile and flexible. the urban morphology sublimates and contaminates the inherent fragmentation, concealing a latent, somewhat torpid cultural order.

caracas presents a ludic model for a city. it is a model navigated by ‘informality’, an informality that results in a highly adaptive and metasic process of development.
it is a city that simultaneously accommodates within its boundaries guerrilla rule, national lotteries, pirate culture and free speech.
mutiny is a democratic process, and ‘the beautiful revolution’ is the name of its home policy.
'revolution' no longer suffices to describe this pattern of adaptation to tomorrow’s world.
it is a virile strain of constantly mutating cells that assume the vacillating climate of their sanctuary. a roost, whose status quo is impossible to define as either half-built or half-destroyed.

a city that is defined by the present, that bows to spontaneity, and finally where no-code is the only code.