Architecture+and+Urban+Planning

There has been always a struggle between the roles of the urban planners and the architects, mostly because in the start of times there was no differentiation between them. Nowadays, we have two separated fields that work hand by hand in making our living spaces and cities more comfortable and suitable to our needs. The role of the Urban Planner is to create and/or organize the settings and landscapes of our cities and regions; they work in a large scale. On the contrary, Architects use a smaller scale when working in the creation of building and living spaces. Both of these professions have the purpose of structuring the environment we live in, in such a way that our needs are met and also our desires. Urban Planners tend to think in a longer-term kind of view than architects do, which is why many of the cities we live in are so poorly designed. In the end, even though architects and urban planners work in different scales an occupy themselves on different things, both of them have the same intention in their careers: to make our way of living more pleasant.  Caracas was a very well-designed city in the beginning, but in the middle of the twentieth century the oil prices went up and the economy had a big growth; we now call it “the oil boom”. With this major break in economy people began to move from the rural parts of the country to the capital. This enormous exodus made impossible for urban planners to create strategic solutions for the demographic growth. This situation resulted in the organic and chaotic Caracas we now live in. The biggest issue that Architects and Urban Planners have to deal with now is the popular fringe zone that circles the entire city. The role of the twenty-first-century designers is to come up with new ideas that are both economic and durable for the new generations.

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