2005 SUMMER RESEARCH REPORT

Entire Summer 2005 Article

The Privatization of the Public: Urban "Renewal" in Managua, Nicaragua
Patrick Scallen

Project Goal: To investigate the transformation of the downtown area of Managua, Nicaragua and assess its impact on the city's civic culture and values, yielding insights which will help us better understand the rapidly evolving nature of urban society in many regions of Latin America.

Methodology: During two months of fieldwork in Managua, I probed archival sources (archivos municipales at the Centro Civico de Managua, Oficina de la Alcaldía, and the Universidad Centroamerica) and conducted interviews with city officials, urban planners, local politicians, and private-sector actors who had been instrumental in shaping the urban landscape in order to determine how the city had been transformed since the devastating earthquake of 1972 and the more recent transition to democracy in 1990.

Analysis/Results: This Tinker summer research grant application was inspired by a working hypothesis regarding the roles of public/private space and elite visions of modernity in shaping the urban landscape of Managua, Nicaragua. Previously, I had believed that the abandonment of the old centro and the adoption of a radically new one based upon "modern" Western consumerist values was the work of a small group of wealthy businesspeople and city officials who had returned after the fall of the Sandinistas to take back the commercial and financial sectors of the city and develop it according to the "Miami model." The seeds of this "new" Managua, I assumed, had been planted by Arnoldo Alemán, the ex-mayor and president who has since been convicted on massive charges of corruption, and his business cronies, in league with the Catholic hierarchy of Nicaragua. Business and religious elites had joined up to create a new urban landscape which reflected the anti-democratic ideals of the Nicaraguan elite.

This rather crude thesis quickly crumbled under the weight of evidence, however. Such pure conjecture gave way to a far more nuanced, complicated, and often contradictory history of urban (under)development in Managua. Although I was correct in thinking that the city has become more privatized and less accessible to the vast majority of Nicaraguans, who cannot afford to shop at the mall or own their own cars, I discovered that Managua had evolved in a far less conspiratorial manner. Alemán and the Nicaraguan business elite, surprisingly, played minor roles in the rise of the Metrocentro mall and the National Cathedral across the street from it. Instead, both the Metrocentro mall and the new mall opening soon on the outskirts of the city were funded primarily by Salvadoran investors, and the mall closer to the old city center owed its existence to a group of Taiwanese. The new Cathedral Metropolitano, constructed with money from right-wing Catholic pizza magnate Tom Monaghan (of Domino's fame), turned out to have been built on land donated, oddly enough, by the Sandinistas immediately before they turned over power to the Liberals in 1990. Apparently, there existed no firm connection between the construction of Metrocentro and the new cathedral, although both appeared during the neoliberal infancy in Nicaragua, directly across the street from each other.

However, such findings did not doom the original hypothesis; on the contrary, they modified and in some cases strengthened it. Although evidence disproved the existence of a conspiratorial Nicaraguan elite in at least some respect, it may still be argued that those foreign investors who funded the construction of modernity (or at least its beginnings) in Managua were responding to a potential market opening and had their choice of where to build and how. Managuan city officials, despite the existence of a detailed urban plan for the rebuilding of the old downtown area, were unable to turn the plan into a reality for lack of money and thus proved unable to turn down the offer of capital investment in any form. In a country as poor as Nicaragua, with a capital as haphazardly developed as Managua, city planners - although most interviewed opposed the construction of malls and other private enclaves for the wealthy - had little choice but to accede to the demands of foreign and domestic capital. As a result, public space has given way to private, and fast-traffic thoroughfares and dangerous traffic circles have replaced sidewalks and pedestrian traffic. The city continues to expand rapidly along a spoke-like axis, as the rich flee further away from the crumbling centro viejo while still remaining within a short drive of the centro nuevo and its trappings of luxury. As oil prices (and thus mass transit prices) surge, fewer Managuans can afford the 2.5 cordobas to ride the ancient city buses, a situation which led to violent riots earlier this year. Such a poor history of urban planning has only augmented such conditions and will continue to do so as long as the city administration is unable to halt the development and sprawl which has come to typify Latin American cities in the late twentieth century.