Working Paper No : 37 (series 2)
Author : Dennis Rodgers
Date : May 2008
Abstract
This
paper focuses on Managua’s urban development in order to explore
the underlying dynamics of post-revolutionary Nicaraguan
society, using the city’s evolution as a window onto the
evolution of the country’s political economy, but also
highlighting its role as a major contributing factor shaping the
specific transformations that this particular political economy
has undergone. It begins by providing a view from barrio Luis
Fanor Hernández, a low-income neighbourhood in the city which
graphically encapsulates the general movement of Nicaraguan
society from a sense of revolution-fuelled collective purpose in
the 1970s and 1980s to more individualised and segregated
socio-spatial practices in the 1990s and 2000s. The paper then
moves on to consider Managua’s development more broadly in order
to seek further insights into the underlying nature of this
particular trajectory. The changing morphology of the city, its
determinants, and the key actors involved, all point to salient
elements to be taken into account in order to attain a more
nuanced comprehension of the logic of post-revolutionary
Nicaragua, which is then explored in a third section. What
emerges starkly from this threefold panorama is that while the
particular urban development of Managua can be seen as a
reflection of the persistent oligarchic structure of Nicaraguan
society, it is also a major pathological factor – an ‘illness’,
one might say – that contributes to the perpetuation of this
oligarchic configuration, albeit in a renewed form.