Uploaded on 2020-08-09 by Corina Fraile

When the urban systems in Caracas were built, they were great: smaller city, capacity greater than demand, and they had regular maintenance. In the present, it's a whole different story, because little to no improvements have been done to network services in the last 20 years. It's important to consider that these were built for the "formal" part of the city, but the "informal" part has more than half a million inhabitants. The inefficiency of the networks is clearly visible: water pipes don't cover the entire city and leaks take months to get fixed, and they never last a long time because they're fixed with poor materials. Even places where the water pipes are not broken, the supply is scarce. Parts of the city depend on water tank trucks to fill the tanks that they have built for the buildings. Others are not so lucky, the ones that don't even have access to the network: people in the slums have to go to other places to fill bottles regularly just to have water in their homes. I think that the city services need to evolve with time, and the authorities need to make sure that these networks work appropriately.