Decentering Managua

Abstract

This chapter looks at the aftermath of the 1972 earthquake that destroyed Managua. It demonstrates how the planners, who implemented Managua's reconstruction, planned a new city modeled on US urban space even though the US government under President Nixon turned away from the developmental premises of the Alliance for Progress. The plan for a decentralized metropolis created an unlikely consensus: US planners, many of whom were less comfortable than Nixon with Somoza's dictatorship, as well as Nicaragua's anti-Somoza opposition, believed that decentralization could diminish the power of the dictator, while Somoza and his staunchest supporters in the United States believed that the tools of urban planning would cement the dictator's economic and political control. The chapter then examines how the new city cemented an alliance of Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional radicals with Nicaragua's anti-Somoza elite.