Since its foundation it has grown from two fledgling towns into the Guayana region's most important industrial center, and a hub of growth in an otherwise typically under populated region of Venezuela.
Much critique has been made about its design, which was created by a number of planners from MIT and Harvard in the early 1960s. Lisa Peattie's "A View From the Barrio" is a good discussion of the adverse social effects that occur when a modernist city is placed without regard for context (social, economic, cultural, or climatological) in the middle of nowhere
