Between emotional, economic and urban needs. Some contradictions of old infrastructure in Buenos Aires

MARÍA LUJÁN MENAZZI

Berlin

Conferencia; Resourceful Cities; 2013

International Sociological Association

The paper analyses the case of the Cattle Market, a large urban infrastructure located in the southwest area of the city of Buenos Aires. At present, the Market is an outdated infrastructure in terms of its economic role and its geographical location. Despite repeated attempts by the political power to remove the Market in the last 40 years, it continues functioning nowadays, and there are no signs that it will be removed in the immediate future. From this empirical case, the paper seeks to reflect on major infrastructure, designed and built in response to specific historical and economic needs, and consistent with a city model that, at present, is no longer current. In this sense, these large infrastructures become obstacles to the development of certain areas and are the subject of bitter disputes between residents seeking its removal, and actors who wish everything to stay the same. More generally, the paper seeks to analyze the "lags" between economic, political, urban processes and material transformations in the city, focusing on the role of major infrastructure in this regard. The paper also seeks to discuss with some academic literature that, by focusing exclusively on urban change, tends to establish linear relationships between the economic and material transformations of the city, ignoring the material strength of major infrastructure, and the economic, political and emotional commitments behind them.