Review of Laura Podalsky?s Specular City. Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955-1973

KOZAK, DANIEL

Urban Morphology, Journal of the International Seminar on Urban Form

Dorset Press

Lugar: Dorchester; Año: 2006 vol. 10 p. 82 - 83

1027-4278

Laura Podalsky offers in this book an analysis of the physical and discursive transformations that took place in Buenos Aires between 1955 and 1973, a period marked by the fall and return of Perón. Following in the footsteps of David Harvey, Edward Soja and Frederic Jameson -as the author informs us in the introduction- "Specular City" is a cultural urban study that combines a revision of new architectural typologies and urban practices with contemporary literature, painting and film analyses. The book is broken down into four main chapters that deal with large cultural and spatial phenomena, as well as five intervals, entitled: Interruption, Interstices, Interlude, Interspersion and Intervention, which focus on more discrete questions. Throughout these four ?cityscapes? and five ?snapshots? (as Podalsky introduces them) the book builds its main argument, which is that after the fall of Perón the middle-class sectors of Buenos Aires renegotiated their position in society. According to the author, after a decade in which the working-class sectors were the main protagonists of the public space, the 1960s were characterized by the predominance of an urban-consumer discourse addressed to the privileged middle classes, which thus became the protagonists and main users of the new public spaces in Buenos Aires. This new hegemony, according to Podalsky, opened the field for the subsequent implementation of the neo-liberal project in Argentinain the mid 1970s.