Urban transformations in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, reflections and experiences of "inhabiting"

PAULA CECILIA ROSA

Viena

Workshop; Desafíos para las políticas del espacio público en Buenos Aires y Viena: Prácticas culturales e innovación social. Movimientos, dinámicas y mecanismos; 2011

Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Regionales (CEUR;CONICET Buenos Aires, Argentina) y el Centro Interdisciplinario de Cultura Urbana y Espacio Público (SKuOR, Universidad Técnica de Viena, Austria)

In ours days what is considered as urban is in continuous debate. This is not for less, if we consider that 80% of the population in Latin America lives in cities. This situation encourages us to reflect on what it means to live in the city and the urban public policies. To this end, this paper will take into account certain transformations in urban areas in recent years, more specifically, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. In this perspective we study the case of so-called street people, ie men and women of different ages and life trajectories who spends their days and nights on the streets, square and sidewalks of the city. Since the nineties has increased the number of people who began living on the streets of the City of Buenos Aires. While this is not a phenomenon of this decade, the increase is very significant and consolidation in recent years and early twenty-first century. This increase crystallize the consequences which have brought structural changes at the economic level but also at national level. From this analysis we get closer to urban experiences that define different modes of inhabiting the city and "be" an habitant, depending on certain public policies that build a kind of town: the "exclusive".