The urban "legacy" of the 1978 FIFA World Cup in Buenos Aires

CORTI, MARCELO; KOZAK, DANIEL

Sydney

Conferencia; Annual PIA Online Conference 2012; 2012

Planning Institute of Australia (PIA)

In 1978 Argentina hosted the FIFA World Cup. The country was then ruled by a brutal military dictatorship, which - in addition to banning all political activity - killed and "disappeared" tens of thousands of people. In this context, the World Cup served as an opportunity for a whitewash of the dictatorship, and, in urban terms, the implementation of a number of urban policies associated with the regime's ideology. On the one hand, these policies explicitly aimed to provide infrastructure for the tournament. On the other, they attempted to "improve the image" of the city for observers abroad. With this aim, slum evictions were carried out, especially in the north of the city where the upper class has traditionally lived. The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which the 1978 World Cup was used to legitimize and implement exclusionary urban policies, implicit in the political agenda of the dictatorship. Additionally, the conclusions relate the "legacy" of this experience with the project of the failed nomination of Buenos Aires for the 2004 Olympic Games - put forward in democracy - which was centred on an "Olympic corridor" also located in the north, and in that sense, echoing the urban preferences of the military regime.