CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This paper will present one specific example taken from Southern Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a way of addressing issues related to politicisation in the urban territory, and more specifically in shantytowns. The paper will briefly explore different ways in which shantytowns residents and the State transform the urban territory, and it will seek to analyse the way in which such transformations affect the lives of the urban poor. In this sense the paper will follow Jacques Rancière?s conception of politics as a ?specific kind of power that deals with a specific entity, a specific community named ?the people? [...] the essence of politics is the power of the people, and [...] the essence of the ?power of the people? is: the power of those who have no quality to exert power.? This conception is of particular interest to us for the role it assigns to common people as political agents. Likewise, the paper will follow Nishat Awan, Jeremy Till and Tatjana Schneider?s notion of spatial agency as the ability to act independently from the constraint of social structures to produce a space which is understood as a collective enterprise while, at the same time, remaining part of such social structures. Agents are thus neither completely free nor completely trapped. Awan, Till and Schneider?s conception is in turn heavily informed by Henri Lefebvre?s idea of the production of space as a social undertaking, and by Anthony Giddens? notion of [social] agency as the ability to intervene in a pre-existing world. At the same time, however, Awan, Till and Schneider?s conception is completely unique in its focus on concrete spaces. Although the paper will focus on the mentioned example, Villa Jardín, between 1958 and 1967, some of the related findings may also be able to shed light on similar processes in other geographical contexts and times.