Public policies and collective action at shanty towns of City of Buenos Aires

ARQUEROS MEJICA, MARIA SOLEDAD

Berlin

Congreso; RC 21 Conference 2013 'Resourceful cities'; 2013

Research Committe 21, ISA

This paper is focused in the study of habitat social production processes at the settlements of Buenos Aires City. The habitat social production processes (HSP) are collective processes, driven by the habitants of settlements to resolve their needs of social reproduction, starting from the house1. We can say that these processes are enrolled in the conflict for the ownership and the use of urban land.The settlements were originated threw vacant land occupations. This way of access to the urban land involved the violating of property and the operation of the market, that are the mechanisms of appropiation and access to urban land protected by the State in a capitalist city. The habitat conditions shows deficits of urban infrastructure and services, on the collective equipment and on the quality of the construction of the houses. These habitat characteristics affect the daily life of its inhabitants. Because of the ways of access and the ways of living at settlements, its population was historically object of estigmatizing classifications. In that sense we can say that to be in the city inhabiting at slum, carries a negative symbolic burden that condition the insertion of its dwellers in the social world. The way of access to urban land, the way of living at the city and the way of being at the city defines an urban insertion way.Historically the inhabitants of settlements have fought to access to the property of their neighborhoods and have reclaimed habitat improvement policies, in the context of the claims to the right to the city. From the last twenty years the state agencies impulse regularizations policies. These two orientations implies differents conceptualizations about the conflict for the appropiation and the use of urban land.The central hypothesis of this paper is that the original urban insertion way of inhabitants of settlements at the city, defines the direction and affects the development of habitat social production processes that take place at these neighborhoods. The second hypothesis is correlative with the first: the habitat social production processes are affected by the terms that the conflict for the ownership and the use of urban land assumes.This paper has a diachronic structure, which shows the way of development of HSP processes at "villa 19". This decision was adopted in the comprehension, paraphrasing Lefebvre, that the HSP processes at settlements have a history, they are a product of a history, "that is to say, of people and groups that perform this work in historical conditions". The reconstruction of these processes was done retrieving the experiences of the organizations and the inhabitants of that neighborhood, and the experiences of the state agencies. It also identifies the milestones that its development involves and the marks left in the territory. The conclusions offer some thoughts about the direction and development of these processes.