The 'generic city' in the south of Buenos Aires: The case of Lanús

KOZAK, DANIEL; VECSLIR, LORENA

Ciudad de Buenos Aires

Congreso; 2nd ISA Forum of Sociology - Social Justice and Democratization; 2012

International Sociological Association

Over at least the last fifteen years, mainstream urban studies of the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires (MRBA) have focused primarily on the analysis of the pair "squatter settlements - gated communities", and large-scale urban interventions, as opposite poles of recent urban transformations. It appears, however, that attention on the fine grain urban fabric and typical public space has been scarcer. This includes micro transformations, plot by plot, that taken together have managed to change vast areas of this region. From this perspective, our paper aims to shed light on a subject that has been somewhat neglected, by examining the "generic city". Not in the sense of the "global generic city", but rather as the most characteristic form of urban tissue in the local tradition, which is especially predominant in the south of the first metropolitan ring of the MRBA. This type of urban fabric can be described as an oxymoronic ?homogeneous heterogeneity? that responds to the (homogeneous) repetition of a morphologically and functionally complex (heterogeneous) block in which single and multi-household residential buildings alternate with shops, small factories, workshops and warehouses. Within this mesh, the recent processes of transformation have had an impact in primarily two ways: 1) the renewal of old neighborhoods and central areas; and 2) the ?verticalization? or emergence of new residential formats within the traditional grid. These processes resulted in various forms of transformation of the "generic city", which in some cases reinforced existing process of social segregation and/or changed the relationship between public and private space. Explicitly or not, a range of urban policies have accompanied these process through changes in the Planning and Construction Codes, the design of urban furniture among different interventions in the public space, the promotion of outdoor commercial centers and fiscal incentives to certain activities and land uses. With the aim of better understanding existing cases, we will focus on the study of different representative samples of the "generic city" in the south of the MRBA, examining their formation processes and the urban transformation that have experienced over the last two decades.