The tales of two mobility infrastructures: the street and the underground railway of Buenos Aires (c. 1890-1940).

DHAN ZUNINO SINGH

Connecticut

Workshop; TAULA: Taller Urbano de las Américas/Cities of the Americas Workshop; 2016

Department of History & Institute of Latina/o, Caribbean, and Latin American Studies, University of Connecticut

The early implementation of the underground railways in Buenos Aires (1913) cannot be pondered without considering the traffic of the city. The positive representations and the hopes as a solution to urban circulation that the underground triggered only can be understood by the negative perceptions about and the experience of chaos of Buenos Aires? streets ?a city that in few decades had grown rapid and dramatically. The underground railway embodied the values of modern transport (speed, comfort and safety), it signified a solution for congestion as well as a contribution to suburbanization, and also gave the city the status of modern metropolis. Yet, like other guided systems (railways, tramways), the planning and investment in underground railways was threatened by the emergence of the automobile, particularly with the use of cars for public transport (jitneys). While since the 19th century urban reforms sought to reshape the street layout of Buenos Aires (the grid), building diagonal avenues and wide boulevards for the flow of multiple vehicles, by 1930s the urban plans envisioned a space for rapid transit, especially for automobiles, constituted by highways and parkways.This paper deals with the period of planning and construction of Buenos Aires? underground railways (c. 1910-1940) in which the city became a modern metropolis and diverse modes of transport proliferated competing between them. It analyzes through debates, plans, maps, photos, statistics, advertising, reports and news the representations of the underground railway in relation to urban policies, the perceptions about the street, urban reforms and the emergence of the automobile in order to understand how the meanings and values about these two mobility infrastructure, as epitome of speed and modernity, changed over the period.