Buenos Aires between America and Europe: dreaming of a metropolis from a peripheral location (c.1880-1910)

ZUNINO SINGH, DHAN

Londres

Conferencia; Anglo-American Conference of Historians 2009: Cities; 2009

Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Buenos Aires became a modern metropolis at the beginning of 20th century in a process marked by high rates of urbanization and population growth only comparable with Chicago among the cities of the Americas. The city was the scenario of transformations prompted by the ruling ideology's motto: Progress and Civilisation. Through the construction of artefacts of infrastructure, architecture, and urbanism, the modernizing will of the elite expressed itself. While the Anglo-Argentine trade relationships prevailed, leaving back the colonial relationship with Spain and embarking upon the new economic world order, it was Paris the city which became the predominant model to follow for the construction of the new Capital of the Republic. That was the long dream the ruling class had imagined during years and it seemed to be confirmed by George Clemenceau's words in 1910: "Buenos Aires is the Paris of South America." Urban historians have largely stressed this French influence on the architecture and urbanism of Buenos Aires (either to celebrate or criticize it). However, this view might reduce the notion of "influence", which is based on a complex circulation of ideas, goods, capital, workers, and experts, to a mere "copy" from Paris. On the contrary, revising the debates on urban transport and the implementation of an underground railway in Buenos Aires, it is possible to see how a broader range of European and North American cities (such as London, Chicago, New York, Glasgow, Berlin) functioned as models of a metropolis contemplated by the local elite. Therefore, this paper explores the circulation of those cosmopolitan ideas-images related to the technological innovation of transport and the improvement of urban traffic through decision makers and public opinion debates. Considering that each new urban artefact implemented reflects the modernizing will, those innovations are analyzed as fragments of the past that contain ideas-images of a metropolis under construction, remains of a dreamt city, or ruins of a peripheral metropolis.