Upgrading slums without relocations: urban struggles within neoliberal housing policies in the city of Buenos Aires

CARLA FAINSTEIN; MERCEDES NAJMAN

Lisboa

Conferencia; The Struggle for Housing Justice Crises, Movements, Knowledge and Policy; 2022

The city of Buenos Aires, capital of Argentina, is the richest in the country and also the one with the highest rates of inequality. One of its dimensions is spatial injustice. The multiple forms of popular habitat have historically been the object of various public policies. Broadly speaking, during the last decades, they have gradually abandoned orientations that tended to eradicate these neighborhoods and displace their residents, to assume guidelines that propose their territorial establishment within the framework of upgrading processes. Under the assumption that public policies cannot be thought of outside what happens in the territories or analysis on social movements without the consideration of existing state regulations, we will investigate the disputes that occur in the framework of urban policies that privilege and recognize the relevance of the territory of life on the strategies and social conditions of its inhabitants. In this paper we analyze two recent urban conflicts in which social movements managed to resist relocation policies and introduce substantial reforms on such ongoing interventions. Likewise, we maintain that, in addition to the direct effects on these disputes, these conflicts had consequences and laid certain foundations for housing policy in general in the city of Buenos Aires.We will consider, on the one hand, the case of the slums located on the banks of the Riachuelo, a river that demarcates the southern limit of the city of Buenos Aires. The city of Buenos Aires dictaminated the relocation of hundreds of families from the riverbank which led to a series of conflicts in which the axis of the debate was the characteristics and location of the new dwellings. From the struggle of the social movements of these neighborhoods, the sanction of a local law was achieved, the elaboration of various protocols and the establishment of new guidelines in the policies of the city government concerning more participative forms of slum relocations. On the other hand, we will analyze the case of the Parque Donado-Holmberg neighborhood, the result of an urban renovation and regeneration project in a central and former urbanistically deteriorated area of the city, where informal modalities of access to housing had prevailed. Initially, the project demonstrated an expulsive and gentrifying objective by promoting the displacement of the occupied houses in this area. However, this was transformed as a result of a strong process of struggle developed by local social movements. These two case studies have highlighted the dimension of location and habitat as fundamental issues in the struggles for housing.The paper is based on a research carried out between the years 2014 - 2021 in the city of Buenos Aires based on a quantitative-qualitative methodology in which various instruments such as surveys, in-depth interviews, participant observation and exhaustive survey of sources were triangulated.