Northwestern Argentina (NOA)

LONGHI, FERNANDO; PAOLASSO, PABLO

Quality of Life in Argentina. Maps, Indexes and Regional Analysis from 2010

Springer Nature

Lugar: Cham; Año: 2024; p. 137 - 154

he six provinces that make up Northwestern Argentina (NOA) cover anarea of 560,000 km2 . In 2010, about five million people lived there, representing 12%of the Argentine population. Nature has played a predominant role in the human occu-pation of this territory, either from a restrictive expression, defined by the existenceof sectors with major obstacles to the development of human life; relative, associatedwith its changing meaning according to material practices or regressive, linked tothe effects of indiscriminate exploitation. From the natural point of view, there is nocriterion that unifies this group. Neither could it be said that there is a cultural homo-geneity that gives a characteristic seal to this portion of the country, since there isalso diversity what prevails. It can be said, however, that the northwest of Argentinais today a peripheral region and is associated in the popular imagination with condi-tions of poverty, low quality of life and extreme inequalities, which are expressedin different stages and processes of territorialization and reterritorialization. Theseprocesses resulted, throughout history, in the construction of differentiated territo-ries, whose economic base was based on agroforestry, agricultural, agro-industrialor mining activities, to mention the most important ones. The preeminence of anyof these activities, or their overlapping over time, defined the construction of highlyunequal territories—whatever the time analyzed—where the binomial inequality-poverty and enormous social differences were almost the norm. The interest of thischapter is focused on analyzing the impact of the territorial transformations thattook place during the first decade of the twenty-first century on the quality of lifein the region. To this end, it is first necessary to study the changes that occurred inpopulation growth and quality of life between 2001 and 2010, which will make itpossible to establish which were the most important dimensions that intervened, theirmagnitude and the way in which they were distributed in the territory. This findingmakes it possible to establish some contingency relationships between the course ofthe quality of life throughout the decade and the evolution of the logics of territorial construction. Under these premises, it is proposed that the logics of the territorial-ization processes that have intersected in the region throughout the first decade ofthe twenty-first century should be considered as a factor in the interpretation of themain problems. They not only affect living conditions, but also have an impact ondemographic characteristics, on the structure of consumption and production, on thecourse of economic processes and on the features of the “materialization” of capi-talism in the region. To a large extent, all these circumstances are expressed in thequality of life of the population of the NOA, which has some of the worst conditionsin the country.