The New Urban Social Question in Buenos Aires Downtown

HILDA HERZER; MARÍA MERCEDES DI VIRGILIO; MARÍA CARLA RODRÍGUEZ; GABRIELA MERLINSKY; MARIANA GÓMEZ

San pablo

Workshop; ISA-RC21 Sao Paulo Conference Inequality, Inclusion and the Sense of Belonging; Mesa: 18. The Uneven Development of Urban Inequalities.; 2009

ISA

The study has been conducted through the application of household surveys in La Boca, San Telmo and Barracas quarters in Buenos Aires, in-depth interviews to policymakers and community leaders and documental analysis of public programs. Our analysis shows that, since the beginning of the renewal process, working class households have seen their existence threatened by the increasing value of the properties where they live, and the added vulnerability for their families this entails. Thereby, renewal, at different scales and scopes, implied strain on lower-income population permanence in the studied quarters and important problems related to habitats. In Buenos Aires City, since the early nineties, renewal has been part of a broader plan to develop the river border from North to South, but for the moment it has been focused on promoting tourist zones. This process was accompanied by the approval of the strategic culture plan by the Buenos Aires city government, which emphasised low capital investment and promoted human and cultural resources. Implemented policies have contradictory results: on the one hand, new policies tend to revalue the real estate capital and land and, on the other hand, these policies do not consider alternatives to compensate for the negative effects of the social-urban dynamics that they have started. The urban renewal of these quarters, at different stages and dynamics, requires capital investment and human capital generation. Cultural tourism promotion policies strongly supported the revaluation processes. On the one hand, tourist content is linked to some cultural factors such as the recovery or placement of theatres, museums, art galleries, etc. On the other hand, the symbolic capital represented by past culture is transformed into a commercial strategy, thus producing strong transformations of the urban space and related consumption. This is how renewal becomes an economic-cultural strategy geared at satisfying a specialised consumption demand, as part of an alliance established between capital and culture to guide attention towards the least conflictive aspects of the strategy, namely, the cultural aspects, and avoiding the more thorny facets: those of economy.