The Littered City: Trash and Neoliberal Urban Space in El aire, Bariloche, and La villa (original) (raw)
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In this thesis ethnographical interviews with women in Buenos Aires are analyzed with discourse theory in order to examine how discourses of safe/unsafe and urban poor construct places and bodies. A central element of discourse is argued to be the partially fixed inscription of danger in territories and bodies of the urban poor. Neoliberalism´s impact on urban space has meant a transformation of public space and impacts on constructing reality. This transformation of meaning is connected to the neoliberal transformation of the labor market, once invested with rights and security, now deregulated and precarious. Urban poor are visible in every interviewed woman´s everyday life, but the way of constructing them as subjects varies with level of closeness and identification. The Argentine historic construction of Europeaness, modernity and civilization as opposed to Latin Americaness, backwardness and barbarism can be found in many of the women´s constructions of urban poor. So is the othering of them in relationship to motherhood and citizenship. The constructions of the urban poor are also analyzed with the Foucaultian concept of biopower.
Geoforum 48 (2013) 187–195
""This study contributes to the existent literature on neoliberal urban governance examining the process based character of this formation. I maintain that neoliberal governance is a fluid and evolving formation which is continuously being constructed and reconstructed beneath a rhetorical veneer of inevitable emergence and permanence. In this context, this work examines the interconnections between neoliberal urban ascendancy, changing rhetoric and urban waste management policies, and waste pickers (cartoneros), in a case study setting, Buenos Aires. Since 2002, the neoliberal urban governance in Buenos Aires (its institutions, programs and policies) has mobilized different rhetoric and policies to negotiate the waste pickers’ ‘‘disturbing’’ and ‘‘dirty’’ presence in the streets. In that process, the waste pickers, originally marginalized and stigmatized by the neoliberal discourse, have been regulated and disciplined into legal and ‘‘well behaved’’ workers. I would argue that, regulating this activity does not entail giving the waste pickers an opportunity to become central actors in the future of urban waste management in the city. Rather, it is compatible with the logic of the local neoliberal urban projects, focused on disciplining the city’s physical and social landscape as new opportunities for growth and development continue to emerge.""
Neoliberal Reform and Urban Space: The Cartoneros of Buenos Aires, 2001-2005
City, 2006
In Argentina, cartoneros are poor people who collect and sell paper products and other recyclables in order to survive. The appearance of cartoneros in high profile urban public spaces in search of recyclables has been one of the most visible and lasting effects of the 2001–2002 economic crisis of Argentina. This essay examines the origins of cartoneros in Buenos Aires and Gran Buenos Aires, their relationship with the state, and the formalization of their gathering activities by the authorities and the recycling industry.
Anthropological Theory, 2018
The various progressive and conservative governments that administered Buenos Aires from the 1990s onward implemented strikingly similar policies that were aimed at transforming the city and metropolitan region into a market-centered society. Their policies caused a record number of citizens to lose their jobs in the formal sector and to become scavengers almost overnight. As they crisscrossed daily the city’s neighborhoods gathering paper, plastic and other recyclable materials, these socially stigmatized, politically disenfranchised and economically pauperized scavengers practiced civility from below with many neighborhood residents from all walks of life in civil society and, occasionally, with municipal officials and members of one or another environmental NGO and waste disposal company in political society. In dialogue with Norbert Elias’s and Cheshire Calhoun’s accounts of liberal civility, and Etienne Balibar’s revisionist conception of radical civility, my study discusses th...
Neoliberal Urban Governance. Spaces, Culture and Discourses in Buenos Aires and Chicago
Palgrave/Macmillan, 2023
This book examines the dynamics of neoliberal urban governance through a comparative analysis of Buenos Aires and Chicago, with a special focus on gentrification processes in both cities from 2011 to 2021. This work argues that neoliberal principles, rationales and institutions, along with the elaborate rhetoric that has contributed to their success, are forever present in the US and Latin American region, particularly in global cities like Buenos Aires and Chicago. The year of 2011 marks the (almost) simultaneous election of new executive authorities in each city, and finalizes in 2021—a sufficient time span to observe key patterns, narratives and developments of each neoliberal urban governance. First, this book chronicles the evolving urban neoliberal policies implemented since 2011 in both cities, with special attention to the systematic reduction of affordable housing and privatization of public land that have paved the way for gentrification to advance at a fast pace. Second, it also exposes readers to the prominent rhetoric crafted by local boards, developers, architects, and real estate agents in both cities. Third, this study chronicles how these contemporary neoliberal urban governances currently operate, a critical aspect that remains vastly unexplored. Lastly, until now these governances have been scantly explored from a comparative perspective in Latin American and North American urban settings, and so this book offers a rich new approach.
Composing the social factory: An autonomist urban geography of Buenos Aires
Through the creation of an original theoretical framework, this paper demonstrates the value of a deeper engagement between autonomist Marxism and (urban) geography. By spatialising arguably the autonomists' key theoretical contribution – class composition – the paper develops the ideas of technical and political spatial compositions. These dialectically intertwined concepts provide a framework with which to analyse the relationships between shifting urban spaces and struggles, and clarity is therefore added to another key autonomist concept, the evocative yet nebulous 'social factory'. Applying these to Buenos Aires, the paper focuses on various spatial conjunc-tures, exploring their emergence and the immanent potentials for radical spatial politics they afford and preclude. In particular, the paper provides a detailed reading of the complex role Buenos Aires' 'informal' settlements play in both perpetuating and resisting a neoliberal, financially extractive economy. The benefit of a 'spatial composition' framework is twofold: it provides a periodising heuristic with which to originally and usefully approach urban struggles, and, in unpacking the 'social factory', it can be applied widely as a form of radical geographical praxis. The paper thus makes important theoretical and empirical contributions to an exciting, emerging autonomist (urban) geography, as well as to studies of Buenos Aires.
The Routledge Handbook of Anthropology and the City, 2019
Based on the ethnographic fieldwork with these two stigmatized labor groups performed in the “public space” of Buenos Aires, waste pickers and street vendors, the chapter deals with the modes in which social inequalities are produced. Dealing with two activities that have different levels of acceptance permits me to compare the mechanisms and the sedimentations that produce inequalities. Moreover, the two cases will allow the reader to comprehend the multiples tempo- ralities of social processes that explain continuities and ruptures in the production of socio-spatial inequalities and precarious ways of living. This chapter will contribute to an understanding of the way in which neoliberal social trans- formations impact the subjectivities of poor people who use public space as an essential resource. Thus, neoliberalism and “global” processes are locally experienced and appropriated in various ways (Edelman and Haugerud 2004; Sharma and Gupta 2006; Ong 2006; Faulk 2013; Ferguson 2006). Effects, then, must be addressed from what happened in Argentina. For doing so, it is important to look into these policies’ implementation, looking for transformations and territorial continuities.
City, 2011
This paper demonstrates how social and political conflict is inscribed in urban space by focusing on the neoliberal political–economic collapse of Argentina, which was a conflict-ridden process with ordinary people protesting against institutions responsible for the neoliberalization of the economy. These protests affected the architecture of banking and government institutions, especially in Buenos Aires, which is the political and financial center of Argentina. Facing popular unrest and continuous political mobilizations, these institutions decided to physically fortify themselves and in the process displayed their vulnerability and illegitimacy. The fact that spatial fortification became a permanent feature of state institutions but only a temporary feature of international banks, raises questions about the way that neoliberalism operates and the way that blame for neoliberal failures is allocated. It also provides hints about the unsatisfactory political–economic outcome that emerged after the collapse, despite the fact that orthodox neoliberalism was at least rhetorically abandoned.