Revanchist City Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

This study examines the interconnections between the shifting sensibilities of middle-class identities in Buenos Aires, i.e. their encompassing sentiments, moralities, perceptions, expectations, and their significant role in mediating the... more

Drawing from interviews conducted during Spring 2014 with journalists, scholars, and grassroots organisations on their perceptions of middle-class identities in Buenos Aires, and secondary source analysis from 2001 to the present, I examine the transformation of middle-class sensibilities, from cultivating a progressive and inclusive city, to favouring all-encompassing policies directed at increasing segregation and exclusiveness. This is illustrated through discourse analysis that reflects socially resentful, revanchist and fearful attitudes towards the poor and working class citizens of Buenos Aires.

Closely following cultural historians and anthropologists critical approaches to the term “middle-class” (Furbank 2005, Visacovsky 2009, Visacovsky 2010, Heiman 2012, Parker and Walker 2013, and Adamovsky 2014), I am interested in examining what discourses have been ascribed to them in Buenos Aires to constitute them as a coherent group. Here, I am trying to comprehend the social uses of these delimitations, in other words, how these discourses participate in the construction of identities and social practices (Lamont & Molnar 2002, Visacovsky 2009, Visacovsky and Garguin 2009). Throughout my narrative, I engage with journalists’, scholars’, and neighbourhood organisations’ accounts that have attributed a specific character and identity to the Buenos Aires middle-class, from the 2001 economic crisis to the present. This study also draws from content analysis of a variety of scholarly studies, blogs, documents, reports and dailies that all together offer significant renditions of the middle-class porteña (porteño/a is popular term used to refer to Buenos Aires’s residents).
I argue that the convergence of the economic meltdown experienced in Argentina in 2001, in particular in Buenos Aires, with what I term the shifting sensibilities of the urban middle-class, have profoundly contributed to the success and sustainability of an on-going and ascendant neoliberal governance since 2007. As I discuss later, urban middle-class porteños have increasingly shown a lack of interest in, and support for, urban redistributive policies . Furthermore, a profound neoliberal ethos has been shaping the porteños’ social relationships, moving them to support the neoliberal regime and resist progressive movements supported by the marginalized, poor, and working classes. With this claim, I am not belittling cross-class inclusive politics that have existed and still exist between the poor and the middle-class, as was persuasively revealed in the work by Lawson, Elwood, Canevaro, and Viotti (2015) and Farías (2016). However, I question the celebrated egalitarian politics that is often-claimed to characterise Argentina in the post-crisis period, conceptualised by many as the “post-neoliberal” period.

First, I find that Buenos Aires’ successful neoliberal initiatives are anchored in what many have characterised as middle-class fears and resentment toward those who are said not to belong in the city’s urban, economic, and social spaces. These sentiments, I argue, emerged with the onset of Argentina’s 2001 crisis. In parallel, as decades passed, they became profoundly articulated with neoliberal principles invoked by the local government. Second, I examine how neoliberal governance reinforces middle-classes fears and resentments through repressive policies, and associated laws that allow the expulsion of people from parks, paths, and city squares. Third, I propose that these policies have created the conditions for middle-class re-appropriation of public spaces that were said to be “occupied” by the poor, immigrants, and working classes.