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2023 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. From Villa to Barrio

Author : Carolina Sternberg

Published in: Neoliberal Urban Governance

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the urbanization project of Villa 31 located in the center side of the city. It examines Buenos Aires’ neoliberal urban governance in its drive to physically and socially transform Villa 31 into Barrio 31. Since 2016, attention has been steered to urbanizing one the most of deprived and stigmatized areas of the city, Villa 31, recently renamed “Barrio 31”. Neoliberal governance operations, strategies, and common understandings of the physical transformation of Villa 31 into Barrio 31 are discussed in this chapter. These helped rationalize this governance’s projects and provided the frame to understand its current center side redevelopment incursion.

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previous chapter Becoming a “Socially Integrated City” Through “Creative Districts”
next chapter Neoliberal Governance and Chicago’s Southwest Side
Footnotes
1
According to the Registro Nacional de Barrios Populares-RENABAP (National Registrar of Popular Neighborhoods): “Barrios populares are considered vulnerable neighborhoods in which, at least, 8 families live together or next to each other, where more than half of the population do not have a property title, nor access to two or more regular basic services (potable and running water, electricity and/or sewage).” https://​www.​argentina.​gob.​ar/​noticias/​barrios-populares.
 
2
Villa 31-31 bis is the original name. Between one of the main highways, the Arturo Illia Highway, and the San Martin Train Station, a new and smaller informal settlement developed next to Villa 31. It was eventually called Villa 31 bis. To simplify, I will be referring to this informal settlement as Villa 31, and alternatively to “Barrio 31”.
 
3
Some authors have argued that Buenos Aires’s governance also relied on strategic transnational urban planning language as means to gain international recognition within the international planning circles of experts and multilateral credit institutions (see Bertelli 2021; Lederman 2020).
 
4
As a reminder, the 108 acres is the extension where villeros/as have settled since the 1970s.
 
5
The Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for the Reconstruction and Development together contributed 55% of the budget to finance this project (ACIJ 2021).
 
6
In 2008, a local law that used to prohibit evictions and displacements for occupying abandoned public buildings was repealed. This law was later followed by a government resolution that allowed evictions to be processed and executed more rapidly. In 2009, the Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) reported that between January and November 2008, the city government executed 350 evictions that affected 2,800 families. Due to these amendments, since 2009 the evictions now marched steadily and faster. The trials now last less than 30 days (Clarín, September 13, 2008).
 
7
Namely, Villa 31, Villa 20, Rodrigo Bueno, Lamadrid, Playón de Chacarita. The original project proposed different modalities of housing tenure, accompanied by different plans to transfer public land from the federal to the local state and the regularization of deeds.
 
8
Until recently, the Secretary for Social and Urban Integration (SECISyU) depended on the Ministry of Human Development and Habitat of the city government of Buenos Aires. In December 2021, the SECISyU was removed, and the execution of the socio-urban integration is now in the hands of the Unidad de Proyectos Especiales Urbanización Barrio Padre Carlos Mugica (UPE) and the Ministerio Público.
 
9
The urbanization plan also included a section to build new housing for those families or individuals who had to be relocated due to new construction or who were formerly living underneath the Arturo Illia Highway.
 
10
A very preliminary version of this body was the Secretariat of Habitat and Inclusion (SECHI), created in 2011 under Macri’s administration to co-ordinate very limited public works in Villa 31. With very limited budget and capacity, it only performed “urban acupuncture” in the villas, including, a few new squares, sports facilities, and small community centers, where residents could come to talk to city-government employees or join in exercise clubs, art projects, and other activities (The Economist 2014a, The Economist 2014b).
 
11
Discussed in Chapter 2.
 
12
Here I refer to a division of labor and functional specialization, a hierarchy, a formalized framework for rules and regulations, the maintenance of files and other records, and high levels of professionalism.
 
13
The board was assembled after Law 6129 was passed.
 
14
In this CGP, the following actors were represented: delegates elected by the villeros/as, the Attorney General of the city of Buenos Aires (DG), government officials from the legislative branch of the city, a collective of community and grassroots’ organizations, and non-governmental organizations.
 
15
These included grassroots organizations from Villa 31, social and political nonprofits such as the Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ), representatives of universities, and individual residents of Villa 31.
 
16
The main structures of concrete were put in place in 2019; currently, they remain there alone and forgotten. As some informants mentioned, construction was discontinued because the local government established other priorities even before the COVID-19 pandemic started. The projected budget for this ad hoc project at the time was 1.7 million Argentine pesos (currently $8.94 million USD), to be financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) (Giambartolomei 2020).
 
17
McCann (2013) and others have highlighted the way cities design and implement policies in order for them to be internationally showcased and recognized as economic, political, or cultural centers. In this context, according to the authors cited above, models from “comparable cities” in Latin America that have been considered successful provided traction and credibility to Buenos Aires’s social and territorial integration project.
 
18
The problem here lies, paraphrasing Anya Roy’s words, in the misunderstanding that informality is a separate sector (2005). She argues that it is not separate: a series of transactions connect different economies and spaces to one another. Along the same lines, James Scott (1998) points out that large-scale state interventions very often fail to consider that the success of designs for social organization depend on the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.
 
19
To note, earlier descriptors of “villeros” had been “cabecitas negras.” But once Villa 31 increased in population, residents of the middle-upper class in Buenos Aires replaced the descriptor of cabecitas negras with “villeros,” referring to a resident of a villa, in this case, Villa 31.
 
20
As part of a cosmovision to achieve an “improved” and more homogeneous national population, Argentine elites implemented policies that ranged from “courting European immigrants as a way of ‘improving’ the local population and bringing the country nearer to European ideals of progress and modernity (…), to passing disciplinary labor legislation (…), enacting free, obligatory and secular schooling for every child (…), and enforcing obligatory military service” (Geler 2016, p. 215).
 
21
Of particular note was Buenos Aires’s governance aim to also formalize the informal economy operating in Villa 31 by opening banks and fast food restaurants, including McDonald’s (Tomorrow City 2020).
 
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Metadata
Title
From Villa to Barrio
Author
Carolina Sternberg
Copyright Year
2023
Book
Neoliberal Urban Governance

Print ISBN: 978-3-031-21717-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-21718-0

Copyright Year: 2023

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21718-0_4