Territorios en pugna: las villas de Buenos Aires

Abstract

The paper sets out to explain the ways and means open to the Poor when it comes to setting uphouse in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area —AMBA— , special attention being here given to the suburbantownships of the capital as these represent in themselves many of the ups and downs of the nation’s recenthistory with its succeeding civil and military regimes, its multiplicity of economic crises and its present dayall time employment and poverty low for the nation as a whole but the AMBA in particular where 37% ofthe overall population lives. The township is seen to embody all the conflicts to be borne, clientelism, cooptation,real estate hikes, internal segregation. In the same wise, their history reflects a population changefrom the pre-70s productive working population with its union card carrying majority to the casual labouringor unemployed sort who now live in them and so well reflect the social and economic situation that AMBAis going through. All this is seen as no more than the upshot of the economic policies pursued by the nationover recent decades, this taking a pernicious downturn from the seventies onwards. The paper opens witha setting out of the general characteristics of the AMBA and an attempt at quantifying its population in termsof how they casually manage to live there. The second studies the ‘villas’ of the city from a historical standpointand the changes they have undergone be it quantitatively or in terms of the quality of life in the wake of thatpolitical, economic and social change that has shaken Argentina and specially Buenas Aires. The workfinishes with an attempt to make some sense of the process previously described.

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