Territories at War:The Townships of Buenos Aires

Abstract

The paper sets out to explain the ways and means open to the Poor when it comes to setting up
house in the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area —AMBA— , special attention being here given to the suburban
townships of the capital as these represent in themselves many of the ups and downs of the nation’s recent
history with its succeeding civil and military regimes, its multiplicity of economic crises and its present day
all time employment and poverty low for the nation as a whole but the AMBA in particular where 37% of
the 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 change
from the pre-70s productive working population with its union card carrying majority to the casual labouring
or unemployed sort who now live in them and so well reflect the social and economic situation that AMBA
is going through. All this is seen as no more than the upshot of the economic policies pursued by the nation
over recent decades, this taking a pernicious downturn from the seventies onwards. The paper opens with
a setting out of the general characteristics of the AMBA and an attempt at quantifying its population in terms
of how they casually manage to live there. The second studies the ‘villas’ of the city from a historical standpoint
and the changes they have undergone be it quantitatively or in terms of the quality of life in the wake of that
political, economic and social change that has shaken Argentina and specially Buenas Aires. The work
finishes with an attempt to make some sense of the process previously described.