Buenos Aires: A City Tries to Recognize Itself
Silvestri, Graciela & Gorelik, Adrián
By leaving all of Buenos Aires' projects half-finished, the current crisis has begun consolidating fragments: pieces of the future like unfulfilled promises in the north of the city, pieces of...
...But the neighborhood we remember nostalgically was never anything but a mechanism of modernization itself...
...You have just left the yawning delta of the River Plate, its pacific antiquity making time stand still, as if river and time flowed into each other at the edge of the burgeoning city...
...The nostalgic interior and the mall complement each other in the way they reduce the city to a private world, suspended in time...
...The abundance of places for public life in the city which could accompany the birth of a new sense of citizenship seem to have been left behind, along with the illusions of a democratic opening...
...But the search for compensation implicitly requires the state to intervene decisively in urban real estate with objectives which differ from those of the market...
...The potential of the modernizing back when nineteenth-century dictator Juan Manuel project in Buenos Aires was trapped in cement and de Rosas built his mansion on the lands which eventu- steel, in avenues and parks, in the eloquent expresally became the privileged county of Palermo...
...The skeletons of sunken ships at the river's mouth and the immense and useless factory artifacts spread over its banks form a geographic folder of city and history blown closed on itself by the somehow attractive breeze of failure...
...into an avenue without a city...
...Large abandoned factory complexes stacked up against each other, with docks and bridges linking both banks, turn the river Graciela Silvestri and Adrian Gorelik are Argentine architecture historians and critics at the Mario J. Buschiazzo Institute of American Art and Aesthetic Research at the School of Architecture, Design and Urban Studies of the University of Buenos Aires...
...Buenos Aires became a metropolis when British hegemony, due to its own characteristics, didn't need to impose paradigms of consumption...
...It is to think about politics...
...Scorn for the urban sprawl of the 1960s and 1970s and fascination with the "anticommunist" model of the city of Montevideo have produced a nostalgia for the city that modernization destroyed...
...In any case, during those years it was still public space that we were being called on to rescue: its memory, its social and political dimensions...
...Although the last stretch of the river seems to be one great industrial dock, the banks no longer display industry, but rather greenery...
...alternative tradition sought to create a homogenous This fiction announced the emergence of a porteihocity, without specialized sectors...
...Today it is obvious that this current of urban thought never really knew what to do with Buenos Aires...
...In cities that have become massive and depersonalized, which can no longer harbor vain illusions of achieving some tranquilizing reunification through form, we must design new forms of citizenship for the multitudes, thereby redefining what is meant by "public...
...The sions of a faith as ingenuous as it was powerful...
...Its The port, the railroads, the subway: bold strokes instrument par excellence was the setting aside of made for effect, a network which quickly characterpublic spaces by timely interventions in the chinks not ized Buenos Aires as a modern city, and at the same yet swallowed by speculation: parks, plazas and time differentiated it from the models it emulated...
...To think about the state is to think about the public...
...Thus the present becomes a mix of times and places, a profound mix that annuls time...
...By leaving all of Buenos Aires' projects half-finished, the current crisis has begun consolidating fragments: pieces of the future like unfulfilled promises in the north of the city, pieces of the past like tourists' souvenirs in the south, and pieces of the present like pimples everywhere...
...If all that counts is "people's acceptance" to confer social value on a building, then what could be more socially valid than the new malls...
...Monuments to wasteful squandering in a city where wasteful squandering borders on scandal, the malls rise up like urban manifestations of the savage economic concentration which characterized the 1970s...
...On the right, there are enormous housing projects like flags that modernization planted in unknown territory...
...If in becoming a metropolis the city lost the communion between nature and culture, the hope is that "in the shadow of the well-loved neighborhoods" one might find pieces of the city capable of surviving, the last refuge from which to resist the processes of mercantilization...
...You can think of Buenos Aires as a series of postcards and imagine yourself traveling through a city stuck in those times, like superimposed blueprints which allow each architecture to concentrate on its own style...
...This article is an adaptation of one that appeared in Nueva Sociedad, No...
...Where people turn, of course, is the neighborhood-the barrio-a place for preserving harmony between people and history, between history and city, between city and land, between land and community...
...In Buenos Aires, malls occupy a very particular place, because the response of capital to the heterogeneity that resulted from inequality has been to produce a utopia for the few...
...They are the destination of visitors from provincial cities, a cheap outing for low-income families who, without buying anything, can attend some free show, or a happy chapter of the day for a housewife who stands before a fashion-store window and sighs...
...Then the tango...
...This is also how nostalgia for the barrio ended up being the means by which an ugly and indistinguishable city, with no exuberant nature or past, at last-in a 1980s version of magic realism-found its "Latin American identity...
...The enthusiasm lost and the protion viewed the south as a necessarily tarnished mirror jects abandoned, the architecture survives as the bagof a north which was already claiming predominance gage of their dreams...
...The mall-known in Buenos Aires by the anglicism shopping-exists thanks to the fact that the rest of the projects could not come to fruition...
...Following the river's course against the current reveals the history of the industrial settlement of Buenos Aires...
...Make your way up the black effluence from the delta that today exists only for sightseeing, until you reach the interior of the unknown city...
...They complement each other because they each represent the outer reaches of a current of thought that developed in the absence of intentions, politics and the state, and which ended up accepting and celebrating that absence...
...In the new urban reality, as far as modernization is concerned, the only thing that progresses is misery...
...The little river embodies the secrets of other projects just as recent and just as forgotten...
...Unlike the industrial utopias which sought to create a complementary city, unlike the homogenizing utopias which sought to create an equitable city, and unlike the modernizing utopias which believed in the limitless growth of modernity, the malls are closed utopias...
...In recent years, nostalgia has retired to the insides...
...On its platforms, this subway nevertheless clothes itself in ceramic murals, thus offering a place of harmony for integrating a mythical past and a promising future...
...In the classic terms of Greek antiquity, it is to challenge destiny...
...on the left, there is the desolation of misery: shreds of city and shreds of countryside mixing people and animals amid the infected smoke of the Quema dump, nature and garbage, odors of the Riachuelo...
...Then the checkered patios of Old Palermo Air conditioned, muzak-perfumed and secure, the shopping malls are closed utopias...
...aced with evidence of the social and urban explosion, the most notable cultural response in recent years has been nostalgia...
...Then come worklots, train stations, more bridges, and docks that suggest an earlier era's incessant coming and going of cargo ships loaded with coal for the factories...
...This tradition can be traced back to timid beginnings at the end rain terminals spoke of technology while hiding of the eighteenth century, formulated explicitly in the the city's barrenness...
...Solitary glass skyscrapers were cut "municipal thinking...
...Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried...
...form which that ideal assumed was compensation...
...This is a symbol of NAC2A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 28URBAN REPORT decent" families would be made equal by the purifying light of nature acting as a disciplined and transparent civic institution...
...Its modern history is that of a project whose completion was thwarted at the moment of its triumph...
...There is scattered housing at first, erected between storage sheds, followed by the meat-packing buildings, which yesterday were slaughterhouses and today are shopping malls...
...If the Riachuelo Pro- victories like scar tissue on a great defeat, but which ject implicitly pursued the ideal of a complementary for a good part of this history managed to constitute a city with an industrial south and a beautified north, an fiction which only today can be perceived as such...
...It boulevards-but also "workers' barrios" in which a was a particular sort of modernity perhaps best exemdomesticated piece of greenery would lead the way to plified by the Obelisk commemorating the 400th the construction of the modern family...
...Having lost the bet on change, Buenos Aires opted for barred gates and entranceways, eternal and identical in a city condemned to have no history...
...NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30URBAN REPORT A poor boy peers into a video-game parlor on Lavalle Street in Buenos Aires...
...Buenos Aires was so well-structured when U.S...
...This was a dominating fiction, but also a tiny Mayo, and have equitably distributed public spaces, foothold for a different sort of city...
...If few can consume what the mall sells, architecture as a symbolic value is consumed by all...
...By leaving all the city's projects half-finished, the current crisis has begun consolidating fragments which are evocative of different periods: pieces of the future like unfulfilled promises in the north of the city, pieces of the past like tourists' souvenirs in the south, and pieces of the present like pimples everywhere...
...Rather it can be read as a metaphor of the most recent response to the crisis...
...A past that could have been different, a present that must be transformed, and a future that must still be created out of that transformation: all of these are on view as Buenos Aires, for the first time, tries to recognize itself...
...And passing the working-class neighborhood of Pompeya toward the west, we find the embodied dreams of those who saw the river as the city's industrial axis, as the factory port of the south, which in turn affirmed the idea of the north as exclusively residential and commercial...
...The idea of the neighborhood that is being resurrected today was born in Buenos Aires in the 1920s as a device to reunite and give modern form to the tiny communities scattered throughout the then-stillimagined urban quadrangle-communities which up to then had maintained semi-rural forms of incorporation into the city...
...Air-conditioned, muzak-perfumed and secure, they are places where in the midst of chaos and decadence, everything works...
...and San Telmo, whose memory gave life to new businesses over the past decade: "preservation" as a meeting place of real-estate speculation and romantic taste for local color...
...Enter Buenos Aires by the mouth of the Riachuelo-the "little river"-like the navigators of yore...
...Urban greenery anniversary of the city's founding, a monument to was thought of not only as hygienic space, but also as both the "city of the future" and to national tradition...
...Nostalgia and consumption complement each other since they have both consciously pulled back from the cultural plane: the former by broadening the concept of culture until it became unrecognizable...
...White and discreet diago- short presidency of reformer Bernardino Rivadavia nals sought to link tradition and modernity, lin(1826-1827), and then popularized in this century as eage and progress...
...But it could also be that nostalgia for the lost barrio was the way some urban thinkers at the end of the 1970s sought to build a refuge for "popular things" which would leave out-except in the slums-the harsh reality of land occupations repressed during the dictatorship...
...The explosion of all our certainties put Buenos Aires--open and dangerous, desperate and utopianon the threshold of such a possibility...
...The trip upstream is the result of a paradox: industry went elsewhere in the city just when the river, in the 1930s, was prepared to consolidate it on its banks...
...This homogenous as residents of Buenos Aires call themselves-middle city would grow concentrically from the Plaza de class...
...Latin America's urban societies face that problem today...
...Buenos Aires is a city invented by modernity, and its tradition has been constructed as nostalgia...
...the latter by identifying market opportunities with public value...
...If few can consume what the mall sells, architecture as a symbolic value is consumed by all...
...According to the ideal of a homogeneous city, parks in the south would be "Palermos for the poor," with nurseries, zoos and scaled pathways...
...It was a struggle which showered small quantify and dominate a space...
...It also illus- dition and the capitalist rules which made the liberal trates a more recent attitude: the drive to apprehend, city possible...
...Perhaps they sought to carve out a place of harmony amid the remains of a city crisscrossed with a symphony of destruction...
...In a series of historical blueprints, one can read what is most obvious: the progressive and persistent extension of the grid of blocks...
...hegemony succeeded British that it could employ its cultural history to resist "the American way of life...
...out against the blue sky like models, like the remains From the dawn of the twentieth century, this tradi- of ambitious ideals...
...Threads were imagined to be expanding the city's modernity, like points on a child's connect-the-dots drawing: Palermo, Avenida Alvear, Avenida de Mayo, the Diagonales Norte and Sur, the Avenida 9 de Julio, Catalinas Sur and Catalinas Norte, the Villa Lugano and Villa Soldati housing projects, and Ciudad Universitaria...
...services and environmental characteristics...
...Its Disney-like worlds only began to filter into Buenos Aires when the 1970s kicked off the city's slide into decadence...
...First there was the gaucho...
...privileged space for socialization, as mortar for an And of course, there is the subway, the perfect sym- "organic city...
...In the midst of a period of urban expansion, in the midst of a "liberal city," the pursuit of an "organic city" meant a relentless struggle Street musicians in Buenos Aires perform behind a photograph of Carlos Gardel, the great tango against the ideological singer, assumptions of the very trathe conquest of ideally empty terrain...
...A trip on the subway can be a voyage through the heart of the modernizing project in Buenos Aires-as long as you don't go anywhere...
...Possibly the comparative lateness with which this purely North American model was introduced was due to the resistance of a city that grew up under cultural traditions different from other Latin American cities...
...No spot along the Riachuelo's meandering bends is likely to make you recall the not-sodistant outings under the willows, and nothing remains of the nearly mythical foundation of the city on its banks...
...n the 1980s, a new urban phenomenon appeared and flowered comfortably in the midst of nostalgia: the shopping mall...
...But the lines are now definitively broken, and the points are but empty promises, stumps of a modernization half-achieved...
...Thus "barrio" today only means walls topped with bricks, a kitsch illusion of reviving the notion of "home...
...Today the mall is not just another symbol of modernizing sprawl...
...The industry that remains today sits in abandoned fortresses, dioramas of what the city managed to become...
...Immigrants and creoles, "humble but bol of urban motion, which dissolves differences 29 29 VOL XXV1ll, No 4 JAN/FEB 1995URBAN REPORT between areas and becomes a demonstration of technology's potential for overcoming the obstacles of territory...
...Three decades branded the city with the idea of progress: the 1880s, the 1930s, and the 1960s...
...They are isolated spaces whose success depends on contrast...
Vol. 28 • January 1995 • No. 4
