Neighborhood and Nation in Neoliberal Times Urban Upheaval, Resistance, and National Identity in Buenos Aires

In the wake of the devastating Argentine economic crisis of 2001, Buenos Aires has undergone one of the largest real estate booms in the city’s history—a boom that is fundamentally reconfiguring the urban landscape. In the midst of a whirlwind of urban development, several middle-class neighborhood activist groups have emerged to contest the effects of the boom on the identity of their neighborhoods and city. One of these activist groups, Palermo Despierta, has begun a campaign in the Palermo district to prevent the construction of residential mega-towers an icon of urban development since the crisis. This middle-class activism largely contradicts scholarship that pigeonholes middle-class urban dwellers as agents of “globalization-oriented urban development.” I argue that underlying the resistance is a desire to defend an historically imagined, national narrative of middle-class European identity inscribed in the urban space of Buenos Aires. In a nation and city recovering from crisis, porteños (Buenos Aires residents) are more willing than ever to contest the globalizing of their city in order to re-emplace national narratives that remain at the heart of their urban identity. This nascent activism is deeply paradoxical, however, as the narratives that animate Palermo Despierta operate on the basis of racial and class distinctions. Contrary to the claims of scholars like Saskia Sassen and Arjun Appadurai, I argue that Buenos Aires demonstrates that the process of deterritorialization has been accompanied by processes of middle-class reterritorialization in post-crisis Buenos Aires. I also offer a revision of the view that neoliberalism is a totalizing form of global hegemony. Post-crisis Buenos Aires illustrates that the global hegemony of neoliberalism is itself contested, resisted, and reworked by the national hegemony of middle-classness and Europeanness. http://depts.washington.edu/chid/intersections_Winter_2012/ Garrett_Strain_Upheaval,_Resistance,_and_National_Identity_in_Buenos_Aires.pdf Fair Use Notice: The images within this article are provided for educational and informational purposes. They are being made available in an effort to advance the understanding of scientific, environmental, economic, social justice and human rights issues etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have an interest in using the included information for research and educational purposes. intersections Winter 2012 15 Neighborhood and Nation in Neoliberal Times Urban Upheaval, Resistance, and National Identity in Buenos Aires By Garrett S. Strain University of Washington, Seattle A Synoptic View of the City rom atop the commanding position of the obelisk (obelisco) located in the Plaza de La República at the center of Buenos Aires, any observer can see that urban change is afoot in the city known in popular tourist parlance as the ‘Paris of South America’ and the ‘Queen of the River Plate.’ To the south, shantytowns (villas miserias) and other precarious living quarters dot the urban landscape in the wake of the city’s implosion during the catastrophic economic crisis of 20012002. Looking to the downtown urban skyline, we see the names of the same F Garrett S. Strain Urban Upheaval, Resistance, and National Identity in Buenos Aires 16 transnational corporations that helped precipitate the economic crisis and perpetuate the city’s ongoing financialization. To the east lies the Puerto Madero district that the Menem administration modernized in the 1990s. Transformed from a traditional port area into the city’s most elite promenade, this district highlights how business efforts to position Buenos Aires as a competitive global city have led to enormous urban upheavals and redevelopment dynamics. But these urban transformations have not gone uncontested. If we now direct our attention away from the obelisk, symbol of the Argentine nation, and look north to Palermo, the city’s largest neighborhood, we can observe an urban struggle over the processes of redevelopment. Middle class Buenos Aires residents known as porteños have mobilized to resist the invasion of residential mega-towers into their neighborhood. According to residents, these towers symbolize how political and economic elites are appropriating the urban landscape of Buenos Aires. For the few porteños who have lived long enough to observe the successive phases of urban development, the obelisk is nearly unrecognizable. If, as Michel de Certeau muses, every city is an urban palimpsest — a composite environment derived from the co-presence of urban layers superimposed on top of one another through successive phases of urban growth—the distinctively European, early-twentieth century urban layer that so many porteños nostalgically remember is being carved up, covered up, and potentially buried forever beneath the current real estate boom. n 2001, Argentina plummeted headfirst into economic crisis after a decade of economic restructuring led by the Menem administration. This crisis culminated in the largest sovereign debt default in world history and the near elimination of the middle class, who lost substantial portions of their personal savings during the infamous Corralito bank closures in 2001. In the wake of the economic crisis, both local and global investors seized upon the Argentine peso’s devaluation to buy up real estate property at fire-sale prices. As a result, Buenos Aires experienced the largest real estate boom in the city’s history. By 2005, urban construction grew at twice the rate of the city’s economy. In the midst of this whirlwind of urban redevelopment, several neighborhood activist groups emerged to contest the effects of the real estate boom on both their own 1 Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 91-110. 2 The Corralito is the informal name given to the Argentine government’s infamous decision to freeze all bank accounts and forbid U.S. dollar withdrawals in 2001. While the measure was intended to prevent bank runs, the action backfired as thousands of protestors took to the streets to demand access to their bank accounts. 3 Ezequiel Burgo, “Las Razones Del Nuevo Boom Del Negocio Inmobiliario,” Clarín.com (Buenos Aires), September 11, 2005; http://www.clarin.com/suplementos/economico/2005/09/11/n-00311.htm (accessed April 2, 2010). I intersections Winter 2012 17 neighborhood and city. Many of these neighborhood activist groups continue to struggle today, arguing that the proliferation of hypermodern urban structures in Buenos Aires have combined to destroy the identity of their neighborhood and city. In particular, the city has witnessed the birth of a popular broad-based coalition called Queremos Buenos Aires (We Want Buenos Aires) that addresses what it calls the, “urban/environmental/social and heritage emergency in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires.” A central goal of this coalition is the protection of Buenos Aires urban heritage and the construction of a more egalitarian and sustainable city. Among the many neighborhood groups in Queremos Buenos Aires, one group called Palermo Despierta (Wake up Palermo) has begun a grassroots campaign in the middle-upper class Palermo neighborhood to prevent the construction of residential mega-towers. These residents claim that the building of these enormous towers ruins the neighborhood, interrupting the delivery of public utilities to their homes and destroying the historic casas bajas (literally, short houses) that characterize the district’s traditional urban landscape. My fieldwork in Buenos Aires began with a broad-based survey of urban change, but came to focus on interviewing Palermo residents who affiliated themselves with this Palermo Despierta coalition, coupled with an examination of the group’s official documents, statements, and multimedia. During five weeks of fieldwork conducted in the Palermo District in 2009, I found that many of my interviewees 4 Queremos Buenos Aires, “Queremos Buenos Aires Adhieren y Participan,” Queremos Buenos Aires: alternativa para el Área Metropolitana en emergencia, web log entry posted June 1, 2008; http://queremosbsas.blogspot.com/ (accessed April 10, 2010). Original Spanish: “Emergencia urbana / ambiental / social y patrimonial del Área Metropolitana Buenos Aires.” 5 Most of these documents are taken from the group’s blog located at http://palermodespierta.blogspot.com/. Middle class activists protesting the construction of mega-towers in Palermo. Garrett S. Strain Urban Upheaval, Resistance, and National Identity in Buenos Aires 18 identified themselves, their neighborhood, and Palermo Despierta’s activism as distinctively middle class in nature. For these residents, the Palermo Despierta represented a rejection of the elitist collusion between private real estate investors and corrupt politicians who were destroying their quaint, middle class neighborhood. The resulting scenes of protest surprised me because, at least in the context of the U.S., it is rare that one sees white, middle class urban dwellers take to the streets to defend their neighborhood and their city from private business interests. To the contrary, several scholars have characterized the urban middle class as socially conservative agents of urban exclusion and segregation. According to Atkinson, middle class urban actors have, “deep inclinations towards segregation based on desires for social homogeneity and the predictability and safety that this 6 This is not to say that every global North urban scholar makes these class gentrification analytical claims about the urban middle classes. Some scholars present more careful complementary analyses of the cultural-urban negotiation of meanings. These scholars include, but are not limited to, David Harvey on Paris, Katharyne Mitchell on Vancouver, and Timothy Gibson on Seattle. Figure 1. Neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. (Palermo in green). intersections Winter 2012 19 is perceived to engender.” Neil Smith uses to term “revanchist city” in several of his works to refer to the, “race/class/gender terror felt by middle and rulingclass whites who [strike a] vicious reaction against, the working class, homeless people, the unemployed, women, gays and lesbians, [and] immigrants.” Even in the context of the global South, several authors claim that middle class actors actively “colonize” selective areas in city centers in ways that emulate Western gentrifiers. These urban scholars among others construe the urban middle classes as the agents of, “globalization-oriented urban development.” In other words, middle class urban dwellers often accept and are complicit in urban transformations. Thus, the question becomes: why are Palermo Despierta and other citywide neighborhood activists organizing for a more spatially just and equitable city, and how should this be interpreted with respect to a wide body of scholarship that depicts middle class urban dwellers as routinely complicit in neoliberal development policies? In response to this question, I argue that Palermo Despierta contests neoliberal models of urban development in order to defend imagined national narratives of middle-classness and Europeanness inscribed in the urban space of Palermo and Buenos Aires. In the eyes of Palermo residents, historical traces of their middle class, European urban identity are now threatened by larger forces that manifest in the destruction of historic urban forms and restructuring of the urban landscape – rationalized in the neoliberal language of global competiveness. Far from asserting a cohesive urban identity, though, my analysis will demonstrate that Palermo Despierta’s activism is more reactive as it responds to the fragmentation of “traditional” porteño identity in the wake of the economic crisis as well as the growing reality that the imagined Buenos Aires that these residents pine for no longer exists. My argument supplements a basic political-economic reading of Buenos Aires’ post-crisis milieu with a critical analysis of the cultural-urban negotiations of meaning and space that have contested neoliberalism in the wake of the crisis. 7 R. Atkinson, “Padding the Bunker: Strategies of Middle class Disaffiliation and Colonisation in the City,” Urban Studies 4, no. 43 (2006): 820. 8 Neil Smith, The new urban frontier: gentrification and the revanchist city (London: Routledge, 2005), 211. 9 See Neil Smith, “New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy.” Antipode 3, no. 34 (2002); William Goldsmith, “From the Metropolis to Globalization: the Dialectics of Race and Urban Form,” in Globalizing cities: a new spatial order?, Eds. Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen (Oxford: Blackwell publishers, 2000), 37-55; and R. M. Leichenko and W. D. Solecki, “Exporting the American Dream: The Globalization of Suburban Consumption Landscapes,” Regional Studies 2, no. 39 (2005): 241-254. 10 See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2007). 11 Juan M. Kanai, The in-between city: neoliberal globalization, inequality and middle class politics in Buenos Aires, Argentina (2002-2007), Dissertation (Ph.D) ― University of California, Los Angeles, 2008, 75. 12 This form of neoliberal urbanism is expressed in the current real estate boom in Buenos Aires. 13 Jonas and Ward note that the city-region literature says virtually nothing on, “how new territorial forms are constructed politically and reproduced through everyday acts and struggles around consumption and social Garrett S. Strain Urban Upheaval, Resistance, and National Identity in Buenos Aires 20 While my ethnographic analysis centers on the Palermo district, this examination is much more than a neighborhood analysis. Rather, it is an examination of a city struggling to reinforce and preserve cultural and urban meaning. I. Critical Scaffolding A definition of terms in the context of the literature on ‘neoliberalism’ Beneath the veneer of common-sense and seemingly ‘natural’ ideas about space and time, there lie hidden terrains of ambiguity, contradiction, and struggle.