Chasing World-Class Urbanism: Global Policy versus Everyday Survival in Buenos Aires

Abstract

Historians of the future will have a hard time distinguishing what we call the Anthropocene from the economic model that supported humankind’s planetary domination. Capitalism is so naturalized in present times that it becomes quite invisible, despite being the elephant in the room. As Slavoj Žižek has stated, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.1 Our discipline of architectural history has also struggled with capitalism, which remains too hegemonic in the eyes of many. From the paradigmatic work of Manfredo Tafuri in the 1970s to the more recent work of Felicity Scott and Peggy Deamer, we have a plethora of scholarship that discusses the relationship between design and the money that pays for it.In Chasing World-Class Urbanism, Jacob Lederman makes a significant contribution to our provisional and still incomplete understanding of architecture’s relation to capitalism. In the early twentieth century, Buenos Aires, with majestic buildings and a vibrant urban culture, already aspired to a position at the table of world-class cities. For many decades, the city had attracted European design talent, from Vittorio Meano and Mario Palanti to Le Corbusier and Antoni Bonet i Castellana. The wealthy Buenos Aires of those years used architecture to develop its self-image as a European metropolis in the South Atlantic, working hard to erase any traces of Indigenous or African heritage.2 One hundred years later, an acute economic and political crisis engulfed Argentina, and the country’s GDP shrank by 28 percent between 1998 and 2002. Lederman’s book takes that crisis as its point of departure to elaborate how architecture and urban design once again served as instruments of public policy, with city officials in Buenos Aires promoting “world-class urbanism” as an answer to the adjustments that followed.Lederman explains that when the economic crisis of 1998–2002 severely deflated real estate prices, the city of Buenos Aires responded by implementing specific cultural policies, inducing the gentrification of downtown Beaux-Arts blocks and working-class neighborhoods such as San Telmo and La Boca. In his initial two chapters, he explains how the Europeanized culture of the early twentieth century continued to influence strategies a century later, despite widely different economic contexts. In the book’s third chapter, regarding the reinvention of San Telmo, Lederman explores in detail how the city government induced displacement and gentrification under the banner of “supporting culture.” This discourse around creativity, however, in the end merely provided a cover for capital investment in areas with maximum real estate return, in a process that Lederman discusses as a kind of redlining in reverse.The “transnational discourse community” that is the focus of the fourth chapter links the late twentieth-century developments in Buenos Aires back to the larger issue of the mechanics of late capitalism and neoliberalism. These functioned something like a hurricane, with the winds blowing much stronger at the periphery of the storm than at its center: at the calm eye of the storm you might even find blue skies. To understand the current situation in Buenos Aires, consequently, we should look not only at the economics and politics behind the architecture and planning of, for instance, nineteenth-century London or twentieth-century Manhattan but also at the periphery of such systems—for example, at the Manchester slums or racial unrest in Detroit. There is much to be learned from such a broader investigation. The late twentieth-century case of Calle Defensa in the San Telmo neighborhood offers a perfect example, where the magnification of some aspects of local culture through a process of “festivalization” in fact served the ends of investors through the privatization of public space. Sidewalk improvements and design regulations supported specific businesses, such as boutique hotels, cafés, and antique shops, while pushing out traditional bars and local workshops that did not appear “European” enough to match the image desired by the city elite.Lederman explains in detail how city administrations supported a select menu of cultural activities to fit touristic expectations, successfully aligning the intellectual and artistic identity of the city with emerging global practices to squeeze more economic value out of culture. And it worked quite well indeed, as the number of tourists doubled between 1999 and 2011. Paradoxically, a left-wing mayor, Anibal Ibarra (2000–2006), implemented those policies, which were then further enhanced under a neoliberal mayor, Mauricio Macri (2007–15).Lederman is also quite critical of the role played by multinational nongovernmental organizations—including the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, the World Resources Institute, the Congress for New Urbanism, and the Cities Climate Leadership Group—in facilitating world-class urbanism. These institutions provide funding for data collection, studies, and capacity building, promoting legislation and urban design solutions such as pedestrianized streets that enhance retail in one area and bus corridors that kill community life only a few blocks away. As Lederman points out, such instruments of world-class urbanism are not strict prescriptions, but they do form a kind of ideological tool kit, with a rhetoric that advances apparently neutral ideological goals. Not surprisingly, the results have always been the same: cities with less diversity, where low-income (non-White) populations are displaced to facilitate real estate investment. This has been shown time and again, not only recently but also in the trajectory of history, whether in Chicago in 1893, Rio de Janeiro in 1903, Montreal in 1976, or New York’s Hudson Yards in the 2010s.Lederman’s fifth chapter moves further south in Buenos Aires, from San Telmo to La Boca, highlighting the use of museums and galleries as yet another instrument of gentrification and sterilization. The changes implemented in La Boca paralleled those in cities all over the world, from Bilbao to the High Line in Manhattan to the port area of Rio de Janeiro. These interventions focused on contemporary aesthetics (aka beautification) rather than on sociohistorical value. The claim that these are “places where people want to live” hides the fact that the “people” referred to are in fact either wealthy outsiders or foreign tourists; the former real inhabitants, who might get jobs as waiters or cooks in the gentrified neighborhoods, will inevitably be forced to live miles away. In his sixth chapter, Lederman discusses the ways in which the locals in affected neighborhoods organized—with limited success—to push back on the “world-class” design projects. Street vendors were given a pass after the 2001 economic crisis, but in 2011, under Mayor Macri, the city government implemented more stringent legislation. However, it had no intention of enforcing the street vendor ban all over the city—only in areas of high-visibility tourism and “world-class” urban design implementation, such as Calle Florida and San Telmo. Such unequal enforcement triggered conflicts between retail store owners and street vendors, and solidified the role of design as signifier of who controls the street.As Lederman writes in the very last paragraph of the book, “Local officials are bringing the tools at their disposal to bear on complex urban problems,” but “these tools bend in the direction of market rule” (205). Architecture has been at best an accomplice of unfettered late capitalism, and at worst its right hand. The pandemic years of 2020–21 made explicit the limitations of any economic strategy based on tourism, but the signs of how unsustainable such a strategy actually is were already clearly visible. Lederman’s book should provide new insights for architects and city planners facing the challenges presented by architecture’s relation to capitalism in the increasingly globalized future.