The Production of Emptied Places in the Borderlands of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires

Abstract

The Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires concentrates almost one-third of the population of Argentina. A broad scope of social, urban, and habitational public policiesPublic policies was found insufficient to guide low-density dynamics of growth, without the basic urban services and with significant processes of self-management for many decades now. Within this context, renewing the ways of questioning the processes of urbanizationUrbanization is central for the academic and political urban agenda. This article proposes rethinking the metropolitan borderlands in their own terms, based on the notion of urbicideUrbicide, and, with this approach, it identifies a series of territoriesTerritory which recent transformations refer to various modes of violenceViolence on the cityCities. This work distinguishes three ways of production of emptied places: the prefigurations of urban and environmental land management in the inhabited banks of polluted rivers, the networks of illegality in informal settlements and the privatization of public spacesPublic space in gated communitiesCommunity. By approaching the metropolitan borderlands from the notion of urbicideUrbicide, a revision and rewriting of urbanizationUrbanization processes is developed from the perspective of the displaced ones.