Who Paid for the Modernization of Cities? The Experience of Buenos Aires, 1880-1910

Abstract

This project was set up in order to establish how the expansion of Buenos Aires, from a large town in 1880 of about 200,000 to a city of nearly 1.5 million in 1910, was paid for. The problems of Buenos Aires were not unique, and the outcome of the research, and of some comparative work on the financing of Montreal, suggest answers, both parallels and differences, which might prove helpful within a much broader context. I have been working on the project for two years in collaboration with Dr. Susan M. Cunningham. The division of labour was for the London work to be completed by Dr. Cunningham, funded for two years by a research grant from the Social Science Research Council (United Kingdom), and for the remainder, in Oxford, Buenos Aires, and Montreal, to be undertaken by me, with the assistance of the Inter-Faculty Committee for Latin American Studies at Oxford and the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires.