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.
Enter Buenos Aires by the mouth of the Riachue-
lo-the “little river”-like the navigators of
yore. 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. 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. No spot along the Riachuelo’s mean-
dering bends is likely to make you recall the not-so-
distant outings under the willows, and nothing remains
of the nearly mythical foundation of the city on its
banks. The little river embodies the secrets of other
projects just as recent and just as forgotten. Its modern
history is that of a project whose completion was
thwarted at the moment of its triumph.
Following the river’s course against the current
reveals the history of the industrial settlement of
Buenos Aires. There is scattered housing at first, erect-
ed between storage sheds, followed by the meat-pack-
ing buildings, which yesterday were slaughterhouses
and today are shopping malls. Large abandoned facto-
ry 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 Architec-
ture, Design and Urban Studies of the University of Buenos
Aires. This article is an adaptation of one that appeared in
Nueva Sociedad, No. 114. Translated from the Spanish by Mark
Fried.
into an avenue without a city. 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. 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.
Although the last stretch of the river seems to be one
great industrial dock, the banks no longer display
industry, but rather greenery. On the right, there are
enormous housing projects like flags that moderniza-
tion planted in unknown territory; 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.
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. The
industry that remains today sits in abandoned fortress-
es, dioramas of what the city managed to become. 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.
In a series of historical blueprints, one can read
what is most obvious: the progressive and persistent
extension of the grid of blocks. This is a symbol of
NAC2A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS
28URBAN REPORT
decent” families would be
made equal by the purify-
ing light of nature acting as
a disciplined and transpar-
ent civic institution.
According to the ideal of
a homogeneous city, parks
in the south would be
“Palermos for the poor,”
with nurseries, zoos and
scaled pathways. 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.
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 tra-
the conquest of ideally empty terrain. It also illus- dition and the capitalist rules which made the liberal
trates a more recent attitude: the drive to apprehend, city possible. It was a struggle which showered small
quantify and dominate a space. 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.
alternative tradition sought to create a homogenous This fiction announced the emergence of a porteiho-
city, without specialized sectors. This homogenous as residents of Buenos Aires call themselves-middle
city would grow concentrically from the Plaza de class. This was a dominating fiction, but also a tiny
Mayo, and have equitably distributed public spaces, foothold for a different sort of city.
services and environmental characteristics. This tradi-
tion 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. 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. Solitary glass skyscrapers were cut “municipal thinking.” out against the blue sky like models, like the remains
From the dawn of the twentieth century, this tradi- of ambitious ideals. The enthusiasm lost and the pro-
tion viewed the south as a necessarily tarnished mirror jects abandoned, the architecture survives as the bag-
of a north which was already claiming predominance gage of their dreams. 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 expres-
ally became the privileged county of Palermo. The sions of a faith as ingenuous as it was powerful.
form which that ideal assumed was compensation. Its The port, the railroads, the subway: bold strokes
instrument par excellence was the setting aside of made for effect, a network which quickly character-
public 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. It
boulevards-but also “workers’ barrios” in which a was a particular sort of modernity perhaps best exem-
domesticated piece of greenery would lead the way to plified by the Obelisk commemorating the 400th
the construction of the modern family. 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.
privileged space for socialization, as mortar for an And of course, there is the subway, the perfect sym- “organic city.” 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 tech-
nology’s potential for overcoming the obstacles of
territory. 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.
Three decades branded the city with the idea of
progress: the 1880s, the 1930s, and the 1960s. 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 Uni-
versitaria. But the lines are now definitively broken,
and the points are but empty promises, stumps of a
modernization half-achieved. 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 any-
where.
In the new urban reality, as far as modernization is
concerned, the only thing that progresses is misery. 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. 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. Thus
the present becomes a mix of times and places, a pro-
found mix that annuls time.
aced with evidence of the social and urban
explosion, the most notable cultural response in
recent years has been nostalgia. Scorn for the
urban sprawl of the 1960s and 1970s and fascination
with the “anticommunist” model of the city of Monte-
video have produced a nostalgia for the city that mod-
ernization destroyed.
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. 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 mercan-
tilization.
But the neighborhood we remember nostalgically
was never anything but a mechanism of modernization
itself. The idea of the neighborhood that is being res-
urrected today
was born in Bue-
nos Aires in the
1920s as a device
to reunite and
give modern form
to the tiny com-
munities scat-
tered throughout
the then-still-
imagined urban
quadrangle–
communities
which up to then
had maintained
semi-rural forms
of incorporation
into the city.
Buenos Aires is
a city invented by
modernity, and
its tradition has
been constructed
as nostalgia. First
there was the
gaucho. Then the
tango. Then the
checkered patios
of Old Palermo
Air conditioned,
muzak-perfumed
and secure, the
shopping malls are
closed utopias.
If few can
consume what
the mall sells,
architecture as a
symbolic value
is consumed
by all.
and San Telmo, whose memory gave life to new busi-
nesses over the past decade: “preservation” as a meet-
ing place of real-estate speculation and romantic taste
for local color.
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. Perhaps they sought to carve out a place
of harmony amid the remains of a city crisscrossed
with a symphony of destruction. 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. In recent years, nostalgia has retired to
the insides. Thus “barrio” today only means walls
topped with bricks, a kitsch illusion of reviving the
notion of “home.”
This is also how nostalgia for the barrio ended up
being the means by which an ugly and indistinguish-
able city, with no exuberant nature or past, at last-in
a 1980s version of magic realism-found its “Latin
American identity.” Having lost the bet on change,
Buenos Aires opted for barred gates and entrance-
ways, 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.
n the 1980s, a new urban phenomenon appeared
and flowered comfortably in the midst of nostalgia:
the shopping mall. 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. Its Disney-like worlds only began to filter
into Buenos Aires when the 1970s kicked off the
city’s slide into decadence.
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.
Buenos Aires became a metropolis when British hege-
mony, due to its own characteristics, didn’t need to
impose paradigms of consumption. Buenos Aires was
so well-structured when U.S. hegemony succeeded
British that it could employ its cultural history to resist
“the American way of life.”
Today the mall is not just another symbol of mod-
ernizing sprawl. Rather it can be read as a metaphor of
the most recent response to the crisis. In Buenos
Aires, malls occupy a very particular place, because
the response of capital to the heterogeneity that result-
ed from inequality has been to produce a utopia for the
few. Unlike the industrial utopias which sought to cre-
ate 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. They are isolated spaces whose success
depends on contrast. Air-conditioned, muzak-per-
fumed and secure, they are places where in the midst
of chaos and decadence, everything works. Monu-
ments to wasteful squandering in a city where waste-
ful squandering borders on scandal, the malls rise up
like urban manifestations of the savage economic con-
centration which characterized the 1970s.
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? They are the desti-
nation of visitors from provincial cities, a cheap out-
ing for low-income families who, without buying any-
thing, can attend some free show, or a happy chapter
of the day for a housewife who stands before a fash-
ion-store window and sighs. If few can consume what
the mall sells, architecture as a symbolic value is con-
sumed by all.
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 open-
ing. 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; the
latter by identifying market opportunities with public
value. 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.
Today it is obvious that this current of urban
thought never really knew what to do with Buenos
Aires. To think about the state is to think about the
public. It is to think about politics. In the classic terms
of Greek antiquity, it is to challenge destiny. Latin
America’s urban societies face that problem today. 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 multi-
tudes, thereby redefining what is meant by “public.”
The explosion of all our certainties put Buenos
Aires–open and dangerous, desperate and utopian-
on the threshold of such a possibility. A past that
could have been different, a present that must be trans-
formed, 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.
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