Buenos Aires is an example of how the cities of the Global South make themselves available to the global city market. They always do it in the same way: reforming neighborhoods – that is, expelling neighbors -, deactivating any source of conflict – that is, pacifying the space -, hiding any sign of misery, and, of course, arranging a calm, friendly and foreseeable. This staging of a city to turn it into a source of profits corresponds to the generation of landscapes suitable for investment and consumption.
In Buenos Aires, neighborhoods such as Palermo, Puerto Madero or San Telmo carry out this policy of generating counterfeit spaces for commercialization. The case of El Abasto is interesting, already thematized as “Gardel’s neighborhood” and about which María Carman wrote her book not long ago. The traps of culture (Paidós).
This dynamic already affects neighborhoods in the south of the city, the worst treated part of the Argentine capital until now. One of them is La Boca, a popular neighborhood full of sentimental and symbolic resonances and with a powerful imaginary in which tango and football occupy a prominent place. A work by anthropologist Ana Clara Fabaron has just appeared about La Boca in which she analyzes the changes that the mouth of the Riachuelo to the Río de la Plata has been experiencing since the 1990s, and she does so precisely by emphasizing how these imply the production of landscapes. . Some results of her research are included in a recent book: Resist Buenos Airesa compilation by Romina Oleajarczyk and, again, María Carman, published by Siglo XXI.
Good opportunity to think about what we call “landscape” and do so remembering that “natural landscapes” do not exist. Every landscape is an intentional and purposeful cutout imposed on the world. This is what Georg Simmel, the pioneer of the theories of the big city, taught us in a fundamental essay: Landscape philosophy. In the city, so to speak, real urban life is nature and the function of urbanism and architecture is to generate landscapes that transform that real urban life—what Henri Lefebvre called “the urban” in The right to the city, — in urbanization and urbanity, that is, in an optical panorama of clear, intelligible and beautiful schemes intended to be obeyed.
But the urban cannot become a landscape because it cannot be fixed. He does not allow himself to be photographed or portrayed on a canvas. If you tried, you would come out shaken because your natural state is startle and trembling. It is not a still backdrop, but a moving skein of experiences, struggles and vicissitudes. Neoliberal urban planning consists, precisely, in trying to “frame” in a detailed image, the heterogeneity of meanings that the city registers, the plurality of uses and functions that it knows, the tireless and sometimes contradictory proliferation of meanings, memories and uses of which It is done and he does it. You can’t, but try to do it.
Despite the interests of power and money, evidence emerges—in La Boca and everywhere—that the truth of cities cannot be set aside to paint an impeccable picture of them, without sadness or passions.
In La Boca the creators of landscapes They want to domesticate or suppress the urban by turning it into a still life with extras, but it is difficult for them. It is the same thing that is happening in many old popular neighborhoods in Latin America and the world, which owners, planners and politicians aspire to convert into perfect and still visual orders, protected from a reality that refuses to pose for them.
Despite his efforts to impose his landscapes, the marketing urban has not won the battle. A good part of La Boca is already an “urban landscape”, that is, a themed territory through which tourists walk and take photos: Caminito, La Ribera, the surroundings of La Bombonera, the Boca Juniors stadium. But another part of the neighborhood, hidden or concealed, is made up of precarious housing, including dozens of tenements—many still made of sheet metal and wood—in which poverty accumulates and in which tragic fires are frequent. Among the tourists who tour the neighborhood, the presence of “undesirables” such as manteros or cartoneros cannot be avoided. Furthermore, in La Boca corners survive to be colonized by tourism, such as El Playón, an enclave of the neighborhood where Ana Clara Fabaron finds young people playing ball in the street, roasting in the open, unsponsored murals – one of them with a great legend that says “Republic of La Boca”—and the activity of one of the main murgas of Buenos Aires: Los Amantes de La Boca.
And so, despite the interests of power and money, evidence emerges—in La Boca and everywhere—that the truth of cities cannot be set aside to paint an impeccable picture of them, without sadness or sadness. passions. Whether they like it or not, it always returns, because it never completely left, that effervescence that is the real city, which does not resign itself to ending up being a mere image.
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