Competing cultural capitals in a capital of culture: New tourist landscapes as unequal developments
Ryan Centner PhD Candidate Department of Sociology University of California, Berkeley
ABSTRACT This paper analyzes the intertwined projects of Third World development and tourism promotion in terms of their unequal social and spatial manifestations in a setting recently beset by transformative overhauls in this regard: Buenos Aires, Argentina. I train a comparative lens on three areas of the Argentine capital and their divergent paths of recovery from economic and political crisis (2001-2002) that have all adopted tourism as their survival strategy. I analyze the following differentiating axes for each urban area: (1) historical relationship to the local and national state, (2) predominant form of economic activity since international market opening in the 1990s, and (3) ethnic composition of area residents. The backdrop for this comparison is the documented boom in tourist entries since mid-2002 and the overarching tourism campaigns promoting the city since then, with the significant slogans of “Buenos Aires: Cultural Capital of Latin America,” and “Smile. We have visitors.” I find that older hierarchies of culture and place undergo reinvention in a conflictive politics of spatial claims that recasts the social cartography of the city for tourists and residents alike. By way of conclusion, I delineate the trajectories of those competing kinds of capital and their highly contingent resolutions.
In the midwinter chill of July 2002, among the many topics of conversation that stirred up shivering dread and wonder simultaneously during that stretch of months just after the globally publicized Argentine financial collapse, there was one bit of big news in Buenos Aires that was having a different kind of effect. Some winced with embarrassment and despair while many others were looking ahead with great enthusiasm.
The capital of Argentina had suddenly shifted status in the world, and not only due to commonplace media portrayals. Rather, in the course of one fast, chaotic year, Buenos
Aires had changed from being one of the most expensive cities in the world to one of the cheapest – less expensive than Manila, Colombo, Nairobi, and Tegucigalpa, and running in the ranks of Harare, Asunción, and Bombay. The high-flying city that represented the pinnacle of Latin American refinement and worldliness, and therefore remained accessible only to the most eccentric or extravagant of travelers, became a rock-bottom tourist bargain.
This essay shows the different ways in which three areas in the Argentine capital transformed via political and economic entrepreneurship that aimed to deal with fallout from international financial development schemes and exploit the new possibilities of tourist development. I focus on the landscapes of these sites and the competing claims that have given them their particular shape. In particular, I endeavor to answer the following two questions: In a context of failed development, what are the territorializations of a panacea redevelopment strategy such as tourism? What factors determine that differentiation? Using recent statistical data on foreign travelers from different thinktanks in Argentina, census figures from 1990 and 2001, extended interviews with residents and workers in these parts of the city, and semi-structured interviews with various functionaries of the local and national state as well as relevant architects and developers, I supplement the 1.5 years of ethnographic research I conducted in Buenos Aires. My theoretical framework positions this research in conversation with longer lineages of work on tourism, redevelopment, stratification, and urban change; in particular it seeks to enrich perspectives on Third World urban tourism, multiple forms of cultural capital, and spatial inequalities of redevelopment. The paper takes the transformation of Buenos Aires into the cheapest city in the world as its point of departure into issues of distinction and cultural differentiation in sociology, moving on to the intersections in the sociologies of development and tourism as well as the influence the state and private economic interests, and finally arriving at the topic of uneven urban geographies and their ties with questions of globalization and growth. The essay concludes by bringing together the empirical research findings presented throughout by demonstrating their interconnectedness in the unequal, competing urban landscapes of tourism currently consolidating in Buenos Aires.
The cheapest city in the world When the annual survey of cost-of-living indicators of 145 major cities around the world was published by Newsweek, in a city where The Economist, Le Monde Diplomatique, and La Repubblica are also in common circulation, shock waves rippled through all kinds of conversations. At sidewalk cafés, lawyers were incredulous that those other big Latin American cities of São Paulo and Mexico City – those “more Latin American cities” – were more expensive than beautiful, “cultured,” “more European” Buenos Aires. But inside the city government of Aníbal Ibarraobj<> endobj 2722 0 obj<
skewed geographic dispersal of
fortunes, the specific interventions
of structural adjustment have had
differentiated transformative effects.
Here I take up an overview of each
district, its history, its content, and its form of development during the neoliberal era of structural adjustment, in turn. Puerto
Madero is a renovated waterfront district with state-of-the-art facilities for living, working, and playing in a cosmopolitan corporate setting. Puerto Madero was the primary conduit for major wealth-generating Argentine exports in agriculture and heavy industry until the middle of the twentieth century. Constructed in the 1880s with design, technology, and capital inputs from England, it had been a bustling center of customs, storage, and port activities when Argentina was one of the ten wealthiest countries in the world, but fell into abandoned disrepair when national economic fortunes shifted and when newer port facilities were built elsewhere. Despite its close proximity to the traditional economic and political centers of
Buenos Aires – situated less than five blocks away from both the presidential palace and the stock exchange – Puerto Madero went unused for decades. Although many open spaces in
Buenos Aires near areas with high levels of economic development and urban infrastructure became the site of large-scale squatter settlements in the second half of the twentieth century, Puerto Madero remained devoid of even such clandestine uses.
There had been many plans to reclaim the derelict territory under various administrations, especially the most recent military regime of 1976-1983, which sought to implement a grandiose project of linear, modernist, easily monitored urban development in the port area, in the tradition of Le Corbusier and the style of Brasilia. Yet no plans combined the necessary attractiveness to investment and expediency of execution to shift from sketches and models to the acts of financing and breaking ground until the presidency of Carlos Menem, beginning in 1989. In the wake of disastrously destabilizing bouts of hyperinflation immediately preceding his administration, Menem moved quickly to alter the general conduct of economic affairs in
Argentina. One of his first legislative moves was to push through two laws with far-reaching influence in the organization of the Argentine economy: the State Reform Act and the Economic Emergency Act, both of 1989. In the text of these laws, Menem gained broad authority to sell – or privatize – a wide range of state holdings, from public utilities to public properties, with the goal of refilling state coffers and signaling to international lenders that
Argentina was deserving of new credit for further development. In terms of property, these twin acts, which underwrote the bulk of transformations under structural adjustment, enabled Menem and his advisors to identify which publicly owned lands could be designated as strategic – according to their own discretion – state holdings and therefore saleable at a profit on the global market.
Puerto Madero was one such site, sold in 1989 to a private development operation called Corporación Antiguo Puerto Madero. However, this entity is an unusual agent of urban development because it is organized as a private corporation – with all the rights and responsibilities of such a firm – but its two stockholders are the national government of
Argentina and the municipal government of Buenos Aires. Their aims of profit-oriented, infrastructure-upgrading, and image-building redevelopment are enshrined in federal law, but their means of acting towards these ends is open to all the freedom of private corporations.
Since the early 1990s, a complete conversion of the space has been underway, transforming it into a hub of sleek apartments, posh restaurants, transnational corporate offices, lavish nightclubs, an exclusive hotel, and a private university campus – all within restored buildings or new constructions sold and overseen by the Corporación Antiguo Puerto Madero in its master plan for urban redevelopment.
La Boca is adjacent to Puerto
Madero, from any perspective on the ground, seems to be worlds away. It is an impoverished, deindustrialized zone with decaying buildings and new shantytowns
surrounding a small, bright tourist island which
nostalgically celebrates the neighborhood’s history
of poor Italian immigration and tango among
bordellos and tenements. Quite differently from
the extended period of disuse in Puerto Madero,
land in La Boca has remained in use for residential
and commercial purposes. Around the turn of the
last century, many Mediterranean immigrants
entered the country through ports in the neighborhood, and often lingered there during their early efforts to establish themselves in the city. With these foundations, La Boca has long been a site of poverty, disadvantage, and dense settlement, even when Argentina was at its pinnacle of success. During the first coordinated Argentine push towards industrialization – largely fueled by immigrant labor – housing was squalid, crowded, and makeshift. Since that time, major economic development has been almost nonexistent, or even negative. Two exceptions have been the construction of the large Boca Juniors soccer stadium in the 1940s, and the development of a tourist sector around the history of the tango in a few blocks called El Caminito in the middle of La
Boca, on the polluted banks of the Riachuelo, in the 1960s. Neither of these provided substantial economic boosts for local residents.
Over the middle of the
twentieth century, there was overall
industrialization and service-
provision through programs prompted by Peronist politicians. But these advances were not permanent.
Deindustrialization came as part of economic contraction beginning in the 1970s.
Governments averse to import-substitution industrialization further undercut the vitality of the poor barrio by dismantling incentives to industries located there. But the greatest blow came with the aggressive, pervasive drive toward deindustrialization led by Menem in his thorough neoliberalization of the economy. Although one might consider La Boca merely a working-class neighborhood, if it is one, then it is certainly one without work. The exception to this today is the island of tourist development around El Caminito, a small, colorful strip of museums, restaurants, and trinket shops that try to market La Boca as an Italian oasis in
South America. This project for revitalizing La Boca has been in place for decades, but it expanded and became much more popular – and its perimeter much more guarded – with investment initiatives during the era of structural adjustment.
Since the mid-1990s, La Boca has been the focus of several broad efforts of
“revitalization” and “recuperation” in the southern zones of Buenos Aires, the poorer half of the city, of which La Boca is a part. The idea has been not only to upgrade the aesthetic and material quality of these sites, but to exploit the urban infrastructure already in place within this half of the city, an important substrate that is technically equal to that of the more prestigious and expensive northern half of the city, where most property development and economic growth was concentrated during the 1990s. In 2000, with the aim of southern redevelopment in mind, the Argentine state formed another major development corporation, the Corporación del Sur. But unlike the Corporación Antiguo de Puerto Madero, this operation remains a state-owned enterprise, is held solely by the City of Buenos Aires, deals with a much vaster area (half of the city), and must grapple with the dilemmas posed by working with territories where hundreds of thousands of people reside. As a result, actions of all kinds are much more circumscribed by political and economic limitations. So far, the major accomplishments of the Corporación del Sur have been the evolution of extensive plans for redevelopment and the very beginning of intervention initiatives – in La Boca, this has focused on the expansion of the tourist area around El Caminito, and the restoration of several buildings throughout the neighborhood considered to be cultural heritage
(specifically with Italian roots) with funds and technical support provided by the government of Italy.
El Once is home to one of the most important transportation hubs in the metropolis, as well as major projects to convert numerous parcels of land to more upscale
uses, such as a gargantuan shopping mall and
high-security apartment towers. El Once has had
a complicated, diverse history. In the middle of
the territory of Buenos Aires proper, it has long
been a center for commerce and transportation, as well as maintaining a sizeable residential base. Although it had predominantly been a ghetto for porteño Jews a century ago, its population has changed substantially in the last 15 years in particular. What were once corner stores run by Jewish merchants have become Korean and
Taiwanese groceries, where many indigenous Bolivians and Peruvians are employed. West
African vendors hawk their goods in parks and along sidewalks. Dominican prostitutes are prevalent at night. Jews who have not moved to either more comfortable neighborhoods or emigrated to Israel (a popular option in the last decade), remain active in several religious and cultural organizations, including the Jewish center which was bombed in 1994, around the same time as the Israeli Embassy of Argentina. These associations have helped sponsor an influx of Russian refugees into the neighborhood; another important group of refugees, Bosnians, has also entered the neighborhood in the last decade. Along with all of this immigration – some of it benefiting from official sponsorship, some of it made possible through lax entry regulations and enforcement – there has been a spike in foreign investment in the vicinity (but only in select areas), most visible in the enormous shopping mall crafted out of the shell of the city’s former farmer’s market, along with several new apartment complexes. There have also been plans by the Argentine state to renovate the decaying train station through privatization. The neighborhood gains its name from the station (El Once de Septiembre), and through it flow tens of thousands of people commuting from the western suburbs, and immigrating from the national interior, daily.
In this bustling neighborhood, which used to have a solidly middle-class standing, there are now divergences of fortunes, with some groups experiencing upward economic mobility, and others moving in the other direction. There is no umbrella development project present, but a mix of private ventures and public development efforts. The construction of the large shopping mall, Abasto de Buenos Aires, was bankrolled by George
Soros, who invested widely in Argentina throughout the 1990s, but had sold off all his holdings by the end of the decade. The mall and its surrounding projects – the apartment towers, an historical center, and a sizeable outlet of the grocery chain, Coto, were all complete and open by 1998. These new additions sit side-by-side with large old homes that have been seized by people in search of shelter – including many new immigrants from nearby countries or the Argentine interior – and the cultural and social institutions that undergird their communities, from clandestine dance clubs to stopgap economic associations. The train station, on the other hand, has continued to fall into disrepair, even as enormous, vibrant signs posted throughout its halls declare the imminent arrival of a “new station” – an advent made unlikely by the bankruptcy of the corporation to which it was sold by the Argentine state. The City of Buenos Aires continues investing in the transportation hub, particularly through the commencement of works on a new subway axis that would be
the first to link the northern and southern halves
of the city rather than run from the center to the
periphery along roughly parallel routes. The
project is far from completion, however, and faces
great uncertainty given the state of public funds during the current Argentine economic crisis.
El Once is therefore a site with some significant territorial conversion, but of a very partial and uncertain kind, surrounding both the public and private development efforts. It is a space defined by neither the dominant elite nor the indigent poor, but by a complex set of populations, activities, and structures which break from typical depictions of the dualized city. Most specifically, the presence of South-South immigration and gentrification – and their combination – in this site make it a type of space in need of new, unorthodox study. A comparative study of this site along with the preceding two allows for a perspective into the dynamics of different approaches of urban redevelopment, and the priorities and pitfalls of all three in the context of neoliberalization.oldMT/FirstChar 32/LastChar 122/Subtype/TrueType/FontDescriptor 2723 0
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2714 22 Gráfico 2.4.5.2.
Evolución en el arribo de turistas residentes en España. Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Año 2003.
Fuente: CEDEM, Secretaría de Producción, Turismo y Desarrollo Sustentable, GCBA, en base a relevamiento propio.
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References
AlSayyad, Nezar (Ed.). 2001. Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism. London: Routledge. - twfµÏŽˆ±lÒBMˆ]è!ä ÊJ¼•c IÐ&¿¾»²]?b·ô¢ ]øæ{̈_µ}x(«-..¸ ^ÕÀoËÇ°,ûÐ, FÍ/ ¸3ˆŒ$&Œ² −jæœVñM †R"Á=¿êû²š×3¸ã¾YÁýååh\@Æo àÓˆa¸!