Circulation and Reception of Mobility Technologies: The Construction of Buenos Aires?s Underground Railways

Abstract

This essay aims to discuss the peripheral character of Buenos Aires by analysingthe construction of its underground railways (1913) - the first in Latin America and one of the earliest in the world. In analysing the circulation and reception of ideas but also capital, experts, technologies and materials, it reconsiders the role of external forces in the shaping of local mobilities and gives assemblage and contingency greater relevance. Therefore, technologies spreading from cores to peripheries are not seen as a homogenising or linear process. Rather, they are seen as one of consumption and reception, which implies a production process. In this case-study, this means that even in a peripheral position Buenos Aires shaped its own underground railway according to local politics, culture and materiality by consuming and mixing underground models from Europe and America. In so doing, Buenos Aires first underground line embodied an American model on European patterns, as introduced by Boston Subway (1896).