Cooperatives battle displacement in Buenos Aires

Abstract

Between 2008-2015, the city of Buenos Aires remained a laboratory for neoliberal policies implemented by a center-right municipal administration opposed to the national government (part of the so called Pink Tide, and strongly allied to other progressive administrations in South America), and which would be projected onto the national level once the PRO party won the Presidential elections of 2015. Thus, the Argentine capital only deepened the process of polarization and unequal urban development started in the 1970s,and exacerbated during the 1990s, evident in the growth and multiplication of informal settlements (shanty-towns, squatter buildings, tenements) entrenched within increasingly affluent and gentrifying neighborhoods..In the struggles for the appropriation of urban space, popular organizations have counteracted displacement, both mobilizing to halt evictions and crafting strategies to promote alternative housing policies. PAV (Programa de Autogestión para la Vivienda - Program for Self-managed housing), a small government program promoted by a group of local grassroots and community-based organizations, represents one example of resistance to exclusionary forms of governance through community sponsored urban policy. Following Marcelo Lopes de Souza´s suggestion to conceive social movements as genuine agents of critical urban planning (2006), this kind of policy can be depicted as part of "self-managed urbanism" inasmuch as it was painstakingly sponsored by organizations who thoroughly participated in its design, but also because it builds upon previous piecemeal experiences of various grassroots cooperatives and groups. The most relevant aspect of PAV is that it contains from the outset certain premises and prerogatives that constitute the basis of organizations´ claims and demands -which are hardly ever part of policy instruments exclusively designed by the state- and invoke an alternative, more inclusive notion of the city. The following pages provide a brief historical framework to understand the context of emergence of PAV, and the incidence social organizations had in its design to underline what makes community sponsored policy particular; to then reflect on the promise of this kind of policies for a sort of self-managed urbanism, one where organized participants have a say on the future of the city.