Neoliberal urban governance and slum dweller movements: The mutual fragmentation of policies and community-based organizations in the city of Buenos Aires

Abstract

This chapter aims to explore the dynamics of contention of the slum dweller movement in the city of Buenos Aires, with a special focus on how an urban agenda of actually existing neoliberalism affected coalition-building and organizational fields of slum dwellers’ community-based organizations. Based on historical desk research and qualitative fieldwork in three informal settlements, we found a long-term trend of upgrading policies and slum dweller movements fragmenting each other in an iterative process. This feedback loop of atomization was the result of two processes: (a) a fragmentation from above, resulting from upgrading responsibilities dividing into multiple and overlapping government agencies, coupled with undemocratic practices in participatory spaces; and (b) a fragmentation from below, resulting from the territorialization of politics and the emergence of a right-wing grassroots political activism with clientelist practices, that intensified party and political competition intra settlements.