By leaving all of Buenos Aires' projects half-finished, the current crisis has begun consolidating fragments: pieces of the future like unfulfilled promises in the north of the city, pieces of the past like tourists' souvenirs in the south, and pieces of the present like pimples everywhere. Enter Buenos Aires by the mouth of the Riachue- lo-the "little river"-like the navigators of yore. You have just left the yawning delta of the River Plate, its pacific antiquity making time stand still, as if river and time flowed into each other at the edge of the burgeoning city. Make your way up the black effluence from the delta that today exists only for sightseeing, until you reach the interior of the unknown city. No spot along the Riachuelo's mean- dering bends is likely to make you recall the not-so- distant outings under the willows, and nothing remains of the nearly mythical foundation of the city on its banks. The little river embodies the secrets of other projects just as recent and just as forgotten. Its modern history is that of a project whose completion was thwarted at the moment of its triumph. Following the river's course against the current reveals the history of the industrial settlement of Buenos Aires. There is scattered housing at first, erect- ed between storage sheds, followed by the meat-pack- ing buildings, which yesterday were slaughterhouses and today are shopping malls. Large abandoned facto- ry complexes stacked up against each other, with docks and bridges linking both banks, turn the river Graciela Silvestri and Adrian Gorelik are Argentine architecture historians and critics at the Mario J. Buschiazzo Institute of American Art and Aesthetic Research at the School of Architec- ture, Design and Urban Studies of the University of Buenos Aires. This article is an adaptation of one that appeared in Nueva Sociedad, No. 114. Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried. into an avenue without a city. Then come worklots, train stations, more bridges, and docks that suggest an earlier era's incessant coming and going of cargo ships loaded with coal for the factories. And passing the working-class neighborhood of Pompeya toward the west, we find the embodied dreams of those who saw the river as the city's industrial axis, as the factory port of the south, which in turn affirmed the idea of the north as exclusively residential and commercial. Although the last stretch of the river seems to be one great industrial dock, the banks no longer display industry, but rather greenery. On the right, there are enormous housing projects like flags that moderniza- tion planted in unknown territory; on the left, there is the desolation of misery: shreds of city and shreds of countryside mixing people and animals amid the infected smoke of the Quema dump, nature and garbage, odors of the Riachuelo. The trip upstream is the result of a paradox: industry went elsewhere in the city just when the river, in the 1930s, was prepared to consolidate it on its banks. The industry that remains today sits in abandoned fortress- es, dioramas of what the city managed to become. The skeletons of sunken ships at the river's mouth and the immense and useless factory artifacts spread over its banks form a geographic folder of city and history blown closed on itself by the somehow attractive breeze of failure. In a series of historical blueprints, one can read what is most obvious: the progressive and persistent extension of the grid of blocks. This is a symbol of NAC2A REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 28URBAN REPORT decent" families would be made equal by the purify- ing light of nature acting as a disciplined and transpar- ent civic institution. According to the ideal of a homogeneous city, parks in the south would be "Palermos for the poor," with nurseries, zoos and scaled pathways. But the search for compensation implicitly requires the state to intervene decisively in urban real estate with objectives which differ from those of the market. In the midst of a period of urban expansion, in the midst of a "liberal city," the pursuit of an "organic city" meant a relentless struggle Street musicians in Buenos Aires perform behind a photograph of Carlos Gardel, the great tango against the ideological singer, assumptions of the very tra- the conquest of ideally empty terrain. It also illus- dition and the capitalist rules which made the liberal trates a more recent attitude: the drive to apprehend, city possible. It was a struggle which showered small quantify and dominate a space. If the Riachuelo Pro- victories like scar tissue on a great defeat, but which ject implicitly pursued the ideal of a complementary for a good part of this history managed to constitute a city with an industrial south and a beautified north, an fiction which only today can be perceived as such. alternative tradition sought to create a homogenous This fiction announced the emergence of a porteiho- city, without specialized sectors. This homogenous as residents of Buenos Aires call themselves-middle city would grow concentrically from the Plaza de class. This was a dominating fiction, but also a tiny Mayo, and have equitably distributed public spaces, foothold for a different sort of city. services and environmental characteristics. This tradi- tion can be traced back to timid beginnings at the end rain terminals spoke of technology while hiding of the eighteenth century, formulated explicitly in the the city's barrenness. White and discreet diago- short presidency of reformer Bernardino Rivadavia nals sought to link tradition and modernity, lin- (1826-1827), and then popularized in this century as eage and progress. Solitary glass skyscrapers were cut "municipal thinking." out against the blue sky like models, like the remains From the dawn of the twentieth century, this tradi- of ambitious ideals. The enthusiasm lost and the pro- tion viewed the south as a necessarily tarnished mirror jects abandoned, the architecture survives as the bag- of a north which was already claiming predominance gage of their dreams. The potential of the modernizing back when nineteenth-century dictator Juan Manuel project in Buenos Aires was trapped in cement and de Rosas built his mansion on the lands which eventu- steel, in avenues and parks, in the eloquent expres- ally became the privileged county of Palermo. The sions of a faith as ingenuous as it was powerful. form which that ideal assumed was compensation. Its The port, the railroads, the subway: bold strokes instrument par excellence was the setting aside of made for effect, a network which quickly character- public spaces by timely interventions in the chinks not ized Buenos Aires as a modern city, and at the same yet swallowed by speculation: parks, plazas and time differentiated it from the models it emulated. It boulevards-but also "workers' barrios" in which a was a particular sort of modernity perhaps best exem- domesticated piece of greenery would lead the way to plified by the Obelisk commemorating the 400th the construction of the modern family. Urban greenery anniversary of the city's founding, a monument to was thought of not only as hygienic space, but also as both the "city of the future" and to national tradition. privileged space for socialization, as mortar for an And of course, there is the subway, the perfect sym- "organic city." Immigrants and creoles, "humble but bol of urban motion, which dissolves differences 29 29 VOL XXV1ll, No 4 JAN/FEB 1995URBAN REPORT between areas and becomes a demonstration of tech- nology's potential for overcoming the obstacles of territory. On its platforms, this subway nevertheless clothes itself in ceramic murals, thus offering a place of harmony for integrating a mythical past and a promising future. Three decades branded the city with the idea of progress: the 1880s, the 1930s, and the 1960s. Threads were imagined to be expanding the city's modernity, like points on a child's connect-the-dots drawing: Palermo, Avenida Alvear, Avenida de Mayo, the Diagonales Norte and Sur, the Avenida 9 de Julio, Catalinas Sur and Catalinas Norte, the Villa Lugano and Villa Soldati housing projects, and Ciudad Uni- versitaria. But the lines are now definitively broken, and the points are but empty promises, stumps of a modernization half-achieved. A trip on the subway can be a voyage through the heart of the modernizing project in Buenos Aires-as long as you don't go any- where. In the new urban reality, as far as modernization is concerned, the only thing that progresses is misery. By leaving all the city's projects half-finished, the current crisis has begun consolidating fragments which are evocative of different periods: pieces of the future like unfulfilled promises in the north of the city, pieces of the past like tourists' souvenirs in the south, and pieces of the present like pimples everywhere. You can think of Buenos Aires as a series of postcards and imagine yourself traveling through a city stuck in those times, like superimposed blueprints which allow each architecture to concentrate on its own style. Thus the present becomes a mix of times and places, a pro- found mix that annuls time. aced with evidence of the social and urban explosion, the most notable cultural response in recent years has been nostalgia. Scorn for the urban sprawl of the 1960s and 1970s and fascination with the "anticommunist" model of the city of Monte- video have produced a nostalgia for the city that mod- ernization destroyed. Where people turn, of course, is the neighborhood-- the barrio-a place for preserving harmony between people and history, between history and city, between city and land, between land and community. If in becoming a metropolis the city lost the communion between nature and culture, the hope is that "in the shadow of the well-loved neighborhoods" one might find pieces of the city capable of surviving, the last refuge from which to resist the processes of mercan- tilization. But the neighborhood we remember nostalgically was never anything but a mechanism of modernization itself. The idea of the neighborhood that is being res- urrected today was born in Bue- nos Aires in the 1920s as a device to reunite and give modern form to the tiny com- munities scat- tered throughout the then-still- imagined urban quadrangle-- communities which up to then had maintained semi-rural forms of incorporation into the city. Buenos Aires is a city invented by modernity, and its tradition has been constructed as nostalgia. First there was the gaucho. Then the tango. Then the checkered patios of Old Palermo Air conditioned, muzak-perfumed and secure, the shopping malls are closed utopias. If few can consume what the mall sells, architecture as a symbolic value is consumed by all. and San Telmo, whose memory gave life to new busi- nesses over the past decade: "preservation" as a meet- ing place of real-estate speculation and romantic taste for local color. But it could also be that nostalgia for the lost barrio was the way some urban thinkers at the end of the 1970s sought to build a refuge for "popular things" which would leave out-except in the slums-the harsh reality of land occupations repressed during the dictatorship. Perhaps they sought to carve out a place of harmony amid the remains of a city crisscrossed with a symphony of destruction. In any case, during those years it was still public space that we were being called on to rescue: its memory, its social and political dimensions. In recent years, nostalgia has retired to the insides. Thus "barrio" today only means walls topped with bricks, a kitsch illusion of reviving the notion of "home." This is also how nostalgia for the barrio ended up being the means by which an ugly and indistinguish- able city, with no exuberant nature or past, at last-in a 1980s version of magic realism-found its "Latin American identity." Having lost the bet on change, Buenos Aires opted for barred gates and entrance- ways, eternal and identical in a city condemned to have no history. NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 30URBAN REPORT A poor boy peers into a video-game parlor on Lavalle Street in Buenos Aires. n the 1980s, a new urban phenomenon appeared and flowered comfortably in the midst of nostalgia: the shopping mall. The mall-known in Buenos Aires by the anglicism shopping-exists thanks to the fact that the rest of the projects could not come to fruition. Its Disney-like worlds only began to filter into Buenos Aires when the 1970s kicked off the city's slide into decadence. Possibly the comparative lateness with which this purely North American model was introduced was due to the resistance of a city that grew up under cultural traditions different from other Latin American cities. Buenos Aires became a metropolis when British hege- mony, due to its own characteristics, didn't need to impose paradigms of consumption. Buenos Aires was so well-structured when U.S. hegemony succeeded British that it could employ its cultural history to resist "the American way of life." Today the mall is not just another symbol of mod- ernizing sprawl. Rather it can be read as a metaphor of the most recent response to the crisis. In Buenos Aires, malls occupy a very particular place, because the response of capital to the heterogeneity that result- ed from inequality has been to produce a utopia for the few. Unlike the industrial utopias which sought to cre- ate a complementary city, unlike the homogenizing utopias which sought to create an equitable city, and unlike the modernizing utopias which believed in the limitless growth of modernity, the malls are closed utopias. They are isolated spaces whose success depends on contrast. Air-conditioned, muzak-per- fumed and secure, they are places where in the midst of chaos and decadence, everything works. Monu- ments to wasteful squandering in a city where waste- ful squandering borders on scandal, the malls rise up like urban manifestations of the savage economic con- centration which characterized the 1970s. If all that counts is "people's acceptance" to confer social value on a building, then what could be more socially valid than the new malls? They are the desti- nation of visitors from provincial cities, a cheap out- ing for low-income families who, without buying any- thing, can attend some free show, or a happy chapter of the day for a housewife who stands before a fash- ion-store window and sighs. If few can consume what the mall sells, architecture as a symbolic value is con- sumed by all. The nostalgic interior and the mall complement each other in the way they reduce the city to a private world, suspended in time. The abundance of places for public life in the city which could accompany the birth of a new sense of citizenship seem to have been left behind, along with the illusions of a democratic open- ing. Nostalgia and consumption complement each other since they have both consciously pulled back from the cultural plane: the former by broadening the concept of culture until it became unrecognizable; the latter by identifying market opportunities with public value. They complement each other because they each represent the outer reaches of a current of thought that developed in the absence of intentions, politics and the state, and which ended up accepting and celebrating that absence. Today it is obvious that this current of urban thought never really knew what to do with Buenos Aires. To think about the state is to think about the public. It is to think about politics. In the classic terms of Greek antiquity, it is to challenge destiny. Latin America's urban societies face that problem today. In cities that have become massive and depersonalized, which can no longer harbor vain illusions of achieving some tranquilizing reunification through form, we must design new forms of citizenship for the multi- tudes, thereby redefining what is meant by "public." The explosion of all our certainties put Buenos Aires--open and dangerous, desperate and utopian- on the threshold of such a possibility. A past that could have been different, a present that must be trans- formed, and a future that must still be created out of that transformation: all of these are on view as Buenos Aires, for the first time, tries to recognize itself.
