The Effects of a Late Modernization
The case of Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires by Guillermo Tella, PhD From this perspective, the term Post-Metropolis allows the highlighting of the differences between the present urban regions and those which have consolidated in the mid-century, thus, the prefix post marks the transition towards new postmodern forms. (E. Soja 1996). It is not as much about the vanishing of the former structure as about its co-living and articulation with new and complex forms of urbanization. The industrial geography of the Fordist metropolis underwent a strong process of retraction before an increasing economy of services, with a densification of informa tion fluxes and within a framework characterized by a tendency towardsmore flexible modes of production.
This work is centered on the study of the territorial structure of the metropolitan region of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in order to examine the dramatic urban changes associated with the transformations in the global economy and, in general, with the “postmodernization” of urban life and society. From a theoretical perspective, its final aim is to contribute to the analysis of the existing interrelations between the spatial structures and the social processes from a case study that involves a metropolis belonging to world spaces of a semi-peripheral type.
Photo courtesy Guillermo Tella
In a recent work, M. Castells (1997) asserts that on this “shore of eternity… space organizes time in the network society”, in which not only the new information technologies dispersed globally at a great speed but also that “the speed of such technological diffusion has been as much socially as functionally Buenos Aires shows a strong contrast between center and periphery selective”. Such arguments from this point of view show the limitations of the present epistemological structures to interpret the recent processes of territorial transformation.
The Up-coming of the Post-Metropolis
It has been conventionally accepted that the 1973 Oil Crisis constitutes the wrench with which a particular urban age ends that of the “modern metropolis” and as from which the era of the so-called “Post-Metropolis” begins. It was precisely at the time when the territorial effects of the great cities began to be noticeable that the discussion about this subject began to be more acute due to the complexity and the celerity of the urbanization processes as well as to the inefficiency of the traditional tools for action.
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In the recent literature an issue of renewed importance appears with insistence: the role assigned to the metropolis and their changing functions in the new economic spaces of regional and world scope. After the hypothesis of “global city”, which caused such a great impact in the academic world (Friedman 1986, 1995; Sassen 1991, 1996), defining the structure and the behavior of cities constitutes a true theoretical and methodological problem in which financial centrality, technological flexibility, and productive capacity are