About the Author
Carolina Sternberg is an Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies and Critical Ethnic Studies at DePaul University. She obtained her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and received her M.A. in Geography from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. Her main areas of research and teaching combine urban studies, domestic workers, Latin American studies, and local urban politics in both US and Latin American settings. Her most recent publications examine race and gentrification in Latino/a/x and African American communities in Chicago, the fluid and evolving nature of neoliberal urban governance in the US and Latin American urban settings, and feminist ethics of care in Buenos Aires.
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 a Map of the Arts District. b Map of La Boca, San Telmo, and Barrio 31 (Source Elaborated by GIS specialist, Julio Villarino)
Fig. 3.2 Usinadelas Artes(Source Photo taken by the author)
Fig. 3.3 Riachuelo river, La Boca (Source Photo taken by the author)
Fig. 3.4 La Boca neighborhood (Source Photo taken by the author)
Fig. 3.5 Caminito and Vuelta de Rocha (Source Photo taken by the author)
Fig. 4.1 Panoramic view of Barrio 31 (Source Courtesy of the Secretary for Social and Urban Integration, SECISyU, City Government of Buenos Aires)
Fig. 4.2 View of corrugated sheet metal and scavenged-brick houses in Barrio 31 (Source Courtesy of Pablo Vitale)
Fig. 4.3 Panoramic view of former Villa 31, showing stark contrast with the wealthy neighborhood of Retiro (Source Courtesy of Pablo Vitale)
Fig. 4.4 Before renovations (housing and infrastructure), unpaved streets and electric cables crossing the streets (Source Courtesy of Pablo Vitale)
Fig. 4.5 Houses were stacked so high that their roofs scraped the underside of the road (Source Courtesy of the Secretary for Social and Urban Integration
SECISyU, City Government of Buenos Aires)
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Fig. 4.7
Barrio 31 emerging: New housing built (Source Courtesy of the Secretary for Social and Urban Integration SECISyU, City Government of Buenos Aires)
Barrio 31 emerging: Housing improved, new streets built, and sanitation installed (Source Courtesy of the Secretary for Social and Urban Integration SECISyU, City Government of Buenos Aires)
Fig. 5.1 Map of Chicago Latino/a/x neighborhoods: Pilsen and Little Village (Source Elaborated by GIS specialist, Julio Villarino)
Fig. 6.1 Pilsen, before and after gentrification (Source Photo taken by the author)
Fig. 7.1 View of the Crawford Power Plant (before being demolished) Courtesy of Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO)
Fig. 7.2 Flyer distributed on September 16, 2020, against the closing of the discount mall in Little village (Source Photo taken by the author)
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List of Tables
Table 3.1
Table 6.1 Pilsen and Little Village socioeconomic conditions over time
Table 6.2 Cook County house price index (January 2000 through June 2021)
Table 6.3 Small-unit building stock vs. multi-unit building stock over time in Pilsen
Table 6.4 Small-unit building stock vs. multi-unit building stock over time in Little Village
Table 8.1 City of Chicago. Neoliberal governance policies and programs, redevelopment agenda, and rhetoric
Table 8.2 City of Buenos Aires. Neoliberal governance policies and programs, redevelopment agenda, and rhetoric
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In February 2016, one of Spain’s leading newspapers, El País , published a story about Villa 31, one of the biggest slums in the center of the city of Buenos Aires, with this headline: “The misery that is impossible to hide in the center of Buenos Aires” (La Nación 2017). Paradoxically, in October of the same year, that headline became an opportunity for the mayor of Buenos Aires, Rodríguez Larreta, to announce a monumental redevelopment plan that would profoundly change the city’s social fabric and urban form: the urbanization of Villa 31 and its social integration with the rest of the city.1 At the Habitat III Regional Conference held in Ecuador in 2016, Rodriguez Larreta explained: “I want an integrated city, in which everyone can have the same rights and responsibilities... a city without slums, integrated from north to south” (La Nación 2016, my translation). This urban plan—incomplete at the time of writing—has become the central pillar of Buenos Aires’s urban redevelopment agenda. In September 2012, during his second year as mayor of Chicago, and as part of a commitment to revitalize “underutilized” lands and former industrial areas on the city’s southwest side, Rahm Emanuel publicly announced that he aimed to: “‘Return these areas to active, productive
1 Briefly, urbanization means formalizing housing tenure and incorporating informal settlements into the domains of existing public services. Improving social integration means reducing inequalities and divisions and promoting quality interaction and a sense of belonging in diverse social environments (Lindquist 2021).
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
C. Sternberg, Neoliberal Urban Governance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21718-0_1 1
use for the residents of the Pilsen and Little Village neighborhoods. This (…) is an important step toward creating jobs and a healthy environment for these communities’” (in Scalzitti 2012). Emanuel’s announcement marked the beginning of a series of redevelopment projects aimed at physically and socially transforming the historically disinvested communities of Pilsen and Little Village.
These mayoral announcements inaugurated a new phase of urban development for each city, but most importantly, they revealed a new era of redevelopment in historically and deeply stigmatized areas. Despite decades of disinvestment in Buenos Aires’s center and south side and in Chicago’s southwest side, to governance actors, acres of property parcels and land (especially in the slums of Buenos Aires) now seem ripe for a new phase of urban restructuring. Long-time area residents neglected for decades by public and private funds in both city areas now face a wave of transformation—social as well as physical. Chicago’s Pilsen and Little Village and Buenos Aires’s La Boca, San Telmo, and Villa 31 are areas in critical need of being drawn into the social fabric and the real estate market of each city. In particular, since the 1970s Pilsen and Little Village have struggled with poverty as a result of structural racism and overall social, physical, and economic disinvestment. In Buenos Aires, La Boca and San Telmo have suffered physical and economic neglect since the 1980s. Villa 31 has historically been cast as an “eyesore of the city” because of its considerable neglect, poverty, and marginalization.
In this book, I consider how the physical and social transformation of these areas is unfolding. I examine how neoliberal urban governances in Chicago and Buenos Aires—institutions, programs, and procedures— work to advance particular redevelopment agendas in a drive to transform previously disinvested and stigmatized neighborhoods.
Chicago and Buenos Aires have been experiencing increasing urban gentrification that is carried out as official government policy. In both cities, neoliberal governance actors—driven by market-oriented goals rather than distributive ones—are exercising new power to upscale targeted blocks in the most neglected and stigmatized areas. In other words, neoliberal governance in each urban setting has moved into an uncharted terrain of impoverished and deeply stigmatized communities. Yet, how neoliberal governances in both cities currently operate as they
move into these new areas remains unexplored by comparative critical urban studies literature.2
Notably, this new phase of redevelopment is not merely a decisive and determined urban project but the result of something humanly and adroitly crafted among an assemblage of actors: city officials, local boards, developers, architects, and real estate agents. I propose that Chicago’s and Buenos Aires’s neoliberal urban governances are doing more than simply producing and rationalizing new policies and procedures. These formations must work through visions of the city, its institutions, its people, and communities, whose impoverishment, stigma, and institutional neglect—the governances suggest—are obstacles to a successful urban transformation. In this context, I ask: How do neoliberal urban governances in Chicago and Buenos Aires unfold their urban plans for transformation while responding to changing political realities, contestation, growing inequalities, and obstacles to development and redevelopment? How do these formations adjust to the ongoing contestation they face in advancing redevelopment? What kind of spaces (material and imagined) and cultural understandings do these actors seek to build across Chicago and Buenos Aires? Finally, I consider how, with the encroaching commodification of urban spaces and landscapes, people living in these formerly neglected areas face new challenges, including the threat of displacement.
Central to my endeavor is a consideration of how neoliberal urban governance in both cities deploys rhetoric to build acceptance, dissuade resistance, and normalize the commodification of the targeted areas. That rhetoric includes metaphors, common understandings, imagined spaces, and sanitary codes. For an example of how neoliberal governance rhetoric works, consider Chicago’s southwest side. For decades ignored or overlooked for formal redevelopment, this area is now imagined and discussed by city officials, real estate, and business leaders as what I term “prosperous and orderly ethnic spaces” (Pilsen) and “culturally rich multiethnic spaces” (Little Village) as contributors to Chicago’s neoliberal globalization efforts. Similarly, the center (Villa 31) and south sides (La Boca
2 There are few examples of comparative urban studies that explore Latin American neoliberal urban governances, see, for example, Saad-Filho (2020), Springer et al. (2016), and Kunkel and Mayer (2012). However, these studies do not address how neoliberal governances work to advance redevelopment agendas in a drive to transform previously stigmatized neighborhoods.
and San Telmo) of Buenos Aires, also for decades, have been largely neglected and overlooked for urban transformation. Yet, these areas in Buenos Aires have been rediscovered as “cultural, touristic and versatile artistic spaces” (La Boca and San Telmo); “livable, formalized, and robust spaces” (Villa 31); and as contributors to Buenos Aires’s socioinclusive efforts. In addition, Villa 31 in Buenos Aires is now presented as an opportunity for renovated “multi-cultural and gastronomic experiences” in efforts to create more revenues for the city and new sources of profits. Identifying these spaces and governances’ dominant goals, urban agendas, and actions is important; they provide the frame to understand the current southwest side and center-south side involvement. While physically transforming these disinvested areas, neoliberal urban governances have also been cultivating positive identities in both cities. In the case of Chicago, the governance has shaped Latinos/as/x experiences by positively rendering them as, what I term, “ethnicity-infused beings.” In Buenos Aires, the term “vecinos ” rather than “villeros/as ” has been used to cultivate positive identities and encourage acceptance of the residents of Villa 31.
The physical and social transformation of these areas in Chicago and Buenos Aires is still highly uneven and continues to unfold in various stages. To governance actors, these areas are in critical need of being integrated in the social composition and real estate market of each city. Rhetoric is fundamental to advancing these challenging urban projects. How are these governances framing redevelopment in Buenos Aires and Chicago around the sharp edges of the market? What are their strategies—do they emphasize consensual and depoliticized language, mobilize a large bureaucratic machine, or change their rhetoric to suit particular contexts? I find that the rhetoric deployed—“as powerful as any physical and social remaking” (Wilson 2018, p. 2)—makes possible both a physical transformation and commodification of both Chicago’s southwest and Buenos Aires’s center-south sides.
Central to this process, neoliberal governance rhetoric in Chicago and Buenos Aires, along with policies and redevelopment projects, reflects specific race and class identities and anxieties. Following Wilson (2007, 2018), Derickson (2017), Bonilla-Silva (2013), and Mele (2013), I consider how race and class shape the production of governance core processes and rhetoric. Racialization and class making, and their integration into economic processes, are often nuanced and subtle: we can see them in situated meanings, expressions, and common understandings
about people and spaces (Wilson 2007). For example, “livable spaces,” “orderly and clean neighborhoods,” “cultural and productive citizens,” and “up-and-coming neighborhoods”—all these communicate both racial and class constructs and imply that these spaces are made for particular groups of people (Wilson 2018,p.42).Inother words, identifyinga governance’s redevelopment projects, policies, and rhetoric must be sensitive to the production and use of race and class. Neoliberal governances’ rhetoric and actions along these new redevelopment frontiers have both old and new racial and class roots; following Derickson (2017), we can trace how they are embedded in ways that are often not immediately apparent.
My goal is to question neoliberal urban governances as forceful assemblage of institutions when they advance their redevelopment projects. When the mayors of Chicago and Buenos Aires announced their plans in 2012 and 2016, they not only presented core urban agendas for each governance, they communicated a sense of decisive and determined governances pushing their agendas forward. Such announcements often marginalize instability, contradictions, struggle, and resistance to redevelopment. In this book, I present a different kind of story, with a complex vision of neoliberal urban governance. I contend that it is crucial to nuance the official stories, recognizing that governances continuously adjust to shifting social, political, and economic circumstances as they plan and advance their projects across cities and neighborhoods. I show that to advance redevelopment, while leaving unresolved some very real dilemmas faced by residents and policymakers, governances mobilize persuasive and powerful discourse deployed by city officials, local boards, developers, architects, and real estate agents.
I argue also that governances that share a common neoliberal framework operate distinctively in particular locations: they are significantly different entities as locally grounded formations. Neoliberal urban governances are constituted in the richness of particular localities, where they are mediated by distinctive socio-political institutions, institutionalized practices, cultures, and economic realities. As I discuss in the comparative analysis presented in Chapter 8, each local neoliberal governance advances processes of redevelopment and growth in a locally specific way. Each formation—locally constituted and humanly crafted— uses distinctive rhetoric (metaphors, common understandings, imagined spaces, sanitary codes), programs, and policies.
Currently, comparative research on the locally grounded nature of neoliberal urban governance has predominantly addressed North American cities in comparison with cities in Europe, South Africa, and Asia (Springer et al. 2016; Kunkel and Mayer 2012; Leitner et al. 2007). Few comparative studies exist that feature Latin American cities (SaadFilho 2020; Kunkel and Mayer 2012; Kanai and Ortega-Alcaráz 2009). Chicago and Buenos Aires are both large and globally connected world cities3 that have not been previously examined comparatively, nor have the dynamics of their governances.
At the structural level, Chicago’s and Buenos Aires’s urban governances may be seen as engaged in similar efforts: to entrepreneurialize government actions, create more responsible and business-oriented citizens, build a strong local business climate, and fashion a globally competitive, consumption-oriented city (Hackworth 2007; Bennett 2006). But if we focus on the nature of evolving places, “we see a patchwork of wildly varying neoliberal governances that often barely resemble each other” (Wilson 2004, p. 772).
In this context, this book contributes to a growing comparative perspective on this type of governance, analyzing two world cities with different urban, historical, and political trajectories, drawing on scholarly traditions from the Global South and Global North (Robinson 2016).
Perspective and Definitions
Cultural Economy
I use a cultural economy framework that closely follows David Wilson’s approach (2007) to understanding these sorts of governances. Wilson emphasizes that economic processes do not operate in a cultural vacuum
3 There appears to be a consensus that cities and the dynamics of urbanization have been changed by the intensification of global processes. Sassen (2002 [1991]) describes “global cities” as the command and control centers for economic, political, and cultural globalization. Urban studies scholars, including Benton-Short et al. (2005), have largely defined global or world cities as major sites for the accumulation of capital, command points in the world economy, headquarters for corporations, and important hubs of global transportation and communication. While there are many limitations and biases to this definition (e.g., cities concentrated in the Global North are seen as the most networked or most highly ranked compared to the Global South), for the purpose of this study, I will follow Benton-Short and colleagues’ (2005) definition to characterize both Buenos Aires and Chicago as global cities.
but are performed and enacted through a system of meanings and common understandings, which gives them form, coherence, and legitimacy (Wilson 2007). Neoliberal governance actors need to mobilize discourses to make sense of their policies, discourage contestation, and make policies acceptable to the general public. In brief, cultural economy is a perspective that sheds light on the inseparability of the cultural and economic realms (Presdee 2000). The approach recognizes that culture and economy are involved in a dialectical interplay; one continuously makes the other in an uninterrupted coalescing of forces that renders these spheres ontologically inseparable. In this study, a cultural economy perspective is key to critically examining the system of meanings and common understandings within discourses that neoliberal governances deploy to normalize, legitimate, and justify policies and operations (Wilson et al. 2004). Before spaces and people become objects for restructuring, they must be communicated as something comprehensible. This is accomplished by drawing on common understandings in ways that demarcate villains, victims, saviors, and threatening forces.
Besides establishing the normalcy and legitimacy of urban programs, neoliberal governance in both cities has increasingly mobilized “culture” to bolster urban development projects. For example, in Chicago and Buenos Aires, cultural upscaling, aesthetic renewing, and beautification programs have become fundamental planning objects, carefully organized to help facilitate redevelopment. This study, therefore, interrogates culture as something mobilized, used, and put in the service of neoliberal redevelopment governances. Thus, neoliberal redevelopment governances work to silence some cultural forms and practices and encourage others. To put forward the best cultural forms and practices, some have to be cultivated (e.g., “hip and young culture”) and others eliminated (e.g., “underachiever culture”). Cultural forms, practices, and aesthetics are judged by governance actors for their race-and class-based content and their ability to meet a city’s needs.
My cultural economy approach also considers space. Neoliberal governance relies on making and using different kinds of space, including both imagined and material spaces, as operative tools. Space is the crucial medium and outcome of the operation of neoliberal governance (Swyngedouw 2000; Peck and Tickell 2007): it is a primordial essence that is scaled, coded with meanings, and physically structured in the service of neoliberal politics. I focus on the production of absolute, material space that fosters social relations and economic processes that directly
enable the neoliberal project to unfold in the form of, for example, gentrified neighborhoods, Planned Manufacturing Districts, and historic preservation programs. But I also focus on how actors create and mobilize imagined spaces. These spaces simultaneously frame, organize, and illuminate “facts” through which to know people and processes (Massey 1992; Lefebvre 1991).4 The ghetto, the inner city, the ethnic enclave, the villas , and the downtown communicate “facts” about culture, aesthetics, and identities as things to be measured and weighed. As I discuss in the final chapters, in both cities neoliberal governance actors have been mobilizing different forms of rhetoric to apply to once non-attractive redevelopment areas that were perceived as containment districts, in their respective contexts, for the Latino/a/x racialized poor and for the villeros .These areas have ultimately received attention for their potentially profitable real estate and commodifiable urban areas along with the corresponding ability to serve each cities’ future investment needs and economic growth.
Neoliberal Urban Governance
I refer to Chicago’s and Buenos Aires’s governances as neoliberal because both are driven by efforts to promote market-oriented policies,5 de-regulate businesses and government actions and procedures, shift government priorities from a politics of redistribution to a politics of growth (Harvey 2006), and create more responsible and businessoriented citizens (Sternberg 2012; Wilson 2007). In Chicago, since the early 1990s, efforts have included clearing public land through public housing demolition and replacing public housing with mixed-income housing or luxury condominiums; offering Tax Increment Financing6 (TIFs) or other subsidies to encourage private investment; converting
4 I engage with Lefebvre and define this space as the crafted and codified (sometimes institutionalized) landscape of the imagination, which can function as visual rhetoric, e.g., the ghetto, the ethnic enclave, the city, global flows, the downtown.
5 This translates into producing a hyper-commodification in which almost everything becomes something to sell or a selling point.
6 TIF is a development tool. The city declares an area “blighted” and unlikely to be developed without the diversion of tax revenues. At the moment a local government creates a TIF district, the sum of all the properties and the property taxes they represent within the district is tallied up and frozen. As economic development increases within the district, any new property taxes generated above the frozen rate are kept in a special account not subject to normal municipal budgetary appropriations or claims by
workspaces into expensive condos; upscaling restaurants, boutiques, and bars to attract tourism. Buenos Aires’s governance has emphasized neoliberal policies since the late 1990s, and since 2007, they have become more pronounced. The city has drastically cut public spending on education, health, and housing, and has consistently neglected declining neighborhoods, which previously were considered priorities for urban renewal. These actions have been coupled with financial strategies: selling city properties for short-term gain with revenue used to attract corporate and real estate investment, changing zoning ordinances, donating land to corporations or semi-private institutions, and offering a series of tax abatements to favor real estate speculation (Sternberg 2018).
I define neoliberal urban governance as the policies, programs, and procedures, and as the assemblage of institutions and actors (mayors, city officials, builders, planners, developers, construction companies, financial institutions, the local media, and auxiliary institutions, including universities and chambers of commerce) that unify around a common vision of city redevelopment and push to make this a reality (Jonas and Wilson 1999). Such institutions and actors strive to create planning agendas, strengthen such plans through powerful rhetoric (metaphors, common understandings, imagined spaces, and sanitary codes), and implement redevelopment projects through strategies and policies. Each actor strives to help the entire group achieve their redevelopment objective as members of the group coordinate, depend on, and synergize with each other. I use the term “urban governance” to get at the physical and social transformation of urban space in my two case study cities. I identify the term “urban” as a central subset of neoliberal governance—it is its central manifestation in the land and property-restructuring realm—that carries the “neoliberal project” to this particular domain.
Finally, this study adopts the perspective that neoliberal governance is too complex and variegated to be considered a singular, monolithic formation (Wilson 2018; Springer 2016; Peck et al. 2012; Peck 2010; Leitner et al. 2007; Peck and Tickell 2007; Wilson 2007; Brenner and Theodore 2002;Keil 2002; McLeod 2002; Mitchell 2001). Scholars taking this view have argued that neoliberal urban governance is constituted in the richness of distinctive localities and thus, it interacts with their socio-political institutions, institutionalized practices, cultures, and
other taxing bodies to support development. TIFs supposedly pay for everything from infrastructure to direct grants to developers.
economic realities. In this sense, following Theodore et al. (2018), I see neoliberal governance in Buenos Aires and Chicago as representing what these authors term “actually existing neoliberal governances” to the extent that these are locally grounded formations, and as such, take different shapes in different local settings. This more nuanced theoretical approach to neoliberal governance helps identify processes and outcomes that are distinctive and those that are shared with other cases, outlining the unique combination of socio-political institutions and urban processes that characterize global cities like Chicago and Buenos Aires.
Gentrification-Led Redevelopment
This book examines the recent drive to knit the southwest side of Chicago and the center and south side of Buenos Aires into the social fabric and real estate market of each city. Gentrification-led redevelopment (urban processes of reinvestment and redevelopment) merits brief discussion as an important process in this work. The book does not intend to generalize about how gentrification unfolds in Latin America in comparison with North America, but does attempt to properly contextualize this phenomenon and its specific manifestations in Latin America. To be clear, I consider displacement—one of the multiple outcomes of gentrification—a violent and dehumanizing consequence of the commodification of land (see Betancur 2002). In this regard, I am inspired by the work of Fullilove (2004) in her account of urban renewal programs across American cities during the second half of the twentieth century, whereby she chronicles how displacement produces psychological trauma among displaced people, who lose their homes and feel uprooted from their long-time neighborhoods.
As Lees and colleagues (2016) argue, gentrification is a central concept in “truly global urban studies” (p. 12). The authors defend a “relational comparative approach” (p. 13) that emphasizes transnational and interconnected features of contemporary urban restructuring. They argue that, whether in the Global South or Global North, local governments increasingly use the secondary circuit of capital (i.e., real estate) as a capital accumulation strategy, resulting in increasing inequality and, above all, in various forms of displacement. More importantly, Lees and colleagues draw on Slater’s (2017) work on the planetary rent gap to highlight the crucial role of the state in the process of concealing the capture of capitalized ground rent by enabling and facilitating such capital reinvestment.
I second the authors’ assertion that state-led gentrification theory is more relevant than ever when it comes to Global South settings, including the city of Buenos Aires.
Over the past decade, there has been increasing debate about gentrification in Latin America, particularly because of its questionable applicability to the region. Briefly, we can identify two main trends. On the one hand, a growing number of decolonial scholars denounce use of the term in the region: importing this terminology from the Global North, it is argued, suggests a form of cultural dependence and subordination (Lacarrieu 2018; Lees et al. 2016; Lopez-Morales 2016; Robinson 2016; Ghertner 2015; Quijano 2014; Mignolo 2007). On the other hand, there is little consensus about what constitutes gentrification in the region (see Rodriguez and Di Virgilio 2016 for the uses and appropriations of the concept of gentrification in Latin America). Many scholars have argued that gentrification implies a false generalization that is irrelevant to Latin American cities and they question the Western capitalist spatial trajectory (Harvey 2003) of industrial decline, disinvestment, and a return of local middle-class residents to the “inner” city (Jaramillo 2015; Salas et al. 2018). In particular, Pradilla (in Delgadillo 2013) has argued that there is no such thing as a “gentry” class in Latin America, which should invalidate the concept’s use.
Yet, many studies have discussed the term with various definitions, applications, and ways of approaching this phenomenon. Overall, I can identify two dominant and opposed approaches: one that focuses on gentrification as result of the advancement of neoliberalism and as a prominent urban policy, and the other on the role of new middle classes. The former includes a very flexible use of the term with a clear focus on the issue of displacement. Representatives of this perspective, Casgrain and Janoschka (2013), point out that “the expansion of neoliberal policies with regard to the production of space, identified mostly with the functioning of the land and capitalist housing markets, always provokes some type of displacement (material and symbolic)” (in Diaz-Parra 2021, p. 479). To these authors, symbolic displacement refers to the stigmatization and invisibilization that low-income populations are subjected to as a result of urban renewal of strategic urban areas (Janoschka and Sequera 2016). In short, to these authors, displacement should be the focus of gentrification studies. Closely following Casgrain and Janoschka (2013), Rodriguez and Di Virgilio (2016) understand gentrification in Latin America “as an effect of neoliberal socio-spatial dynamics supported by
variegated forms of symbolic and/or material displacement of low-income people, coupled with their exclusion from political decision-making about the future of the city” (2016, p. 4). In addition, the authors acknowledge that the concept of gentrification cannot be applied without attention to the changes experienced by the working-class in Latin America (and Argentina in particular) precipitated by global processes of neoliberalization. The effects on the Latin American working-class were exacerbated by structural adjustment policies in the 1980s and 1990s. This is particularly the case in Buenos Aires, where gentrification developed in parallel to processes of economic and social restructuring. (Rodriguez and Di Virgilio 2016, p. 3). Rodriguez and Di Virgilio (2016) also make an important contribution relevant to the case of Latin America, and to the city of Buenos Aires in particular, emphasizing the role of the state in producing segregation and in the displacement of low-income people and their resources, activities, and institutions.
Other scholars have argued that gentrification in Latin America does not necessarily cause displacement, but promotes social mixing by hindering high levels of segregation in the cities of the region. Jaramillo (2015) examines urban revitalization in the city of Bogotá, pointing out that middle-class people have recycled and rehabilitated buildings in historic areas. To Jaramillo, these initiatives have ultimately attracted public investment without displacing vulnerable groups. In a similar vein, John Betancur (2014) argues that historic civic renovations focused mainly on heritage tourism “in disinvested (mainly historic) inner city locations such as Mexico City, Puebla, Salvador de Bahia, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Guayaquil, Lima, Bogota, Cartagena and many others (…), have not produced residential class replacement or the return of the gentry but commercial heritage tourism” (2014, p. 5). Jacob Lederman (2020) seems to agree with Betancur (2014), questioning the use of the term gentrification to conceptualize reinvestment in historic centers, such as the one he studied in the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Lederman emphasizes the importance of tourism, commercial versus residential change, and the redevelopment of informal housing as hotels and hostels. To Lederman (2020), Buenos Aires has experienced a process of commercial gentrification such as hotel and retail construction and higher intensity land use such as condominium construction in limited and historic districts such as San Telmo. He contends that rising property taxes and rents and consumer-driven
residential displacement do not seem to be the strongest forces of restructuring in San Telmo. Drawing on Ghertner (2015), Lederman (2020) argues that the concept of “accumulation by dispossession” appears to be more appropriate to explain, for example, the forced eviction and dispossession of precarious residents from tenement houses in the historic center of Buenos Aires. Accumulation by dispossession points to “the violent forms of expropriation that redistribute territory or wealth through relations of force. State-led evictions and commercial profit making, rather than the slow movement of middle-class residents and rising residential rents, are central to displacement in San Telmo” (Lederman 2020, pp. 195–196).
Recognizing that the topic of gentrification in Latin America is complex, I use the term to describe a phenomenon shaping urban settings in both the Global North and the Global South, with myriad manifestations and reverberations. I closely follow Diaz-Parra’s (2021)leadin acknowledging that gentrification is not limited to the Anglo-Saxon world and in recognizing its explanatory capacity and diverse manifestations. According to Diaz-Parra, “the penetration levels of capitalist institutions and regulatory agreements may also be very diverse, as are local cultures and social and ethnic structures of population” (2021, p. 484).
To properly contextualize the rise of gentrification in Latin America, it is important to recognize its capitalist institutions, regulatory frameworks, and local specificities. In addition, and in contrast to urban scholars who advocate for the term “urban revitalization” instead of gentrification (Jaramillo 2015), I second Diaz-Parra’s observation that displacement can rapidly affect vulnerable groups (e.g., illegal occupants of tenements and other buildings). Yet, displacement can also happen over a longer time span, in a way that is difficult to track statistically. This seems to be the case in Buenos Aires and other cities in Latin America such as Mexico City (see e.g., Diaz-Parra 2015). I agree with Janoshka and Serquera (2016) that, with respect to the restructuring of the housing market, neoliberal policies always produce some type of displacement.
Another salient point made by Diaz-Parra (2015) is that price increase does not necessarily generate a massive and rapid displacement of the pre-existing population. Displacement, Diaz-Parra suggests, depends to a large extent on factors such as local politics, urban regulations, and the tenure statuses among city residents (Diaz-Parra 2015). Factors that often impede gentrification in Latin American cities include various forms of resistance, complex hybrid land and property markets with high levels of
informality, fragmented property ownership, limited market capacity, and insufficient loans and mortgage market (see Betancur 2014).
In Latin America, socioeconomic segregation and social stratification are closely intertwined with processes of racialization and ethnic difference. It is, therefore, critical to pay attention to the relationship between racialization and gentrification in the region, about which there has been little scholarship. Some of the available literature on this relationship has illustrated the destructive and racist process of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic minorities are continually victims of these processes and are often displaced or harassed by lighter-skinned westernized middleclass counterparts. Examples include the Indigenous population in the historic center of large cities (Delgadillo 2011;Crossa 2015) and immigrants from Paraguay, Peru, and Bolivia in Buenos Aires (Carman 2005). Other studies have reported that high-income households avoid settling near racialized and low-income groups (Abramo 2011). In addition, gentrification-led redevelopment processes are sensitive to the use of racial and class identities when deploying rhetorical and other strategies. In other words, both racial and class identities embedded in policies and rhetoric shape gentrification. As I note in this study, neoliberal governances’ rhetoric and actions mobilize both old and new racial and class identities along new redevelopment frontiers; these identities may be embedded in ways that are not readily apparent (see Derickson 2017).
Taking all these discussions into consideration, I examine gentrification as a central policy instrument that guides the economic growth of neoliberal cities across the world (Hackworth 2007; Smith 1996), transforming the socio-spatial character of cities by creating exclusionary zones of conspicuous consumption (trendy coffee shops, glamorous restaurants, and boutiques), fine residential living, and sanitized public spaces. Over decades and across global cities, gentrification has been extolled by neoliberal urban governances as something “efficient, progressive, and unleashing of supposedly free and rational actors” (Wilson 2007, p. 191) that will heal struggling neighborhoods, enhance a positive city culture, and increasingly generate revenues for cities (see Wilson and Sternberg 2012). Some have even suggested that this redevelopment will lead to less segregated communities, with new social and class mixing (see Lees et al. 2010). Gentrification has been widely promoted all across Latin American (Janoschka and Sequera 2016) and North American cities and, with the adroit use of rhetoric, neoliberal governances have been systematically
using it as a central urban policy to transform disinvested neighborhoods socially and physically.
Post-political Turn and Policy Mobility
How are governances able to mobilize socially minded values while advancing a prominent market-oriented approach to urban development? Among geographers, Wilson and Swyngedouw (2015)and Swyngedouw (2011) have contributed to an emerging body of thought about the dynamics of de-politicization, also known as “post-democracy,” or consensus politics. They have examined how recent transformations in urban governance dynamics involve consensual modes of policy-making within new institutional configurations surrounding socially minded objectives, such as sustainability, responsibility, and participation (2011, p. 371).
This post-democratization combines a series of interrelated dynamics. The political process of neoliberalization, despite its heterogeneous differentiated and uneven dynamics (Peck et al. 2012; Leitner et al. 2007; Brenner and Theodore 2002), has been named “the de-politicization of the economic” (Bourdieu 2002). These dynamics result in a sort of ideal system whereby the production and organization of the distribution of resources are centered on a practice that seemingly separates economic dynamics from the political process. At the same time, many governmental policy efforts are geared at assuring the “proper” functioning of this ideal system in the real movement of economic life.
As Erik Swyngedouw (2011) argues, the post-political framework offers insight into how circulating transnational urban policies and urban governances are shaped by this post-political orientation. One could argue that these policies are infused with post-political rhetoric that is difficult to challenge due to goals that appear ideologically neutral. Planning terms such as sustainability, creativity, participation, inclusion, and livability— normative and seemingly socially minded values—may be difficult to contest. The elevation of socially minded values suggests a consensual mode of urban governance deprived of political contention or forms of domination (Wilson and Swyngedouw 2015; Swyngedouw 2011). For example, as examined in Chapter 5, neoliberal urban governance in Buenos Aires bolstered the policy of “creative districts” as an open and progressive form of economic development on the south side of the
city, which predominantly focused on improvements to the built environment to foster specific industries as technocratic choices rather than distributional ones (e.g., creating employment and affordable housing). This study suggests that many of the values embedded in neoliberal governance policies and rhetoric—including socio-inclusion, creativity, and inclusivity—are shaped by a post-political approach to urban governance that is circulating across the globe. Again, this approach suppresses political and ideological framings in favor of broad-consensus values that are difficult to challenge. Larner (2015) adds that the post-political is associated with “the diffusion of governance into a host of non-state and quasi-state institutional forms that foster consensual understandings of political action, and the particularizations of political demands. The result is a multi-scalar politics in which states act with experts, NGOs and other responsible partners, and conflict is defused and managed through dialogical processes” (p. 193).
Neoliberal governance rhetoric and policies relate to broader governance transformations occurring across the world. Here, I draw on a body of literature on policy mobility that moves beyond the limited approaches of policy transfer and diffusion and focuses on complex power relations that shape global/local daily realities (McCann 2011; McCann and Ward 2010; Peck and Theodore 2010). In this sense, the neoliberal governance formulation of urban policies should be understood in relation to a global network of urban planning experts (McCann and Ward 2010) along with their locally grounded realities (McCann and Ward 2010). This tension, between the relational and grounded aspect of urban policies, is a productive one that shapes policies and places (McCann and Ward 2010).
Methods
This study will be the first to chronicle neoliberal urban governances in a comparative analysis of Chicago and Buenos Aires, representing different urban, historical, and political trajectories. In Chicago, I focus my study on Pilsen and Little Village, and in Buenos Aires, on La Boca, San Telmo, and Villa 31. To governance actors, these areas are in critical need of being re-sculpted and incorporated into the real estate market of each city. Despite decades of disinvestment, long-time area residents, who have been neglected for decades by public and private funding sources, now face a wave of physical and social transformation. The neighborhood of
