I left for Buenos Aires to spend two months in the summer of 2002 in order to bring some vital firsthand perspective to my studies that had only been conducted from the libraries of Berkeley for the two previous years. My original title for the summer project, “Spaces of Boom and Bust in Buenos Aires,” was part of a design to delve into two particular neighborhoods that it seemed, from afar, were at opposite ends of an urban hierarchy—La Recoleta and El Once—in order to see what sort of sociological changes had been occurring first under the structural adjustment regimes of the 1990s and then since the “crisis” which unofficially began with a series of presidential resignations at the end of 2001. My plan was to conduct a number of interviews and observations of public space in these neighborhoods that would allow me to make inroads into a larger, more in-depth dissertation study on economic crisis and urban change. After arriving in Argentina and spending time in several different porteño neighborhoods, I quickly came to revamp my study in important ways. It struck me that La Recoleta, with its historical legacy as the wealthiest zone in central Buenos Aires, was not such an interesting site to study in terms of recent changes with global-economic connections. It also became very clear that El Once, with its sedimented, diverse immigrant histories and blend of gentrification with widespread informal economic operations, was not really a space of bust. Rather, it was one of blur, a state in which much of the city appeared to be operating in the context of an ostensible crisis. It therefore seemed crucial that I reorient my project to address spaces of boom, bust, and blur in order to move closer to understanding what seems to be structurally adjusted urbanism as a way of life in Buenos Aires.

In order to see the paradox that I want to unravel with a focus on blur, consider the following interlude from my fieldnotes:

“¿Dónde está la crisis?,” asked my friend in mid-2002, as we walked through the US-style food court of Alto Palermo Shopping, a grandiose mall in one of the wealthier neighborhoods of central Buenos Aires. In fact, Alejandro knew the crisis firsthand from his inability to find any kind of work after months of searching—except with los taxiboys, or young male prostitutes servicing other men, which he refused. And yet, in that particular place, he had good reason to wonder where the crisis was. Not a single table—out of hundreds—was unoccupied by consumers eating expensive fast food in the middle of a holiday weekend. There were no signals around us that Argentina was in the middle of perhaps its worst-ever economic catastrophe, with a dramatically wounded currency, an enormous foreign debt (on which it had recently made the largest default in world history), soaring poverty, and widespread unemployment.

Only months earlier, on December 21, 2001, thousands of demonstrators gathered at the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the seat of executive power in Argentina, the Casa Rosada, to protest the austerity measures implemented by centrist president Fernando de la Rúa. To the surprise of most, before dark fell on the city, the president had resigned, 20 protestors in the capital had been killed by police, and De la Rúa had fled his presidential palace by helicopter as Buenos Aires billowed smoke below. Leadership was changing but hardship was not. After all, De la Rúa had inaugurated a new, more palpable round of structural adjustment programs, but the larger neoliberal economic model was the legacy of Carlos Menem, whose administration had overseen dramatic trade liberalization, financial deregulation, and state privatization between 1989 and 1999. The changes under his aegis had opened up Argentina to global-economic networks via the key interlocutor of Buenos Aires, making the city a darling of international markets in the early and middle 1990s. But by the close of the decade those programs backfired, culminating in an ongoing four-year recession and banking restrictions that trapped Argentine savings from fleeing before a fifty-percent devaluation in January 2002, and with more painful plummets in the following months.

The dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of Buenos Aires would have been unthinkable amid the political and economic euphoria of a decade earlier. That structural adjustment could contribute so saliently to the ruining of a city—and much of the rest of the country—had not been foreseen in the projections of economic and institutional analysts in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, or the Argentine state. Rather than instigate nightmares, neoliberalism was supposed to make miracles happen. And for a time, it did. Buenos Aires underwent a massive investment and construction boom in the early 1990s, changing the face of many spaces in the city and ushering in new opportunities for employment across the occupational spectrum.

The capital of Argentina quickly ascended to a position of economic command over operations throughout much of Latin America, representing one of the densest sites for the location of transnational capital and its control functions in the Southern Hemisphere. Furthermore, consumption was booming, as indicated by the creation of new places for shopping, dining, and partying throughout the city. But there was a substantial part of the populace left out of this upturn. The swift reduction of both the public and manufacturing sectors—two mainstays of steady employment for generations in Buenos Aires—had sent joblessness skyrocketing to a level consistently above 15 percent of the labor force in the capital. Those conditions of precariousness have now expanded to encompass a much larger share of the city. As of July 2002, over 50 percent of the population is officially below the poverty line, which itself represents a modest standard of subsistence. But as the example of the mall at Alto Palermo suggests, in a few places the artifacts of those early neoliberal miracles continue to stand out as spaces of boom among others of unequivocal bust. However, much of the city is in fact some kind of blur, wherein elements of both boom and bust intermingle in complex ways to create a physical landscape of proximate prosperity and precariousness. Together, these conditions form a setting for urban social processes of economic and political change dominated by inequality and instability.

It is this state of blurring that marks much of Buenos Aires as most mysterious but also most interesting in terms of several important questions in urban sociology and the sociology of globalization surrounding the social and spatial organization of economic practices—production and consumption. How does neoliberalization—through the vector of structural adjustment—transform certain spaces and thereby create certain kinds of places in the city in which it takes root? How do place and practice intertwine in these differentiated spaces of the city? Is it dialectical or unidirectional? In essence, how do the residents of the city interact with changing structures around them to help shape sociospatial outcomes? In between the different spaces of the city, what kind of urbanism do these adjustments to adjustment generate?

The goal in my choice of focus on spaces is to capture the dynamics that are present in highly localized, concretized forms, rather than looking at looser categories of social phenomena, such as labor markets. It is also my contention that, counter to the notions in the sociological literature on cities and globalization—and my own initial orientations before entering the field—there is not a simple polarization of fortunes under neoliberal structural adjustment. Nor is there a total collapse for all of Buenos Aires. In other words, the differentiated spaces of boom, bust, and blur help us to see that the story of the Third World city in neoliberal times is neither simply one of haves and have-nots, nor is it one of all-consuming downfall. Rather, even in times of crisis, there are still spaces that are the grounds for innovative economic practices that allow for relative boom; others experience bust, perhaps now in wildly exaggerated fashion, as the priorities of structural adjustment undercut their livelihoods; and still others are a blur of movement—a traffic in people, goods, ideas—shifting constantly along the border of boom and bust, or sometimes legality and illegality, tradition and postmodernity. As the first phase of my dissertation research, I spent the summer trying to hone my research foci and angle of questioning. The sites of my research shifted while spending time in the field in Buenos Aires, as noted above, to boom in Puerto Madero (and adjacent Catalinas), bust in La Boca, and blur in El Once.

Although each of these spaces of boom, bust, and blur is distinct in the ways I have briefly outlined above, they are also connected by a thread of public-private urban development projects that has attached them all to the neoliberal model in particular ways. Puerto Madero had been an abandoned port district of ramshackle warehouses, silos, factories, mills, and customs houses on the waterfront of the Río de la Plata until the early 1990s when a joint venture of local government and private development sought to transform the area into a state-of-the-art live/work and entertainment complex, replete with lofts, offices, hotels, theaters, restaurants and cafés that aimed at shifting the center of gravity in downtown Buenos Aires from the old Microcentro towards the river. The adjacent district of Catalinas, also a part of my study, became the center of high-rise, transnational office space—and some residences—during the boom of the 1990s.

In the southern area of the city, traditionally the poorest zones, La Boca is the site of much obvious bust, in the sense of longstanding dereliction, made worse by deindustrialization, and yet punctuated by perhaps the most touristic site in all of the Argentine capital: El Caminito. This is a small strip of brightly colored buildings, expensive Italian restaurants, cultural centers and museums, all designed to commemorate the hub of immigration—mostly of Italians, but also many other poor Mediterraneans—that fueled population growth in Argentina around the turn of the last century. It is also considered the birthplace of the tango, lending a mythic character to this site.

However, El Caminito is only a few blocks long. Surrounding the area are obvious signs of poverty that are incongruent with the bright, cheery façade of the tourist zone. Police even stop people who unequivocally appear as tourists from meandering beyond El Caminito, warning, as happened to some acquaintances of mine, that if they proceeded further they would be assaulted for sure (“Si vos vas más allá, te asaltarán, pero seguro”).

Lastly, in El Once, there is the greatest mix of fortunes, the most blur in the sense of constantly intermingled extremes that actually create a state that is neither boom nor bust but the blurring that is a genuine hybridity. To summarize a great deal, this has been the center of Jewish, Arab, Korean, Taiwanese, Peruvian, Bolivian, Russian, Bosnian, sub-Saharan African, and Dominican newcomers to Buenos Aires, with all groups except the first two entering mostly in the 1990s. It is the site of a gargantuan shopping mall, El Abasto de Buenos Aires, that has been converted from the city’s old produce marketplace into a gleaming and—by any standards—impressive center of high-end commerce, complete with an indoor amusement park and museum for children. This project was funded mostly by multibillionaire George Soros, before he divested entirely from Argentina, but also proceeded with the aid of city government in an effort to makeover El Once, adding new housing and hotel facilities in a bid to upgrade the neighborhood.

This utter metamorphosis has not occurred. Rather, there is a striking interspersal of informal economic practices—from street vendors to prostitution—and the icons of lavish consumption.

In addition to determining my sites of research, I began a first round of pilot interviews, all focused on the boom site of Puerto Madero, where finding interviewees and establishing trust was the easiest due to shared experiences and class backgrounds between myself and the interviewees. I was able to complete 10 detailed, lengthy interviews with people who either lived or worked in Puerto Madero/Catalinas, inquiring about the economic repercussions of both long-term structural adjustment and the ongoing current crisis. My focus was on economic practices of production and consumption, and how these blend into most other realms of life—social, political, and cultural. However, there was also much attention paid to the spatial effects, or what amounted to, in a sense, a remapping of the lives and experiences of these people: where they went, what they did there, and why (as in, where was safe, where was not). I chose, at this point, to maximize my time through specialization with this group, but plan to cast a much wider net upon my eventual return to Buenos Aires in order to cultivate confidence with a broad and diverse set of potential interviewees in all three of my research sites.

When I return to Buenos Aires, I will need to have narrowed my questioning further. I also need to specify exactly the avenues that I will pursue for procuring more interviewees—either through political organizations, or workplaces, or public spaces as an initial start, and then snowball or random sampling, which will depend on the different types of populations I ultimately define as salient to my study of shifting economic practices, and their effects, in these spaces of boom, bust, and blur.

Appendix: Additional Photographs of Research Sites
(all by Ryan Centner)