"History of the villas in the city of Buenos Aires. From the origins to the present day" is the book by Valeria Snitcofsky that reconstructs the historical background of the villas in the city of Buenos Aires based on research that began in 2003 and whose advances were expressed in a bachelor's and a doctoral thesis. It is framed within the objective of the Tejido Urbano Foundation, which is focused on promoting research and the generation of knowledge on the problems of habitat and housing.
Edited and published in 2022 by the Tejido Urbano Foundation and edited by Bisman Ediciones, the book examines the main organizations formed between 1958 and 1983 in these spaces, such as the Federación de Villas y Barrios de Emergencia, the Movimiento Villero Peronista, and the Comisión de Demandantes, highlighting the fundamental forms of negotiation and confrontation established with the State. Towards the end, an epilogue presents the main changes and continuities produced between the period addressed and the first two decades of the 21st century.
The book by researcher and PhD in History from the University of Buenos Aires, Valeria Snitcofsky, has been awarded the main prize in the "Research" category of the 18th SCA-CPAU Architecture Award and will be presented at the III Congress of the Ibero-American Association of Urban History Madrid, to be held between November 22nd and 25th, 2022, with comments by Charlotte Vorms (Université de Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne) and María José Bolaña (Universidad de la República Oriental del Uruguay).
We then set out to enter into a dialogue with its author, Valeria Snitcofsky, and with the president of the Tejido Urbano Foundation and promoter of the book, Pablo Roviralta, in order to synthesize the contents of the book and to understand the ideas, experiences, and views that have driven this research.
Text submitted by Valeria Snitcofsky. If the so-called "informality" refers to what is not registered, to what is not officially recognized by the State, it necessarily appears before the eyes of the researcher as an elusive reality, difficult to access for historical analysis. However, this same difficulty can also be read as a potential challenge and a gateway to complex worlds that hold the keys to overthrowing old preconceptions. In Latin American cities, these preconceptions are particularly deep-rooted and tend to veil the knowledge about spaces named with terms such as "favelas", "callampas", "cantegriles" and, in the case of Buenos Aires, "villas".
The first "villa" known as such, was formed around the beginning of 1932, and its inhabitants were unemployed workers, which is why it was popularly known as "Villa Desocupación". This neighborhood, composed mostly of European immigrants, was dismantled in 1935 and, despite its brief existence, left its mark in a significant number of sources ranging from films to tangos, milongas, plays, and essays.
Towards the middle of the 20th century, with the consolidation of import substitution industrialization, the massive influx of internal migrants led to a drastic increase in the number of slums in the city of Buenos Aires, first recorded in a 1956 census, which registered a total of 33,920 inhabitants. The census, in turn, was part of the so-called "Emergency Plan", which was the first public policy specifically aimed at intervening in these areas in Argentina, and whose objective was the massive eviction of their inhabitants, followed by their relocation to a series of social housing complexes. In response to these measures, towards the end of the 1950s, the first sectoral organization was formed to bring together these populations: the Federación de Villas y Barrios de Emergencia de la Capital Federal (Federation of Shantytowns and Emergency Neighborhoods of the Federal Capital).
Under the dictatorship headed by Juan Carlos Onganía, a new attempt of mass eviction was implemented in 1968. In this context, the Federación de Villas gradually lost representation until it was replaced in 1973 by the "Movimiento Villero Peronista", which transcended the limits of the city of Buenos Aires and took on a national scale. This organization finally split, as a consequence of the internal tensions that Peronism of the period was going through and, fundamentally, as a result of the launching of the "Plan Alborada" which, once again, foresaw the eviction of the villas and the displacement of their inhabitants to large complexes located in peripheral areas.
Between 1976 and 1983, coinciding with the most violent dictatorship in Argentina's history, an unprecedented repressive deployment took place in the villas, followed by numerous compulsory eviction operations that expelled more than 200,000 people from the urban perimeter. As a reaction to these operations, a new territorial organization was formed, the "Plaintiffs' Commission", which, through a series of lawsuits and with the support of part of the Catholic Church, succeeded in limiting evictions in five of the city's villas.
During the 1980s there was an accelerated repopulation of the villas and new types of territorial leadership were formed in Buenos Aires, marked by a context of growing unemployment, where hunger took on unprecedented dimensions and clientelistic practices tended to gain ground. Simultaneously, the spread of drugs and the significant, although never definitive, weakening of the solidarities that had been a constitutive part of the bond between slum dwellers took place. On the other hand, during the first decades of the 21st century, the notion of the Right to the City began to consolidate, which seems to have driven away the specter of general plans for mass evictions. In any case, and despite the implementation of some policies aimed at social and urban integration, precariousness continues to advance by leaps and bounds in the city of Buenos Aires, evidencing its increasingly unequal nature.
Text sent by Pablo Roviralta. After a brief but exciting experience at the head of the Housing Institute of the City of Buenos Aires, I started an organization linked to habitat. I had seen the existence of thousands of neighbors who struggled to settle in the city, to enjoy its advantages, and I found it made sense to understand that struggle, to show so many sacrifices, to register the inadequacy of public action when the major macroeconomic variables are in a state of flux.
Thus Tejido Urbano was born, with the aim of understanding, alerting, and combating the housing deficit in our city. It would do so by promoting researchers and professionals linked to habitat and urban poverty, disseminating unpublished contents that collaborate in the learning of good practices, and generating methodologies of territorial intervention that enrich public policies. All this, with the discreet resources of an Argentine civil organization.
Let's summarize. Beyond the type of tenure, about a quarter of the 'porteños' live in poor conditions. The villas - the most vociferous expression of the housing deficit - account for half of the problem. Housing complexes in poor condition, squatted houses and factories, dilapidated tenements, hotels and tenements, and the pure and simple sidewalk complete it. Unlike the rest, the villas were self-built after their first settlers timidly occupied urban vacuums that the market discarded or the State had in disuse or out of control. In this way, they gave value to garbage dumps, forgotten railroad grills, and flood-prone areas. Hundreds of thousands of people whose heritage is buried in those neighborhoods ─today called popular─ with their own characteristics.
The last Habitat meeting (Quito, 2016) consecrated the value of a compact city. The villas of Buenos Aires comply with this advice since in 1.5% of the city's surface they gather around 10% of the population. The reverse side of their domestic overcrowding is a crowded public space, full of life, with some streets that look like open-air shopping malls; it is no coincidence that Corvalán Street is called "the Florida of Villa 20". Jane Jacobs would be happy to contemplate its mixture of uses and the social control that generates such a "mixture of experiences". There is money in the villas. Until further notice, I say that half of them work outside the walls and the other half move the money they bring.
Of course, not all of them are. Overcrowding soon becomes a trap if the infrastructure does not come to the rescue. Six years ago, the CABA Government addressed the problem in four slums: two large ones (31 in Retiro and 20 in Lugano) and two small ones (Rodrigo Bueno, in Costanera Sur, and Playón Fraga, next to Federico Lacroze Station, in Chacarita). These four represent almost 30% of the total. From all of them, great lessons were learned. Valeria Snitcofsky's work, recently published by Tejido Urbano, overflies this praiseworthy public impulse. Instead, it traces the first manifestations of this way of inhabiting the city until the return of democracy, after some 200,000 people were deported beyond the General Paz. In a scientific manner, with a rich variety of perspectives, he describes the resistance of tens of thousands of families who did not want to live on the margins of our city, whose wealth is four times that of the national average. I am often asked how to solve Argentina's housing problem. I answer all of them: let's fix the macro.
