The Neighborhood that Isn’t There

An indispensable tool for every visitor and resident of Buenos Aires is the ‘Guia T’, a pocket-sized map of every street and bus route in the city. Each bus line has been independently owned and operated long before privatization became fashionable in the 1990′s. To a new arrival such as my self, Buenos Aires’ several hundred bus lines are a confusing yet comprehensive network. Once you get the hang out it, for 80 centavos, you can get pretty much anywhere in the city.

There’s a curious feature on page 32 of the pocket-sized Guia’t. West of Ave Zavaleta until Iguazu Street, there is what appears to be a large vacant plot of land. Some of the streets are laid out, but they have no names. To the outsider looking at this map, it would seem that this area is unoccupied. In the Southwest of the United States, it might be a new suburban development with the streets paved before the houses are built. Yet on this land is one of Buenos Aires’ largest shantytowns, home to more than 25,000 people.

Shantytowns have grown dramatically in this city over the past ten years. In 1995, 200,000 people lived in Buenos Aires’ shantytowns or illegally squatted its empty buildings. Today, that number has grown to 600,000. In these narrow streets, residents live an untenable existence, one often of questionable legality around issues of land ownership and sources of income.

There are no sewers and connections to electricity and cable television lines are pirated. The government does offer an incentive to discourage illegal connections to utilities: if you pay for them, you’re entitled to the deed on your land. While it’s one of the few means of property ownership for residents of the shantytowns, it is still out of the reach for many.

The area we visited was called Baracas, specifically an area called Shantytown 21. The neighborhood itself is diverse. Although home to some native Argentines, most residents of Shantytown 21 are Peruvian. Some live in the asentamiento, a recent squatter settlement on a former landfill. Their homes are made mostly of found materials such as wood and metal sheets. In the older parts of the neighborhood, the housing stock is more developed. The homes are built of brick and cement blocks, though the construction is still informal. One home we visited was next to the Riachuelo, an extremely polluted river that runs through the south of Buenos Aires. We noticed large amounts of garbage floating by while large portions of the river stood stagnant.

The government has announced a plan to clean up the river. But for those who live on its polluted banks now, the river means threats from flooding and health problems from its toxic waters. Our guide showed us a garden on the banks of the Riachuelo, where residents were growing fresh mint (pictured below). More symbollic than nutritous, the mint is used around the house to help drown out the smell of the pollution.

The oversign in the ‘Guia T’ is hardly unique. The political and social biases of maps have been well documented in academic and popular literature. These ideas are best laid out in Mark Monmonier’s fantastic How to Lie with Maps, which shows the multitude of ways supposedly unbiased maps are inherently political. It would be an overstatement to consider this omission an outright lie. I certainly wouldn’t want to difficult job of reflecting graphically a shantytown’s complex and informal network of streets and alleys.

Like elsewhere in Buenos Aires, I was impressed with the use of graffiti and street art as a means of political expression.

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• Jane Jacobs, 1916 - 2006
• A Public Toilet with Transparent Walls
• Life Machines / Death Machines
• Karen M. O’Leary’s Handcut City Maps
• Paris vs. New York
• Lori Nix’s Tiny Worlds of Urban Decay
• Peter Wegner’s Buildings Made of Sky
• Shaun Usher’s Scaffoldage