| Buenos Aires has been the nexus of jarring transitions for some thirty years. The latter half of this period (1989-2006) marks the rise and fall of "structural adjustment." Adjustment was occurring throughout the global South, and comprised a general set of internationally-mandated, nationally-administered economic reforms favoring markets over state management and international competition over domestic insularity. Analysis of adjustment effects is essential to understand Buenos Aires, but also to construct an urban sociology that reflects the experience of the global South more generally.;Yet "adjustment scholarship"---about Argentina and elsewhere---fails to link macrolevel effects to the changing politics, terrains, and practices of urban life. This dissertation makes that connection by answering the following question: How did Argentina's market-oriented reforms through the 1990s influence political-economic trends of urban redevelopment in Buenos Aires, with what repercussions for spatialized social relations and struggles over social rights in affected neighborhoods?;I study three central districts of Buenos Aires that began the adjustment period with similar circumstances of social marginalization---Puerto Madero, La Boca, and Abasto. During adjustment, they all underwent redevelopment, but quite divergently. The dissimilar milieux that emerge are what I call boom, bust, and blur, or prototypical places in adjustment urbanism. Focusing on disparate redevelopment outcomes in comparable sites reconnects the detached conceptualization of adjustment to the palpable, dynamic conditions of urban life.;My findings, first, show that constellations of political-economic factors at urban and national levels, during particular junctures in the course of adjustment, shape specific modes of redevelopment across the city, with divergent economic and physical repercussions. Second, I demonstrate that the character of redevelopment within each neighborhood interacts with shifting circumstances of local populations to create a resilient set of emplaced social relations as material-symbolic landscapes. These offer resources for---or obstacles against---managing ongoing economic turbulence during adjustment and after. Lastly, after adjustment, I find access to urban space mediated through spatiotemporally circumscribed forms of social rights for different groups in each redevelopment site. This fractious belonging is the basis for quarrelsome, multiscalar identities that animate conflicting claims of rights to the city. |
