Events

Barrio Ecologies: Patios, Real Estate, and the Politics of Articulation in Buenos Aires

Dr. Nicolas D'Avella,

Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU

This talk examines articulations between ecological politics and the politics of markets in several neighborhoods of Buenos Aires during a construction boom in the mid-2000s. Through an analysis of quotidian practices of plant cultivation; poetry and songs about neighborhood life; and political mobilizations around public parklands, I describe how neighborhood groups worked to attune to and care for the relations between people, buildings, and the elements that I call a barrio ecology. Central to these political efforts was an attention to how these life practices were made vulnerable when neighborhoods are treated as a profit-maximizing economic terrain whose primary purpose is real estate development. Framing their efforts to defend urban environments in the terms of economic speculation, I argue, allowed neighborhood groups to articulate their struggle with broadly-held histories of economic disenfranchisement prevalent in post-crisis Argentina, providing the possibility for other forms of value to endure in an urban landscape threatened by the hegemony of economic investment.

Biography

Nicholas D’Avella is a Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU. An ethnographer of contemporary Argentine economic life, he is currently completing his first manuscript, Concrete Dreams: Ethnographies of Practice and the Value of Buildings in Post-Crisis Buenos Aires, an ethnographic study of a construction boom following Argentina’s economic and political crisis of 2001. Based on two years of fieldwork with real estate investors, architects, and neighborhood residents, the book describes how buildings were incorporated into post-crisis practices of economic investment, and how other forms of value were made to endure in the face of buildings’ increasingly central place in Argentine economic life.