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Buenos Aires, under the city administration of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, has recently implemented an ambitious social and territorial integration project in Villa 31 and other low-income settlements within the city. The mayor and his team have circulated the project in prestigious universities and urban forums while talking about Buenos Aires as 'a global city'. When discussing the design of this integration initiative, the mayor referred to London's Borough Market, New York's High Line and Medellín's Parque Biblioteca. This paper examines the role of policy circulation on the change in discourse and practice towards low-income settlements in Buenos Aires, as well as its relation to the making of a world-class city. I argue that: (a) policy change has been the result of a complex assemblage of artifacts and individuals that mobilise successes, a process that is increasingly South-South; (b) the city government drew its inspiration from urban policies adopted by other cities, not only for the urbanisation project itself, but for approaches to internationalise the initiative; (c) Buenos Aires is using this project as an opportunity to world itself as an integrated city. By doing so, this research adds value to the policy mobility scholarship, since Latin American cities are not only worlding themselves through mega urban developments but also through the circulation of singular 'world-class' imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore initiatives for the construction of substantive citizenship by transnational migrants in Buenos Aires. In looking at migrants’ political participation across the city, we found that the spatiality of citizenship practices is important. At the city level, there are migrant organisations representing specific nationalities. However, in informal settlements, where many migrants reside, we found that migrants engage in political practices across nationality and ethnic lines by coming together with their neighbours in grassroots organisations. These different forms of organising embody critically different views of migrants in their relationship with rights. While the former promote practices linked to ethnic belonging and see migrants as ‘guests’ in a foreign country, unable to make claims to the local or national governments, the latter see them as rights-bearing individuals with power to claim their right to the city. We argue that activism at the scale of the neighbourhood proves to hold more potential for the building of substantive citizenship than actions by organisations active at the city level. This is because migrant organisations active at the city level organise on the basis of nationality, while those at the neighbourhood level bring migrants and non-migrants together on the basis of their class-based interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on two Buenos Aires neighborhoods that face displacement pressures. Building on research about urban mobilization in a range of cities, this paper highlights how collaboration can vary in its configuration and orientation at the neighborhood level, despite similar circumstances. Data include ethnographic excerpts from the experiences of residents who fight to remain in their homes but ultimately leave, which trace out distinct neighborhood trajectories--moving onward and moving away. These accounts indicate divergence in how residents respond to displacement threats due to the differently situated, networked nature of the two sites as political spaces. Moreover, distinct logics of collaboration infl ect ongoing displacement politics in the threatened neighborhoods as well as in the destinations of displaced residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a moment of shift in urban neoliberal governance strategies under the purview of a new municipal Chief of Government of Buenos Aires at the end of the 2000s: the introduction of a regime of public space that has had implications for the waste management sector (and particularly informal recyclers or cartoneros). I document government attempts to re-represent the city as a modern, hygienic centre that is receptive to investment and tourism, drawing on discursive framings of public space that seek to redefine legitimate users and uses of the city. Such framings are exclusionary of cartoneros and other marginalized urbanites. As with most forms of actually existing neoliberalism, this regime is contradictory and unstable, both containing and provoking challenges to its coherence. This case study of 'actually existing neoliberalism' in Buenos Aires encourages analytical focus on moments of shift and renewal in urban processes of neoliberalization. In this case the shift marked by the introduction of the regime of public space reveals the priorities and agendas of urban elites as championed by municipal governments, makes visible the paradoxes and contradictions inherent to neoliberal urbanisms, and also exposes openings for resistance, opposition, and renegotiation of urban neoliberal agendas (including protest, discursive reframings of the city and its uses, and the forging of indeterminate alliances). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]