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Techniques of absence describe some of the potentially anti-deliberative practices that haunt recently widespread participation-based governance schemes. Techniques of absence remove certain kinds of people - on a spatialised basis - from crucial 'democratic' conversations. To illustrate these, I use ethnographic accounts from the implementation of a citywide participatory budgeting programme in three neighbourhoods across Buenos Aires, Argentina, modelled after the vaunted budgeting process pioneered in Porto Alegre, Brazil since 1989. I position absencing as part of an emergent urban governmentality related to participation. This allows for an analysis of the Buenos Aires participatory budget across very different areas of the city: Puerto Madero, Abasto, and La Boca. Discussion centres on dynamics of participation and non-participation observed during extensive fieldwork in 2004 and 2005. The research aimed to establish intense co-presence through participant-observation, yet instead yielded an ethnography of absences, entailing analysis of how, why and with what consequences there was lacking participation in this participatory experiment. The phenomenon of absencing points to an emergent governmentality that enables ironically pernicious, territorialised regulation of difference, which must be countered to fulfil the promise of such widespread experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of culture-led urban regeneration from a Latin American perspective. It argues that, despite limited government intervention, the democratization processes that many cities have undergone have enhanced the potential of urban cultural policy as an instrument to address economic, social and physical decay. Grounded on the cases of Mexico City and Buenos Aires, the article shows how highly contingent and contradictory processes of economic globalization, political democratization and institutional neoliberalization have led to much variation in urban policy. In this context, we argue that urban cultural policy is highly dependent on the intricacies of local configurations of power and the negotiation of policy agendas. As a third level of analysis, the article looks at one paradigmatic project in each city. These experiences reveal that cultural initiatives offer the potential to generate socially inclusive forms of economic and territorial development at both the city and neighborhood scales. Yet we also point out that existing fiscal and political constraints limit the extent to which they can be replicated and articulated into a wider policy agenda. The article ends with a discussion of the comparative findings and a research agenda to examine governmental and non-governmental culture-led urban regeneration initiatives. Résumé Cet article offre une perspective latino-américaine sur la régénération urbaine à travers la culture. Malgré une faible intervention gouvernementale, les processus de démocratisation qui se sont déroulés dans de nombreuses villes ont renforcé le potentiel que peut avoir une politique culturelle urbaine en tant qu'instrument de lutte contre le délabrement économique, social et matériel. Basée sur les cas de Mexico et de Buenos Aires, l'étude montre comment des processus particulièrement contingents et contradictoires de mondialisation économique, démocratisation politique et néo-libéralisation institutionnelle ont diversifié la politique urbaine. À cet égard, l'article affirme que la politique culturelle urbaine dépend largement des subtilités des configurations locales de pouvoir et de la négociation des programmes de politique publique. Se plaçant sur un troisième niveau d'analyse, il s'attache à un projet typique de chaque ville: ces expériences révèlent que les initiatives culturelles peuvent donner naissance à des formes de développement économique et territorial génératrices d'inclusion sociale, à l'échelon de la ville comme des quartiers. Il faut néanmoins souligner que les contraintes fiscales et politiques limitent la mesure dans laquelle elles peuvent se reproduire et s'articuler dans un agenda politique plus vaste. Pour finir, sont discutés les résultats comparatifs ainsi qu'un programme de recherches consacré aux initiatives (gouvernementales ou non) de régénération urbaine par la culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]