Collective Strategies of Resistance in Compact Global South Cities. Stories From the Residents of the Villa Rodrigo Bueno

Other conference contribution, 2018

This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of what citizen-driven strategies are developed to cope with informal urbanisation and urban compactness. More precisely, the paper explores the intersection between informal urbanisation processes, informal economy and networks of solidarity and citizenship, in the context of compact cities. In particular, this paper aims to examine the creation of novel and collective forms of strategizing and organising resistance articulated from the informal settlements to build up alternative notions of the city from below. In order to do that the paper is empirically informed by the case of Argentina, a country that has experienced in the last decades the revival of villas miseria (misery town or shanty towns), as a result of successive economic crisis and migration waves. The history of one of these villas miserias, Rodrigo Bueno, in Puerto Madero, the most expensive urban development in Argentina, serves to illustrate the creation and maintenance of the informal city as an alternative urban logic, as well as the continuous process of stabilisation and resistance to the institutional arrangements threatening its existence.