Culture&Territories#3

CeiED | CULTURE & TERRITORY
they are evicted “for their own good,” “for their own safety,” or in defence of the
public space. In this way, the environmental or cultural embellishment of a degraded
area achieves a quick consensus among different actors in opposition to the
problem of illegal “ocupantes” or homelessness, the subject of many disputes.
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THE GROWTH OF SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE
Oszlak (1991: 28-9) discusses the contradiction between the increase in the
occupied spaces in the city of Buenos Aires by popular classes and the feelings …of
a resentful bourgeois morality, which saw a negation of the validity of rights, of justice,
of the natural order of things embedded within these anomalies. A morality that demanded
redress, (…) that claimed that ‘one must deserve’ to live in the city: it is not an
automatic right, coextensive with the condition of citizenship. (…) This conception (…)
would observe the city as the rightful place of residence of ‘decent people’ (…).
Although Oszlack analyses the housing policies during the military dictatorship
(1976-1983), it is not unwise to consider the general spirit of his hypothesis – or its
metaphorical scope – to reflect upon the hegemonic orientation of contemporary
government policies. The conception of Buenos Aires as the social and cultural
vanguard of the country, and as the shiny storefront to be seen by the rest of the
nation and the world, whose deterioration should be stopped, remains prevalent.
As long as“casas tomadas” are perceived as “a dwelling and a human problem
at the same time” (Diario La Nación, 10/8/2001), the State will cease to socialise
its inhabitants. Understood as both a moral and a social problem, and based one
of the last levels of hegemonic classification, this “other” cannot be redeemed.
The authoritarian conceptions of these city dwellers implicitly entail a social
Darwinism: these classes have no other solution but to “survive as they can.”
Without attempting to present an exhaustive list of the local government’s social
policies during the period analysed here (1995-2005), I at least want to highlight the
transitory nature converging in several of them, despite the slogans proclaiming
to build a Buenos Aires for everybody. If the housing policies range between an
excess of restrictions, political clientelism, scarcity, and absurdity 7 , who can enjoy the
cultural policies, considering that a growing number of citizens do not even “deserve
to live” in the city and are expelled in a subtle and almost unnoticeable manner? The
success of the process of local ennoblement is based both on the appeal to middle
class consumers and the quest to expel the popular classes through the use of
similar methods: cash money, governmental laissez faire or consent, which results
in a sort of indirect violence. The physical violence of yesteryear’s forced evictions
(expressed paradigmatically in the eradication of shantytowns) is nowadays displaced
7
Since this issue goes beyond the scope of this paper, I will highlight only two points. First, the profound changes that dwelling
policies have undergone in the analysed period, have produced “a change in the condition of a residence as social policy to its transformation
into a commodity” (Cravino 2001). Second, there is an “inaccessibility to social housing, through the State, (…) in which
many sectors of the poor population of the City of Buenos Aires are inscribed in a situation of illegality (Lekerman 2002).