Whose city is it?

This text analyzes the capacity of places to transform and to integrate physically and socially marginalized urban areas (slums) in the city of Buenos Aires. Although the causes of slum problems and deficiencies emerged from social and economic structural conditions, these settlements nonetheless provide creative strategies for everyday life that constitute, even if in a precarious way, physical structures of positive social relationships.

This is why the opportunity for transformation is on the strengthening of these socio-territorial values because reinforce the existing socio-spatial articulation capacity. The socialization networks, the systems of daily life and the cultural significations of the community are therefore key parameters, which would work as a starting point for the project (by being the guides for it), and also as a finishing line (by being the project conceived to solidify those socio-cultural networks). In this way transformation strategies should produce, not a model based on an ideal image, but rather, a process of articulation, adaptation and promotion of public places as spaces where the wishes and desires of society are or could be materialized.This development process, started from community re-organizations and re-appropriations of their own urban space, is the way to recover, in marginalized and stigmatized areas, both the symbolical power of the public place and their own integration capacity.

The question whose City is it? aims then to understand this transformative capacity of daily events, in building socio-physical capital for an open and flexible socio-communitarian transformation process. The document will present findings from recent research on projects that address public space improvements and stimulate wider slum-upgrading processes through collaborative action.