Global City and Cultural Consumption in Buenos Aires at the End of the XXth Century: Continuities and Ruptures of Neoliberalism

Abstract

As many cities in Latin America, during the 1990s Buenos Aires City was the scene of various dizzyng changes associated, with greater or lesser emphasis, to the imperative of entering on a global stage. Some areas that decades ago were the reason of the metropolis' pride, and where the nineteenth century, through the urban boom, had installed a symbol of the power of the emerging nation-state, began to be abandoned in favor of new or recycled neighborhoods that revealed an aesthetic or cultural mark. In this way, the neoliberalism succeeded in printing its signs in the city: the setting-up of new neighborhoods (Puerto Madero, for example); the recycling of other existing neighborhoods by private actions (Palermo), the emergence of shopping malls situated in converted old and abandoned structures, and so on. After the great argentinian crise in 2001, these processes were integred into an emphasized opposition that suggested a breakdown between the "neoliberal decade" (the 1990s) and the following decade. This article proposes, on the contrary, that it is a cultural continuity between the 1990s and the 2000s city, and suggests that this continuity is expressed in the perpetuation and empowerment of spaces called "global spaces", as well as it is expressed in some urban practices associated to the cultural consummerism.