Introduction

1Urban informality exists in modern cities throughout the world but it has acquired greater visibility in the countries of the so-called “global South”. In Latin America, urban informality has different names depending on the country : villas (or villa miserias) in Argentina, favelas in Brazil, callampas in Chile, barriadas or pueblos jóvenes in Peru, and cantegriles in Uruguay. This chapter analyses the right to the city concept in the historical case in Buenos Aires, Argentina in the 1970s. This is done by examining three topics : the villeras organisations and the way in which their demands have developed over time ; the ideas underlying State plans to treat the villas as an urban problem ; and the academic field research on the city and on the poorer sections of society. In this way, through a particular experience we reveal the tension between contrasting ways of understanding the “right to the city”.

2In Argentina villas (slums or shantytowns) emerged in the 1930s in the country’s large urban agglomerations. Immediately, villera organisations started to develop to realise the demands of this particular urban population vis-à-vis State institutions. In the 1970s the Movimiento Villero Peronista (Villero Peronist Movement, MVP) was the hegemonic villera organisation and, as its name indicates, it was framed within Peronism. In Argentina the experience of Peronism included aspects of welfare state development, with a redistributive policy to support the poorer parts of the population, defending workers’ rights and promoting the development of national industry. The first two Peronist governments took place between 1946 and 1955, led by Juan Perón, enjoyed a widespread popular and personal support. The 1955 coup d’État brought down the second Peronist government and banned Peronism, a prohibition which lasted eighteen years. This ideological ban led to the formation of a platform for a left-wing within Peronism, with the “Resistencia Peronista” (Peronist Resistence) followed by the “Tendencia Reviolucionaria” (Revolutionary Trend).1 Thus, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, Peronism had a non-conformist force with broad influence and presenting a revolutionary programme. In a historical context characterized by a challenge to the social order, the normative conception of the city was challenged by innovative proposals such as upgrading the villas and the legitimacy of creating and producing the city.

3Peronist forces participated in the 1973 elections, and won. The central challenge for the third Peronist government was to represent two divergent political positions within the same political force. On the one hand, conservative Peronism sought a balance between capital and labour and, on the other hand, the radical wing which had developed during the protracted political ban, backed the construction of a form of National Socialism. The MVP was located within the radicalised wing.

4In this conflictive scenario, the relationship between the MVP and the third Peronist government (1973-1976) is analysed and reveals the conceptions of the right to the city2 deployed by both groups of actors. Henri Lefebvre analysed the harmful consequences of capitalism for city life and proposed that the city belong to the citizens who live in it. Considering this concept in a broad sense, the experience of the MVP and its upgrading project are analysed and compared here. The government in power shared the political project with the organisation that fought for their right to the city, understood as the opportunity to upgrade the neighbourhoods where they lived. But in opposition to this idea, the third Peronist government suggested the eradication of the villas from the city of Buenos Aires.

5The methodology used for this research is based on archival work. The main sources of information were State plans for the villas : The 1956 Plan de Emergencia (Emergency Plan), the 1968 Plan de Erradicación de Villas de Emergencia de la Capital Federal y del Gran Buenos Aires (Plan for the Eradication of Emergency Slums in the District Capital and Greater Buenos Aires) and the 1974 Plan Alborada.3 I also used Peronist party publications, especially El Descamisado, El Peronista and Evita Montonera ; and historical documents, such as leaflets and circulars produced by various Neighbourhood Boards and the MVP. This research is partly based on in-depth interviews with villeros (settlers) and form a key part of the general reconstruction of the context analysed here.

Villera organisations and demands for upgrading : the genealogy of a struggle for the right to the city

6“The right to the city is […] a right to change and reinvent the city in accordance with our wishes”.4 Here I articulate this idea with the history of territorial organisations in Argentina’s villas with their dissimilar strategies to produce the city.

7Urban informality originates in Buenos Aires towards the late nineteenth century and informal settlements start to be called villas by the 1930s.5 These villas grew in the 1940s and 1950s alongside the accelerating pace of the import substitution industrialisation (ISI) model, which built up national industry in the country’s metropolises. While the new industry demanded an urban workforce, the housing market was not open to these recent arrivals from the countryside who could not afford the cost of housing in the formal city. In this way, they started to shape the informal city, i.e. the villas. Hand in hand with the growth of the villas, neighbourhood organisations developed to obtain basic services for subsistence in the city. Whereas in the formal city the state is responsible for providing electricity, water, gas, etc., in the villas, it was the slum dwellers’ collective organisations which worked to acquire them. The state defended its refusal to provide these urban services on the grounds of that the settlers were occupying land illegally and, consequently, the struggle to obtain them required collective organisation.6

Barrio de las Ranas (the Frog Neighbourhood), 1885-1917.

This late nineteenth-century settlement in Buenos Aires was located in the south of the city, in an undeveloped area, next to a rubbish dump. Its inhabitants worked carrying rubbish to the dump. The shantytown was gradually abandoned by its inhabitants when the rubbish dump was moved to another place in the city.

Source : Harry Grant Olds (1901), in Buenos Aires 1910 : Memoria del Porvenir (1999) ed. by Margarita Gutman (Buenos Aires : Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, FADU/UBA y IIED/AL).

Villa Desocupación (Unemployed’s slum), 1932-1935.

This was the first informal settlement known as a “villa”. It was located in the north of Buenos Aires, near the port, in a very rentable area. Its inhabitants were immigrants from Eastern Europe. In 1935 its inhabitants were moved into sheds provided by the State. A new villa began to develop in the vicinity.

Source : Archivo General de la Nación.

8This organisation not only provided basic services, but gradually developed its own demands and claims. One of the first and strongest stands made by villa organisations was the rejection of and resistance to slum eradication plans of successive governments. The first state interventions involving the villas were framed in the paradigm of eradication, then a standard way to address this “new urban problem” in Latin America.

9Local interventions in Argentina took place in 1956 and 1968.7 In 1956, the Comisión Nacional de Vivienda (National Housing Commission) presented its Plan de Emergencia (Emergency Plan), the first state intervention to eradicate the villas. The plan was drawn up under the self-styled dictatorship Revolución Libertadora (Liberating Revolution 1955- 1958), which overthrew the second Peronist government, banned it as a political organisation and forced Juan Perón into exile.

10In order to relocate the villeros, the city powers proposed the construction of housing where the “social readaptation” (readaptación social) of the eradicated slum dwellers would be carried out by social workers. These actions were based on the premises of marginality theory, created by the Chicago School and introduced in Argentina by the work of Gino Germani in the 1950s. According to marginality theory migrants living in the villas were “not integrated” into the city because they reproduced the lifestyle of their original rural homes in a new urban context. The results of the Emergency Plan were slim : although the census estimated that the villas had a total of 112,000 inhabitants, slum eradication only managed to relocate 31,070 of them whereas the goal was to relocate 80 % of the slum population (89,600 people) in 17 local units. What was effectively achieved was the construction of 6 local units (2 in the District Capital and 4 in Greater Buenos Aires).8 In 1968, the Ministerio de Bienestar Social (Ministry of Social Welfare) carried out the Plan de Erradicación de Villas de Emergencia de la Capital Federal y del Gran Buenos Aires (PEVE, Plan for the Eradication of Emergency Slums in the District Capital and Greater Buenos Aires). This second plan appeared during another period of dictatorship, the self-proclaimed Revolución Argentina (Argentine Revolution 1966-1973). The PEVE consisted of two programmes : the eradication of slums and the relocation of slum dwellers to Núcleos Habitacionales Transitorios (NHT, Temporary Housing Centres), where the villeros would be “re-educated”, before being moved to the Núcleos Habitacionales Definitivos (NHD, Definitive Housing Centres). Once again marginality theory was the theoretical and ideological matrix of this eradication plan, which set out to build 56,000 permanent housing units9 but only led to the effective construction of 9,842.10

11In marginality theory the villas were a place of transit between the peasant experience of the past and the acquisition of the cultural patterns of the great city of the present and led to the claim that the villas were a consequence of the lifestyle of the slum dwellers themselves. This reading is incomplete since it does not incorporate economic and social variables, which are vital in any analysis of social structures, and it means making the subjects themselves responsible for their own social exclusion.11

12Immediately after its diffusion as an explanatory matrix, the concept of marginality was harshly criticized by the architect, Emilio Pradilla Cobos, who argued that it was an ideological and unscientific approach to research12 and that :

The situation of backwardness and misery of Latin America’s exploited classes […] is a problem of social classes that revolves around the fundamental class contradiction in the hegemonic capitalist society : capital and wage labour. The development of this contradiction […] is what generates the poverty of the Latin American masses […] ; it is not the asynchronous or unequal character of the modernisation process that places individuals who do not follow the pace of integration in the miserable life situation they suffer, as Germani says, but the essence of that development : the exploitative nature of that process. This reading of the situation is objective and independent of social perception ; exploitation exists even if nobody detects it or nobody wants to recognize it, even if Germani does not understand it.13

13Despite criticisms of marginality theory, the Argentine state continued to use it as a basis for its eradication plans. The arguments supporting both these eradication plans conquered common sense, exacerbated by the accusation that the slum dwellers were intruders, an idea that the State itself had contributed to spread. The piece of lands where the villas stood was not the private property of the settlers themselves, but technically an illegally squatted land. This was the main characteristic of the problem that predisposed public opinion against the villeros, i.e. their status as intruders. The villeros and their representative organisations faced the task of building a city, of making the land where the villas were settled fit to live in, and simultaneously they had to face the grievances from the social environment where they were inserting themselves. This situation meant that the villera organisation had to generate ideas and produce arguments that made the violation of rights visible, so that they became victims rather than perpetrators. One central argument was claiming the right to reside in the city.

14To illustrate this I focus briefly on the resolutions of the two national congresses of the Movimiento Villero Peronista (Villero Peronist Movement, MVP) and on an upgrading project. The First National MVP Congress (Santa Fe, October 1973) demanded the expropriation of land and its allocation to the resident families and the acceptance of popular enterprises in the form of cooperatives for the construction of housing by the villeros themselves, thus cancelling the profits of the construction companies. The Congress affirmed :

Nuestra participación […] será a través de las Cooperativas que se convertirán en el futuro en las Empresas Populares para ir logrando :
1° Ahorro al país, abaratando el costo de producción de obra por eliminación de intermediarios.
2° Creación de fuentes de trabajo, eliminando la desocupación en las Villas.
3° Participación en el Gobierno Popular, discutiendo con él, de igual a igual, las políticas de tierras, viviendas, salud, educación y haciendo un aporte eficaz a la solución de esos problemas.14

15The Second MVP National Congress (Córdoba, January 1974) took the same direction : it called for a national law to help expropriate the fiscal and private lands where the villas were established and the transfer of the land property to the inhabitants of those neighbourhoods.15

16In the two Congresses the expropriation of land and the handing over of property to villera families were clearly stated, and the Villa 31 experience was a concrete example of upgrading. In the light of the government’s announcement of the planned eradication of Villa 31 to make way for the construction of a major road, the villeros presented their own project : the construction of a working-class neighbourhood on the land where the villa was located.16 In December 1973, they held an assembly where they resolved :

Que las viviendas definitivas a construirse sean realizadas en el lugar que actualmente ocupan […] Las villas saldrán a la calle como ya lo han hecho en tantas oportunidades para defender sus derechos y los del pueblo entero.17

17Defending the expropriation of land and upgrading and raising the issue with the government are the indicators which support the argument that the MVP fought for the villeros’ right to the city, even though they did not declare it in as many words.

18This demand converged with the grassroots political activity experienced around the world in the 1960s and 1970s. In Argentina, this activism was broad-based and reached the organisations of the MVP experience, active nationwide between 1973 and 1976. The MVP managed to be broadly represented and with a very widespread territorial organisation in Argentina’s villas. In a historical period with low levels of unemployment, the vast majority of villeros were formal and informal workers. The MVP articulated its political work together with the Confederacion General de Trabajadores de los Argentinos (General Confederation of Argentine Workers), a combative workers’ union, and the priests belonging to the Movimiento de Sacerdotes para el Tercer Mundo (Movement of Priests for the Third World).

19The MVP was linked to the Montoneros, one of the most important guerrilla groups in Argentina and the main reference point for the Peronist Left.18 The link between the villera organisations and the guerrilla organisation was the Technical Political Teams, professional teams (architects, sociologists, doctors, lawyers, etc.) active in the Montoneros who worked in the villas collaborating and strengthening the experience of the territorial organisation. In this way the linkage between the political level and the political work in villas was made.

20Facing with the notion of the villero as an intruder who had usurped the land, thus violating private property, the MVP reversed the terms of the discussion : Is usurpation a violation of order ? Or is it instead a breach of basic social guarantees protected by the Constitution, and which represents a prior illegality and causes the emergence of the villas in the first place ? What was previously presented as illegal in official discourse was now redefined as legitimate action caused by an earlier illegality performed by the state. The MVP stated that it was legitimate to live in the city and proposed upgrading as a contribution on behalf of the villeros to resolving the problem of the villas. Upgrading implied expropriation and handing over land to the villeros and the improvement of housing conditions in situ.

21At the time these ideas circulated simultaneously in two separate and apparently unconnected fields : the national popular field and the academic world. While the MVP claimed the villeros’ right to live in the city, scholars from different disciplines and orientations matured similar ideas. As regards scholarship in this field, the main reference are the works of Henri Lefebvre and his concept of the right to the city defined as a “superior form of rights : the right to freedom, to individualisation in socialisation, to habitat and to inhabit. The right to work (the participating activity) and the right to appropriation (as distinct from the right to property) they are imbricated in the right to the city”.19 In much the same way, the concepts of self-help housing developed by the architect John Turner20 were close to the idea of upgrading, but no evidence was found linking the MVP project with Turner’s work.

22While marginality theory influenced public policy on the villas, the theories related to upgrading did not have any impact. In this way, the discussion was dominated by theoretical approaches which understood the issue of the villas as a problem of adaptation of their inhabitants, with the theoretical shortcomings mentioned above, rather than by the academic perspectives that proposed self-helped housing solutions, in practical terms, and the right to the city, in theoretical terms. Without giving a comprehensive overview of these trends and without conflating self-help housing and the right to the city approaches, this argument attempts to present both ideas in contrast to marginality theory and eradication initiatives.

23The MVP worked consistently for upgrading and had enormous expectations of its materialisation with the return of the Peronists to government.

The First National MVP Congress.

The first congress took place in Santa Fe, 20-21 October 1973 with 2,500 participants, assembled leaders of various villas across the country.
(El Descamisado, año I, n° 24, 30 de octubre de 1973).

The Plan Alborada versus upgrading : the two possible housing paradigms

24When Perón took office for the third time he was faced by intense conflict within the ranks of his own party. The growth of the Peronist Left had been countered by the growth of a conservative wing within the same political force. One of Perón’s principal challenges was to keep the two antagonistic ideological forces under his leadership. This confrontation had an inevitable impact on policy regarding the villas. In this way, by the time Perón had taken up office for his third term as President (1973-1974),21 the potential projects to deal with the villas had developed into two opposing plans : the upgrading, proposed by the MVP, and the eradication proposed by the conservative wing, a measure which was rejected and resisted by the villeros. Although in principle a commitment had been made not to eradicate existing houses and to build housing on land already occupied by the villas, in the political conflict faced by the government this agreement was breached.

25The third Peronist government launched a Triennial Plan (1974-1977), where housing policy played a central role in promoting economic recovery. The Plan Alborada focussed on the villeros, by eradicating and handing over housing in the city suburbs and in the Greater Buenos Aires area. The Plan built 6,678 housing units (of which 4,578 were in the Greater Buenos Aires area) for 79,000 inhabitants.22

26Contrary to what the villeros expected, the government proposed to eradicate the villas, challenging the MVP’s notion of the right to the city, namely upgrading, a project supporting the stable presence of the poorer population in the city and in its central locations. This perception of the city contrasted with the traditional notion of urban planning that only allows the location of popular neighbourhoods in the city periphery, far from the work centres. Rethinking this historical case brings us closer to the ideas of David Harvey when he says that :

27The idea of the right to the city does not arise primarily from various fascination and intellectual fashions […] but of the streets, of the neighbourhoods, like a cry for help from oppressed people in desperate times.23

28With eradication, the state simply ignored the villero’s strongest claim, built up over years of struggle : to remain in the same city and in their same areas of residence.

29Initially the MVP decided to continue working in favour of upgrading but subsequently this position was revised and modified. In the light of the negative stance of the third Peronist government on upgrading, the MVP was compelled to change its strategy and to negotiate conditions for housing allocation. Opposing eradication meant rejecting the charismatic leader, Perón, and implied the rejection of housing offered by the Plan Alborada when the units were almost ready to be handed over. While it is necessary to underline the defeat of one of the primary banners of the MVP, we must also recognise and value the ability to negotiate even in the face of unexpected and extreme setbacks. To support opposition to eradication, however just and dignified in the framework of the villera organisation, was extremely difficult in the political context. Many families accepted the housing, legitimising eradication and turning their backs on the villeros’ most important flagship. The acquired housing offered a new kind of social projection, but at the same time it diluted the construction of a collective struggle with a collective political horizon. With the acceptance of housing the fragile balance that enabled the development of political activity working towards radical reform in the living conditions of the villeros collapsed and, consequently, the MVP lost much of its potential for action.

Conclusion

30Villera organisations began to organise alongside the emergence of the first villas. Their initial task was to obtain services and urban infrastructure (electricity, water, street opening, rubbish collection, etc) for its inhabitants. Recognising that these tasks were State obligations, they demanded services from the appropriate public agency. The political experience was deepening the analysis of the problem of the villas and in the context of the conformation of MVP, advanced political positions developed. With upgrading, the MVP proposed a new paradigm of intervention in the villas that opposed the hegemonic paradigm of eviction. When Perón became president this raised great hope among the villeros that their demands would be realised.

31The concept of the “right to the city” allows us to clarify the opposition between upgrading and eradication : the first proposal to upgrade assumes every citizen’s right to produce and create a city ; whereas eradication is based on the premises of marginality theory, and tends to make residence in the city conditional on having certain habits and customs (i.e. a modern urban lifestyle). For marginalists and promoters of eradication, the modern city has no place for the poor. These two conflicting paradigms confronted each other, as the MVP managed to submit their project to President Perón, but eradication, the hegemonic intervention pattern of the time, came out the winner.

32As noted, this historical case had no points of contact with some other ideas then circulating in the intellectual sphere. Without any knowledge of research that elaborated theoretical and practical proposals for urban informality, the MVP fought for the right to the city, expressed as the right to reside in the city by expropriating land and regularisation in situ, although it was not defined in those terms. According to Harvey (2014 : 20),

the right to the city […] is more a collective than an individual right, since the reinvention of the city inevitably depends on the exercise of a collective power over the process of urbanisation.24

33The MVP fought in that direction and the collective memory of this period refers to this experience when debating the current processes of urbanisation, partly achieved thanks to the historical struggle initiated by the villeros and framed by the MVP.