Les quartiers enclos à Buenos Aires : quand la ville devient country

Abstract

This article deals with the development of gated communities in the Great Buenos Aires. It aims at replacing the recent boom of this residential form in a succession of historical moments, each characterized by the convergence of its modes of productive organization, social relations, cultural values and representations, and urbanization. In this vision, gated communities appear in Buenos Aires as the archetypal urban form of globalization, at the crossroads between local transformations – the end of a urban model, based on public space, inherited from the colonial period and the formation of a national state – and a global cultural circulation – the importation of a North American (sub)urban model. The gap between these two realities gives birth to urban spaces of a third kind, analyzed through the example of the municipality of Pilar, fifty km north west from the town center.