City in Common

James Scorer

Description

In this book James Scorer argues that culture remains a force for imagining inclusive urban futures based around what inhabitants of the city have in common. Using Buenos Aires as his case study, Scorer takes the urban commons to be those aspects of the city that are shared and used by its various communities. Exploring a hugely diverse set of works, including literature, film, and comics, and engaging with urban theory, political philosophy, and Latin American cultural studies, City in Common paints a portrait of the city caught between opposing forces. Scorer seeks out alternatives to the current trend in analysis of urban culture to read Buenos Aires purely through the lens of segregation, division, and enclosure. Instead, he argues that urban imaginaries can and often do offer visions of more open communities and more inclusive urban futures.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. The City in Common

2. Dictatorship, Exclusion, and Remembering in Common

3. Surviving the City in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Comics

4. Neoliberal Urbanism: Anticommons in Common

5. Neighbors and Strangers in Gran Buenos Aires

6. Transforming the Commons, Recycling the City

7. Shantytowns: Beyond the Pale?

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

Sujets

• Latin American
• América del Sur
• 20th century
• South America
• Latin America
• History of the Americas
• Caribbean

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438460581
• Langue: English

Extrait

City in Common
SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture

Jorge J. E. Gracia and Rosemary Geisdorfer Feal, Editors
City in Common
Culture and Community in Buenos Aires
JAMES SCORER
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Scorer, James, 1978–
Title: City in common : culture and community in Buenos Aires / James Scorer.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2016. | Series: SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian thought and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015020844 | ISBN 9781438460574 (hardcover : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781438460581 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Buenos Aires (Argentina)—Social life and customs. | Buenos Aires (Argentina)—Social conditions. | City and town life—Argentina—Buenos Aires. | Commons—Argentina—Buenos Aires. | Community life—Argentina—Buenos Aires. | Buenos Aires (Argentina)—Intellectual life. | Politics and culture—Argentina—Buenos Aires. | Dictatorship—Social aspects—Argentina—Buenos Aires. | Neoliberalism—Social aspects—Argentina—Buenos Aires. | Buenos Aires (Argentina)—Politics and government.
Classification: LCC F3001.2 .S36 2016 | DDC 982/.11—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015020844
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jordana and Luca
… y sobre todo porque, lo piensen con palabras o no, la calle recta que van dejando atrás, está hecha de ellos mismos, de sus vidas, es inconcebible sin ellos, sin sus vidas, y a medida que ellos se desplazan va formándose con ese desplazamiento, es el borde empírico del acaecer, ubicuo y móvil, que llevan consigo a donde quiera que vayan, la forma que asume el mundo cuando accede a la finitud, calle, mañana, color, materia y movimiento—todo esto, entendámonos bien para que quede claro, más o menos, y si se quiere, mientras sigue siendo la Misma, ¿no?, y en el Mismo, siempre, como decía, pero después de todo, y por encima de todo, ¡qué más da!
—Juan José Saer, Glosa (1985)
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The City in Common
2. Dictatorship, Exclusion, and Remembering in Common
3. Surviving the City in Post-Dictatorship Argentine Comics
4. Neoliberal Urbanism: Anticommons in Common
5. Neighbors and Strangers in Gran Buenos Aires
6. Transforming the Commons, Recycling the City
7. Shantytowns: Beyond the Pale?
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index
Illustrations
Figure 3.1 Image from the episode “Autosupermarket” in Ciudad , written by Ricardo Barreiro and drawn by Juan Giménez.
Figure 3.2 Image from the episode “La salida final” in Ciudad , written by Ricardo Barreiro and drawn by Juan Giménez.
Figure 3.3 Image from the episode “Dueño alquila un ambiente” in Parque Chas , written by Ricardo Barreiro and drawn by Eduardo Risso.
Figure 3.4 Image from the episode “El libro” in Parque Chas , written by Ricardo Barreiro and drawn by Eduardo Risso.
Acknowledgments
The origins of this book lie in the period I spent in Buenos Aires between 2000 and 2002. Arriving soon after the resignation of Carlos “Chacho” Álvarez, I left in the midst of the crisis, some months before the election of Néstor Kirchner. Though it was a period of intense political and social conflict, on a personal level it was also a time of great friendships and solidarity. I am forever grateful to Paula Porroni, Alex Pryor, Marcelo Topuzian, and particularly Carolina Favre, who welcomed me so warmly to their city. Since that time, many other people in Argentina have been extremely generous in helping me toward the completion of this project in all sorts of ways. I would like to thank Ana Amado, Ana Dinerstein, Beatriz Flastersztein, Julio Flores, Andrea Giunta, Roberto Jacoby, Ana Longoni, Federico Lorenz, Federico Reggiani, Mariana Santángelo, and Sebastián Touza. Javier Trimbolí was particularly generous in the time he gave over to me to talk about Argentine history and culture. Bernardo Blejmar and Graciela Shvartzman have always been prepared to help me throughout the past decade and a half. I would also like to thank Juan Giménez for his kind permission to reproduce artwork from Ciudad (Barreiro Giménez, 1992) and Eduardo Risso and Puro Comic for their kind permission to reproduce artwork from Parque Chas (Barreiro Risso, 2004). Heartfelt thanks also to Paula Eleod for permission to use one of her photographs for the cover of this book.
In the United Kingdom, I am grateful to the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London, for permission to reuse material from my essay, “Recycling the City: Streets: Walking, Garbage and Cartoneros,” which appeared in Elisha Foust and Sophie Fuggle’s Word on the Street (London: IMLR, 2011 [igrs books]). Many of my current and former colleagues have offered sound advice and support over the course of the project, particularly Carmen Herrero, Parvathi Kumaraswami, Leandro Minuchin, Christopher Perriam, Karl Posso, Lúcia Sá, Patience Schell, and Peter Wade. Jens Andermann and Jon Beasley-Murray gave helpful input on the direction of my research at a time when it needed it most. Equally important has been the companionship (often at a distance) of Matthew Allen, Troy Blacklaws, Roman Buss, Mariana Casale O’Ryan, Emanuele D’Onofrio, Glyn Fry, Stefanie Gänger, Charlotte Gleghorn, Gwen MacKeith, Paul McAleer, Ana Moro, Aike Müller, Anne Paffenholz, and Vijay Tymms. Caroline Davis, Richard Ford, and June Taylor were also kind enough to support my travels. My family, particularly my parents, has been unfailingly supportive in more ways than I can list here. Without all of you, the process of writing this book would have been a whole lot less grounded and a whole lot less enjoyable. Above all, I would like to thank Jordana Blejmar, who saw this book through from start to finish and who is deeply inscribed in it and the life that lies beyond.
Introduction
Rife with despots, rapes, and killings, the postcity landscape is ruled by might and inhabited by bodies that have become fighting machines, objects of exchange, and outlets for sexual use and possession. Outsiders are regarded with suspicion; insiders fear for their lives. Under perpetually rainy skies, the urban landscape has become an endless stretch of wasteland, contaminated water, and rubbish, such that the only site of commonality is survival—to outlast the threatening others living in the same threatening landscape. At times, the world of Rafael Pinedo’s novel Plop (2004) appears to be our urban destiny. Trapped in a cyclical, predetermined, and inescapable future, we are unable to flee this apocalyptic cityscape that has been turned into a nightmarish post-urban terrain. Like the protagonist Plop, named after the sound he made falling into the mud as his mother gave birth during a forced march, we too will be submerged in the grime of this corrupted city.
Some would have us believe that dystopian cityscapes such as Pinedo’s are our only urban future. Violence, fragmentation, and fear dominate our urban imaginations and are inscribed into the material cityscape. For many urban dwellers and theorists, positive sites of commonality are simply no longer part of our increasingly conflictual formulations of urban territory (Korn, 2007, p. 33). Without ignoring the pressing reality of urban fragmentation and its material and social impact, this book addresses some of the ways that cultural imaginaries can and do point toward alternative urban futures, because beyond such discord, disaffection, and enclosure, the urban remains a privileged site of links, connections, and encounters that exist alongside and sometimes undermine the divisive and alienating trends of the city. Such encounters are the basis of what I call the city in common. Swelling from below, the city in common disrupts the imposition of an imposed urban spatial order. Of course, the common itself is not inherently democratic. It can also be divisive, such that shared spaces or identities can be used to reinforce inequalities and promote exclusion as much as to construct equality or togetherness. As a consequence, an important step toward creating democratic, inclusive cities is to rethink the ways that the common is imagined and put into practice: The negative traits of the common must be rejected in favor of its more affirmative attributes, ones that can foment and support the real and imagined meeting places that make of a city a shared space.
I focus on the way that the city has been variously constructed as a commons through quotidian actions and habits and, more particularly, the role that cultural