Distinction and Urban Redevelopment in Buenos Aires: Understanding Culture as Resource in Urban Restructuring

• In Event: 095 - Section on Community and Urban Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 05. Urban Culture, Arts, and Heritage

Abstract

Beyond a city’s macro-level urban restructuring, residents experience particular life outcomes based on mediated, everyday interactions with local institutions. All neighborhoods contain particular physical resources such as their housing stock, transportation infrastructure, and green spaces such as parks and plazas. Yet they also contain a less tangible set of benefits and resources in their dense set of networks, human and cultural capital. This paper examines how the commercial practices of various social groups – the urban poor, newly impoverished middle classes, and more privileged residents and merchants – adjusted their engagements with the physical spaces of the historic center and the concept of culture to survive during a period of social and economic turbulence. It shows how differently positioned groups mobilized cultural capital to create ties with local institutions, networks with beneficial actors, and resolved problems through recourse to legitimized forms of knowledge and culture.

Author

• Jacob H. Lederman, University of Michigan-Flint