LAC History Seminar Series: Villas as Urban Change: Contesting Narratives of Modernity in Twentieth-Century Buenos Aires

Thursday 30 November, 5:00pm
Latin American Centre (1 Church Walk) and Zoom

Convener: Eduardo Posada-Carbó, University of Oxford

Speaker: Adriana Massidda, University of Sheffield

 

To join online, please register in advance:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIpceqtpz8oHdB5ETD8UUb5RfpyAgavKjmM

 

week

Los "Tru"' (the Trujillo family) reconstructing Villa Piolín after a fire. Buenos Aires, current Barrio Charrúa, mid-1960s. Source: Barrio Charrúa residents' facebook account, 21 January 2021. With thanks to Eduardo Rivas.

 

Adriana Massidda writes about the transformation of urban space in contexts of social and ecological disadvantage.  Her main project to date analysed the transformation of the Buenos Aires Southwest marshlands into a landscape of low-income neighbourhoods, shanty towns (villas), and state-sponsored projects over a convoluted period of Argentine history (1956-1967). Residents’ micro-scale and collective actions were key for this transformative process, refuting modernisation discourse which regarded  villas as sites of backwardness and disorganisation. More recently she has explored the environmental past of two social housing areas in London and Leicester respectively, interrogating the ways in which it ties into their present.