City building at the periphery of metropolitan Buenos Aires: Local community, political leadership and state intervention

In a context of selective metropolization and urban segmentation, the steady growing of big cities brings about the unequal provision of public services. While in the better-off sectors of the city public services are provided through “standard” channels (i.e. state intervention or market access), in the poorest quarters that provision is usually left in the hands of the local community. Based upon the study of a favela in Metropolitan Buenos Aires, this paper examines how poor people solve the access to essential public services.

As local efforts need to be complemented with outside inputs (e.g. running water can only be furnished by the sanitation company), we contend that local capacity to secure urban services in a periphery neighborhood depends a great deal on political leadership and brokerage. We both focus on the importance of local leadership and deny the absence-of-the-state thesis. This paper shows how “non-standard” state intervention and local leadership combine and reinforce each other, and in doing so nourish the profusion of competing neighborhood organizations that undertake on their own the building of the city.