“But this is a park!” the paradox of public space in a Buenos Aires “no man's land”

Drawing upon qualitative fieldwork, this paper analyzes the occupation of an abandoned park in the south of Buenos Aires by the city’s urban poor, delineating the implications of this incident for notions of citizenship in the context of deeply fragmented social rights. While public space has historically been understood as an expression of the universality of rights bearing membership in a political community, I show how this universalism became the object of struggle during a conflict over the park between the local middle class and squatters of mostly immigrant descent. The discourses mobilized by various social groups blurred the distinction between citizenship as a set of legal-formal rights versus a project of normative inclusion. While public space is juridically constructed as universal, particularistic claims to these spaces are imbued with increased legitimacy in a context in which social rights – conceived as a set of provisions guaranteed by the state under a regime of liberal citizenship – are unrealizable.  By claiming this space for particularistic uses, squatters drew attention to the contradictions embedded in public space’s democratic pretensions in a setting in which putatively universal rights are ignored by the state.