Beyond Residential Fragmentation: (dis)Encounters in the New Metropolitan Peripheries

In Argentina, as in other Latin American countries, metropolitan expansion is reshaping the urban landscape, pushing into what scholars describe as new peripheries. Middle and high classes are central actors demanding as well as producing new, secure (and securitized), well connected urban spaces in the fringes of the metropolitan borders. These new inhabitants tend to follow residential strategies based on gated communities as the main residential choice. They often leave the central city to the new peripheries in the pursuit of a suburban familiar lifestyle, with privatized strategies for schooling, health, housing and security. These families do their groceries in supermarkets located in shopping centers, children are taken to school in family cars, and recreational activities frequently occur inside the gated community.

Urban scholars often refer to residential segregation and fragmentation as the main domain in which social inequalities express in the new peripheries from the urban level. However, this presentation considers that social segregation analysis in the context of new peripheries should go beyond residential, by comprehending the urban interactions in two scales. First, from the urban level, it addresses how these privatized and commodified urban spaces interact with(in) the city and other urban public and common spaces. It then zooms in to the agent’s level to daily interactions among the different inhabitants with(in) different private spaces (gated communities and shopping centers) by highlighting the explicit and implicit hierarchical barriers that these spaces build among them. What is left of the Argentine’s urban togetherness in these (dis)encounters?

Drawing on evidence from observations and biographical interviews conducted during doctoral fieldwork in two Argentine metropolitan areas, this presentation aims to share key findings on how social inequalities are (re)produced at the urban level across these two scales in the context of contemporary metropolitan expansion.