The Reconfiguration of the Buenos Aires Historic Center: boundaries, Demographic Mutations and Theoretical Approaches (1990-2022)

Abstract

For the last three or four decades, metropolitan areas of the contemporary global North and global South such as Buenos Aires, have experienced profound changes in their social and economic structure. The central areas of large cities were one of the most affected sectors in terms of their material and symbolic reorganization. Primarily, this composition proposes to analyze the mutations that have arisen in the central area of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA), paying particular attention to sociodemographic changes. The analysis of the available quantitative information suggests that while the CABA as a whole slightly increased its population in the last three decades (1990-2020), on the other hand, the urban fabric of the center lost residents. A second objective is to identify theoretical guidelines capable of explaining and analyzing this contradictory process. The proposal is to articulate theorizations and categories produced in contemporary social sciences and simultaneously identify structural and functional aspects in culture and lifestyle and the role played by systemic rationality (public, but mainly private) in the modernization of socio-urban areas, activities and practices. The unfinished conclusions seek to both problematize (and rethink) the object-category “urban center” and propose possible (future) lines of research around the delimited object-problem.