In this guest post, Dr Mercedes Najman, a former USF International Fellow, shares the findings of her research on the impact of social housing locations, focusing on the case of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
My research investigates the most recent popular social housing policies developed in the last two decades in the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina) to respond to populations with informal urban inscriptions. I am particularly interested in understanding the differential effects of housing location on the opportunities of its inhabitants and urban inequalities. For this reason, my research comparatively analyses different social housing neighbourhoods, which were recently built and are located in different types of locations in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA).
Against the international trend of contraction of the state’s role in housing policy, during the last decades, the local government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA) built different social housing projects located in the central city, which sought to solve the housing problem of households with informal urban inscriptions.
Although all these projects are located in the central city, they occupy different types of positions within this urban structure. Most of them were built in neglected areas in the southern part of the central city -an area that was traditionally chosen for social housing construction- while others are exceptionally located in favourable urban positions.
In addition to their north-southwest location, the social housing buildings are located in different types of environments: some were built in the formal urban fabric (example in photo A), while others are located on the edges that separate the formal city from certain informal settlements (example in photo B). The latter alternative responds to recent upgrading programmes in some of the city’s informal settlements, which include among their guidelines the construction of social housing to rehouse part of their population.
- a) Example of social housing built in the formal urban fabric
- b) Example of social housing built in a “mixed” environment
The choice of the location of all these projects is a state responsibility insofar as, in CABA, the state assumes a central role in the policy by subsidising the (targeted) demand, financing the construction of the housing, and also managing the land where the project is carried out.
What kind of opportunities do the social housing projects that occupy different locations in the city provide for their inhabitants? How do these different projects affect urban inequalities?
This work recovers the results of my doctoral thesis and draws on the collaborative work of the PICT research team ‘La nueva vivienda estatal en la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: sus efectos sobre el habitar y sus habitantes’ (The new state housing in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires: its effects on habitation and its inhabitants).
Thanks to the support of the Urban Studies Foundation through the USF International Fellowhips, I was able to carry out a writing internship with the aim of publishing these results. I would like to highlight and thank my tutor, Dr Ann Varley, who provided me with indispensable tools to advance in my work and identify the particularities of low-income housing policy in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires in comparison to the dynamics of other cities around the world.
The following are some of the findings expanded upon in the various ongoing publications. These make visible the differential effects of social housing depending on its location and question the capacity of these policies to generate more equitable urban structures.
- Effects on the urban positions of the popular sectors: Despite the fact that social housing is a decommodified asset that could enable the access of the popular sectors to urban positions that they cannot access by other means, the analysis of the residential trajectories of the inhabitants of social housing shows that the policy tends to reproduce or worsen the positions previously achieved – by informal means – by these households. Both better- and worse-located social housing tended to reproduce the urban positions that its beneficiaries had achieved before the policy. But in addition, many of those who came into social housing in worse locations, deteriorated their urban positions. The results are worrying insofar as, even when social housing is located in good urban positions, this does not (positively) modify the social division of space since it does not enable popular sectors to access areas of the city that were previously inaccessible to them.
- Differential effects on beneficiaries’ urban opportunities: Because they are located in opposite urban positions, social housing has disparate effects on the possibilities of access to urban opportunities for its inhabitants. Those who arrive at the social housing located in the northern axis have a greater supply of urban resources (mainly private) in their vicinity than those who arrive at the social housing located in the south-west of the city. However, an analysis of the daily mobility practices and urban experiences of social housing residents in their residential environments shows that even those who live physically close to these resources do not necessarily appropriate them. It forces us to think about the persistence of other distances – social and symbolic – that hinder effective access to such ‘available’ urban opportunities.
- The effects of social housing on their urban environments: integration or micro-segregation? : Social housing is inscribed/built on pre-existing urban environments, which are transformed with their arrival. In this sense, social housing, as a habitat typology, dialogues in a more or less conflictive way with their urban environments (which, as we have seen, are heterogeneous). In cases where this dialogue is more conflictive, processes of micro-segregation are visible, which are the result of social differentiation practices, often loaded with territorial stigmas that seek to create distances between neighbours and those who live in social housing. Some initial results show that these processes of differentiation and micro-segregation are different depending on the socio-economic distance between those who live in the social housing and those who live in the surrounding area, as well as on the presence or absence of informal neighbourhoods.
- What meanings and effects does access to social housing have on the life trajectories of its beneficiaries? Although the capacity of social housing to improve the urban positions of its beneficiaries is shown to be almost nil, it has a clear positive effect on the autonomy or independence of nuclear households that manage to leave co-habitation situations and on the modalities of legal tenure of housing (access to property ownership). On this last point, home ownership is attributed with meanings linked to the security of tenure and, mainly, to the improvement of patrimony.
- Sustainability of a policy that decommodifies and re-commodifies housing: the research findings put into tension the sustainability capacity of a policy that aims to guarantee access to housing and the city for the popular sectors when it relies on the re-commodification of social good through the figure of home ownership. Tensions and contradictions are detected in the worldview of the policy between the notions of the right to housing, the right to property, and the functions of social housing.
These results continue to be explored and extended in the framework of ongoing research projects. Currently, and with a view to the future, we are interested in unravelling the role of social housing policy when it is included in more general policies for the redevelopment of working-class neighbourhoods. It also compares the dynamics and effects of housing policies aimed at the popular sectors versus those aimed at the lower-middle sectors. On the other hand, insofar as these policies are recent, many of the questions seek to understand the possible outcomes of these neighbourhoods in terms of urban processes: To what extent are new social housing neighbourhoods in different locations at risk of gentrification, informalisation or integration into the urban fabric.