City, housing, and power: Urban society in Late Colonial Buenos Aires

Abstract

Spanish domination strategy and geopolitical need guided the economic growth of the obscure, remote city on the edge of the Spanish Empire. Internal and external migrations created a series of strong social tensions in the urban space and within the social system: where the merchants' sector -the local élite- demanded growing quotas of power, producing an intensive use of urban land together with “new” architectural aesthetics, expressed in a formal language with elements that were symbols of European classicism; and the sectors of the common people, doing a reinterpretation, tended to think and reflect in their places a growing social mobility where urban space and housing were social markers, a highly significant detail in the Old Regime. These elements theoretically underpin another vision of history, of the construction of the city, and of architecture: where the spatial variable, the pattern of settlement, the use and occupation of land, the manner of economic accumulation, — housing, “economic relationships, constructed volume, and destination marked the identity (in the broadest sense of the term) of the owner or user. The reading of the places and the structures beyond the form tends to enrich the research and facilitates a better understanding of the How and the Why of the architectural response and the urban space.