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Cooperatives Battle Displacement in Buenos Aires

Valeria Procupez & María Carla Rodríguez

To cite this article: Valeria Procupez & María Carla Rodríguez (2019) Cooperatives Battle
Displacement in Buenos Aires, NACLA Report on the Americas, 51:4, 386-393, DOI:
10.1080/10714839.2019.1692992

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 REPORT
VALERIA PROCUPEZ AND MARÍA CARLA RODRÍGUEZ
Cooperatives Battle Displacement in
Buenos Aires
In one of South America’s largest cities, housing projects led and
managed by grassroots groups create dignified homes and communities
while promoting truly participatory processes of urban development.
O
n Saturday mornings in the Buenos Aires
neighborhood of La Boca, a few blocks
away from the traditional area that caters to
tourists with local crafts and tango, a popular market
brings together small farmers and worker-run coop-
eratives selling their products to local residents and
bartering services and goods. The market takes place
on the premises of the Cooperativa de Vivienda Los
Pibes, a housing cooperative also known as COVILPI,
where former tenement residents built and now
inhabit an eight-floor building of 33 apartments.
La Boca, a historically working class neighborhood
with a riverside location providing convenient access
to the harbor and affordable accommodations for
incoming immigrants at the turn of the 20th cen-
tury, has remained predominantly low-income and
a hot-spot of community organizations.
Diverse and lively, the market also functions as
a weekly meeting ground where neighbors discuss
the latest local happenings. Leticia, the president
of the cooperative, is often there airing her distrust
about suspicious recent fires in old buildings that she
deems aimed at displacing tenants to redevelop the
historic area as a tourist attraction. “It really is my
history that is here,” she said, making reference to
some well-known swindlers deceitfully forcing out
residents and accumulating property. “They want to
extend the renewal to the harbor and need to kick
people out. But this is ours now, no one will move us
386 NACLA  — Report on the Americas  |  VOL. 51, NO. 4
© 2019 North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA)  —  386-393, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2019.1692992
NACLA_51-4.indd 386
from here, and we will help others to organize and
stay put like we did!”
Between 2008 and 2015, the city of Buenos Aires
served as a laboratory for neoliberal policies under
the municipal government of the center-right
Republican Proposal (PRO) party. The local admin-
istration was opposed to the national government,
which at the time was part of the so-called Pink
Tide and strongly allied to other progressive admin-
istrations in South America. The PRO purported an
alternative “new politics” based on a modern man-
agerialism favoring financial capital and large real
estate investors. With these policies, the Argentine
capital only deepened processes of polarization
and unequal urban development that had been
prevalent during the 1990s, evident in the growth
and multiplication of informal settlements such as
shantytowns, squatter buildings, and tenements,
entrenched within increasingly affluent and gentri-
fying neighborhoods. This neoliberal agenda would
eventually expand onto the national level once the
PRO won the presidential elections with Mauricio
Macri at the helm in 2015.
In struggles to appropriate urban space, popular
organizations have counteracted displacement, both
by mobilizing to halt evictions and crafting strategies
to promote alternative housing policies. The Pro-
grama de Autogestión para la Vivienda (Program for
Self-Managed Housing, PAV), a small government
11/27/19 8:00 PM
 Ultimately, as a direct product of grassroots organizing and
engaged participation, PAV produces de-commodified
housing while fathoming the city as a social product with use
value instead of as an object for profit and investment.
program promoted by a group of local grassroots and
community-based organizations and that financed
COVILPI’s housing project, is one example of resis-
tance to exclusionary forms of governance through
community-sponsored urban policy.
Following Marcelo Lopes de Souza’s approach in
his 2006 article “Social movements as ‘critical urban
planning’ agents,” this kind of policy embodies
“self-managed urbanism” inasmuch as it builds upon
previous piecemeal experiences of various grassroots
cooperatives and groups who directly participated
in its design and painstakingly sponsored it. PAV’s
unique aspect is that it contains from the outset
certain premises and prerogatives central to orga-
nizations’ demands, which are hardly ever part of
policy instruments designed exclusively by the state.
Despite being assigned a marginal place as a minor
housing program within Buenos Aires public plan-
ning, PAV represents the promise of community
sponsored policy. It effectively removes affordable
housing from the realm of social assistance and
places it within the sphere of public policy that
not only produces a concrete material outcome—
cheaper, better, more spacious housing—but also
supports capacity-building for urban residents to
counter displacement and thoroughly participate in
the development of their city. Ultimately, as a direct
product of grassroots organizing and engaged par-
ticipation, PAV produces de-commodified housing
while fathoming the city as a social product with use
value instead of as an object for profit and invest-
ment. The program, therefore, invokes an alternative,
radical and inclusive conception of the city, where
Leticia and her fellow cooperativistas have a say on
their collective future.
NACLA_51-4.indd 387
The City in Transformation
D isplacement has been a recurrent experience
for low-income residents in Buenos Aires. In
the mid-1970s, the military dictatorship’s appointed
local authority, de facto mayor Brigadier Osvaldo
Cacciatore, applied extreme measures as part of the
political disciplining of the working classes. Massive
forced removals of villas, or shantytowns, evicted
around 300,000 people, while the liberalization of
the rental market and the prioritization of highway
construction dispossessed and displaced thousands
more. These policies, implemented through blood
and repression, expelled around 6 percent of the
Buenos Aires population between 1976 and 1980.
During the first years after the return to democracy
in 1983, local authorities—at the time still appointed
by the national government—adopted a tolerant but
rather passive attitude towards informal settlements
to reverse the previous authoritarian and exclusion-
ary tendencies. This ambiguous approach allowed
the repopulation of villas and the massive expansion
of squatting, while overlooking the need for invest-
ment in effective housing policy. The 1990s, however,
brought an emphasis on neoliberal reforms. The city
aggressively pursued urban renewal in the Puerto
Madero harbor, affecting the adjoining southern
neighborhoods of La Boca and Barracas through
the creation of public-private partnerships, changes
in zoning regulations, and investment in infrastruc-
ture. Simultaneously, the government modified the
local penal code to criminalize squatting, enabling
removal even in cases under ongoing litigation.
In 1994, for example, authorities forcibly evicted
230 families from Bodegas Giol, the largest squat
in the city, located in the up-and-coming neighbor-
hood of Palermo Viejo.
Winter 2019  |  NACLA  — Report on the Americas 387
11/27/19 8:00 PM
 Buenos Aires turned another page when the city
became autonomous in 1996, as mandated by a
1994 constitutional reform, and acquired the status
of a quasi-federal province. The city sanctioned its
own local constitution using a model of participa-
tory democracy based on the Brazilian experience,
where officials interacted with a broad range of
civil society organizations in thematic assemblies
to draft the contents. A testament to the fruits of
the participatory process, Article 31 of the Buenos
Aires Constitution prioritizes informal settlement
legalization—a longstanding demand of the vil-
lero movement. It also promotes social and urban
integration of low-income residents, recommends
the social use of vacant buildings, and encourages
self-managed housing programs.
An alliance of center-left parties in the first
elected local government developed policies seek-
ing to incorporate the “south into the north,” aimed
at improving the historically poorer housing and
infrastructure in the southern part of the city. In the
following years, municipal authorities elaborated
urban development regulations in collaboration
with social organizations. In 1998 for example,
groups including the Movimiento de Ocupantes e
Inquilinos (Movement of Squatters and Tenants,
MOI), the Asamblea de Desalojados de la Boca (La
Boca Assembly of Evicted Residents), and delegates
from the Ex AU3 settlement sponsored and partici-
pated in a task-force with city council members that
produced the Self-Managed Housing Act (Law 341),
sanctioned in 2000 and later modified by Housing
Act 964 in 2002.
This regulation created the Program for
Self-Managed Housing, or PAV, to allocate public
funds for the production of affordable housing in
central urban areas, based on an innovative meth-
odology of self-management. The policy enables
low-income groups, formally incorporated into
housing cooperatives or associations, to apply for
government-subsidized mortgage loans for compre-
hensive housing projects developed with technical
388 NACLA  — Report on the Americas  |  VOL. 51, NO. 4
NACLA_51-4.indd 388
advisors. Thus, PAV repurposed public funds previ-
ously available for individual applicants into common
loans that depend upon the organizational capacity of
the borrowers. The collectively organized beneficia-
ries are the legal entities in charge of all stages of the
projects—assessing residents’ needs and demands,
filing paperwork, hiring contractors, locating possible
sites—under certification from city government staff.
The program strengthened participatory processes
and, as a result, low-income housing cooperatives
multiplied following the 2001 economic crisis. Social
movements’ resistance and mobilization of the 1990s
effectively morphed into concrete proposals.
Between 2000 and 2007, 519 registered organi-
zations representing 10,101 families applied to the
housing program, according to data from the city
housing authority, Instituto de Vivienda de la Ciudad.
Since the creation of the program, 118 cooperatives
involving 2,474 families have purchased plots, most
of them in centrally-located neighborhoods. How-
ever, as part of a general strategy to revitalize the
economy during the first decade of the 21st century,
government policies involved a significant stimulus
to market-led urban renewal, incentives for high-rise
construction, and continuous transfers of public land
to private developments. The city relegated PAV to
a distant secondary place in the public agenda, and
from 2008 onwards, the new center-right adminis-
tration closed down registration for new cooperative
groups entirely.
Data from the 2010 census revealed that the hous-
ing stock in the city effectively grew by 5.6 percent
compared to 2001. But it also showed that during the
last two decades idle housing has multiplied more
than nine times as developers speculate with land
values. In fact, between 2002 and 2014, the average
price per built square meter in the city increased
359.5 percent, resulting in too many people with-
out adequate homes, and too many houses without
people. In recent years, scant policy interventions
have prioritized villa legalization and private
re-development, neglecting pockets of poverty and
11/27/19 8:00 PM
 Architecture of MOI’s La Fabrica cooperative (PABLO JEIFETZ)
housing precarity, such as tenements, squatter build-
ings, and temporary accommodations in central
areas of the city, that had spurred the creation of PAV.
Community-Sponsored Policy
T he city council’s move to establish the task-force
that developed Law 341 was a response to
the mobilization of low-income sectors at risk of
eviction due to the urban renewal process that inten-
sified in the mid-1990s. By 2000, the social basis had
grown beyond the initial organizations, involving
a large range of groups, political parties, and hun-
dreds of squatters and tenants in the city, and even
some branches of the unemployed workers’ move-
ment that spread in Argentina at the time, such as
the Movimiento Territorial de Liberación (Territorial
Liberation Movement).
The program built upon the piecemeal experiences
of grassroots organizations, particularly MOI, that
had lumped together scattered local and national
programs, as well as varied funding sources, and
NACLA_51-4.indd 389
drawn on regional paradigmatic examples in coop-
erative functioning, such as the housing cooperative
movement in Uruguay. PAV encouraged the use
of some of the tools these pioneering cases had
introduced, such as self-management, common
ownership, mutual aid, and the use of hitherto
available financial instruments, such as individual
government loans.
Several studies have shown that, through direct
management, cooperatives have built significantly
more cheaply and efficiently than private contrac-
tors. As a result, cooperatives have had the potential
to effectively—if occasionally—counter gentrifica-
tion, even in spite of the local administration’s efforts
to systematically slash funding and make way for
market-led urban development. Beyond mere “bene-
ficiary participation,” social organizations have been
able to formulate clear and detailed proposals and
support them with steady mobilization, represent-
ing a genuine attempt at what Lopes de Souza terms
“grassroots urban planning.” Crucially, grassroots
Winter 2019  |  NACLA  — Report on the Americas 389
11/27/19 8:00 PM
 Demonstrators pass
in front of the COVILPI
building during a march
for dignified housing in
Buenos Aires in 2014.
(ORGANIZACIÓN SOCIAL Y
POLÍTICA LOS PIBES)
participation in the program’s design has enabled
direct management, land access, and flexibility.
Cooperative members’ direct administra-
tion of resources is the flagship characteristic of
self-management. This feature clearly replaces a
social assistance policy with a public housing devel-
opment policy, involving a cohesive instrument for
regulation, financing, and support. Most importantly,
self-management implies a different conception of the
beneficiaries, approaching them as legally organized
recipients of credit instead of as suffering, helpless
individuals requiring assistance. Self-management
builds political and organizational capacity, offers
skills training in administration and planning, and
empowers residents to effectively interact with gov-
ernmental and professional teams. By removing
private for-profit construction companies from the
production of social housing, direct management
is also a tool for de-commodification and ensures
best practices in the use of resources through deci-
sions about size, quality of materials, and amount of
finishes, while forsaking profit. In other words, the
policy restores a longstanding organizational prem-
ise of prioritizing housing’s use value instead of its
390 NACLA  — Report on the Americas  |  VOL. 51, NO. 4
NACLA_51-4.indd 390
exchange value or its potential as an “investment
opportunity” for developers.
PAV also enables low-income sectors to access oth-
erwise prohibitively costly central urban land. Unlike
most urban housing provision policies that exclu-
sively provide construction funds, PAV finances land
acquisition, in addition to construction and tech-
nical assistance. Market values still determine land
and location, but during the 2001-2002 economic
crisis that devalued land prices, for example, PAV
enabled cooperatives and the city to take advantage
of investing in central areas, effectively capturing
valuable urban land for the purpose of address-
ing social goals within gentrifying neighborhoods.
Cooperatives purchased 118 plots at the time, ensur-
ing self-managed housing development for around
2,500 households. Interestingly, having the option to
choose, all the cooperatives decided to purchase lots
within the consolidated urban grid, underlining the
fact that popular sectors prefer to reside in the city to
have access to amenities, transportation, and labor
opportunities.
Finally, PAV is thoroughly flexible regarding scale,
typology, and the kind of housing intervention. Tra-
ditional official programs are usually rigid and tend
11/27/19 8:00 PM
 schemes for producing and financing public works,
challenging corporate interests, and engaging bene-
ficiaries as social organizations instead of dependent
individual families, which generates resistance
from both poles. It has encountered opposition
from traditional political parties often based on
clientelistic relations, as well as from left-wing posi-
tions that envision this model as a form of worker
self-exploitation. In addition, public institutions
have been slow at training personnel and devising
the mechanisms necessary to manage and monitor
Construction underway at the MOI cooperative called La the program. In innumerable occasions, officials
Fabrica (NESTOR JEIFETZ) delayed certifications and funding for projects, and
several cooperatives had to interrupt construction or
to produce the same kind of housing units in mas-
postpone payments. In fact, the self-managed model
sive quantities, consisting of identical size, number
is also very demanding on the organizations them-
of rooms, and form of tenure. With control over
selves. As members relinquish individual aspirations
decision-making, cooperatives can opt for building
of social mobility to embrace collective projects of
high-rises or lower complexes with or without shared
social justice, they must profoundly reconfigure their
common areas, with five or 100 units to adapt to space
practices and expectations and develop management
and needs. They can choose whether to buy a vacant
skills for complex technical and financial operations.
lot to build from scratch, renovate an unused factory
The process has therefore been long and arduous.
building or dilapidated structure, or improve existing
In 2008, besides closing down registration for new
housing stock. There is also flexibility in the hiring of
cooperatives, the city government reduced financ-
contractors; groups have the option to engage indi-
ing and increased bureaucracy of the program.
vidual providers according to specialty or contract
However, almost two decades after PAV’s creation,
consolidated professional teams. Most importantly,
35 completed housing projects where families cur-
the program maintains flexibility of ownership, and
rently reside and 57 others in progress demonstrate
cooperatives may opt for private individual titling,
this program’s impact and efficiency, as well as the
limited equity cooperatives, or other collective
promise of community-sponsored policy more
models. This ample flexibility enables the legalization
generally, particularly in terms of how it enhances
of scattered informal enclaves and ensures security of
resident participation in the production of the city.
tenure for the residents.
Each of these three features—direct management,
Self-Managed Housing
access to central areas, and flexibility—is the result
of the involvement of organizations in the creation
of the program. They are also the seeds of a different
“
E ach of us came from different situations, but
the first day I moved in here, I slept so peace-
fully!” Leticia’s sentiment represents a prevalent
kind of urbanism, inasmuch as they assign residents
feeling of safety among those living in cooperatives.
the role of making decisions while providing them
This extends both to the conditions in the neigh-
with the means to develop self-management capacity.
borhoods they have settled in—with paved streets
Predictably, PAV has met innumerable obstacles
and street lighting, as well as accessible public trans-
and tensions that have affected its functioning and
portation—as well as to the fact that they reside
efficacy. The model breaks away from established
collectively and look after one another. Her neighbor

Winter 2019  |  NACLA  — Report on the Americas 391

NACLA_51-4.indd 391 11/27/19 8:00 PM

 Sara, for example, remembered facing issues together,
such as taking shifts to guard the site at night during
construction, or convincing a gang of youngsters who
used to hang out on the corner to move somewhere
else. This empowerment also stems from the experi-
ence of having gone through different stages of the
process as a community. She recalls that when current
COVILPI residents were displaced from their former
homes, some opted to return to other parts of the
country from which they hailed. “But we decided to
remain here, organize, and stay put,” she said. “When
we signed for the property...it was a vacant lot! There
was nothing here, and look at us now!” For many of
the families involved, who endured decades of hous-
ing instability, this constitutes the first time they have
security of tenure, which undoubtedly contributes to
peace of mind with the knowledge that they “can’t be
moved,” as Leticia stressed.
“Staying put” in La Boca was a key demand for
COVILPI. All members had resided in tenements in
the area for years and were adamant about remain-
ing in the neighborhood. In other PAV cooperatives,
the selection of neighborhoods such as Barracas, San
Telmo, or Parque Patricios was not related to attach-
ment to the areas but to costs, size of available lots,
or even in some cases to urgency due to impending
eviction. In any case, residents are generally very
satisfied with the location of their homes, usually
situated close to public transportation and commu-
nity amenities such as schools, health care, and other
services. This differs greatly from most cases of tradi-
tional publicly-financed social housing, often isolated
in peripheral locations near vacant lots or landfills.
By inserting self-managed groups within the formal
and consolidated urban grid, PAV successfully gave
residents access to the material and cultural benefits
and amenities concentrated in the city. Cooperatives
such as COVILPI also contribute to the neighbor-
hood, not only by holding the weekly market, but also
by providing a variety of other activities and services
for local residents, such as school tutoring for neigh-
borhood kids and meeting space for other grassroots
organizations.
392 NACLA  — Report on the Americas  |  VOL. 51, NO. 4
NACLA_51-4.indd 392
A peaceful night’s sleep was the culmination of the
cooperative’s 12 years of work to legalize, purchase
the lot, gather members, fill out paperwork, strug-
gle with authorities, and build their homes. Leticia
and her peers are enthusiastic about offering tours
of their building, proudly showing their average
775-square-foot, two-bedroom apartments. Leticia
pointed at details such as tiled floors and large win-
dows that offered a view of the sky and let in fresh air.
“So different from the tenement,” she recalled. “We
used to live one on top of the other—adults, with
teenage kids, in small rooms with no windows. But I
have a view now!” Sara shared a similar experience,
saying, “We lived with the lights on 24/7. But then
we were able to tell the architect we wanted [natu-
ral] light!”
Attachment to places is also evident in the impact
new housing conditions have on residents’ quality of
life. In the balconies of those who built high-rises, or
in the internal patios of the lower projects, cooper-
ative members have grown gardens or planted pots
and even small trees. The value bestowed on green
spaces, as well as ventilation and natural lighting,
are indicators of the profound change self-managed
housing has meant for families coming from deprived
living conditions.
Another significant achievement is the adaptation
of homes to fulfill the needs of privacy and intimacy,
but also common activities. Both Leticia and Sara
commented, for example, on the important changes
particularly in girls’ lives as a result of having pri-
vate bathrooms and their own spaces. But they also
reported on the use of shared spaces, both for every-
day activities and collective organizing. Many of the
housing complexes have community and neighbor-
hood facilities including multipurpose rooms, shared
terraces, common gardens, community radios, and
even in some cases childcare and educational facili-
ties open to the neighborhood.
Cooperative residents are usually fond of their
houses, and none have built new rooms on terraces
or open areas altering the original design of their
units or invading common spaces. This high level
11/27/19 8:00 PM
 of conformity with the buildings contrasts strongly
with the prevailing situations in state-run social
housing, where makeshift expansions are common.
In cooperative housing, families endeavor to con-
tinue embellishing their homes, moving away from
the common conception that social housing needs
to be uniform, cheap, and unpleasant. Direct man-
agement and participatory design have allowed them
to choose materials, organize common purchases,
and invest in quality finishes of tile, wooden doors,
plaster, and so on. Participating in the design, man-
agement and even construction of their housing has
allowed residents to appropriate their places and the
city more generally. can overturn or subsume results, and the practice
Building the City
T raditional social housing complexes financed
by the government and built by private con-
tractors are planned at a desk. Officials select future
residents from a list of applicants who receive a fin-
ished product and do not have a say in the design
and construction process. Housing units are usually
small, poorly designed—when not outright ugly—
and are almost always located in peripheral areas
with difficult accessibility. In addition, such housing
often faces stigmatization from the outset, hindering
residents’ integration within the neighborhoods.
In cooperative housing complexes, residents have
been involved in projects from their inception. They
have participated in design, managed funds, chosen
the location, purchased materials, and even in some
cases contributed their own labor to the construc-
tion process in the form of mutual aid. They have
learned new skills working alongside professionals
and contractors and developed their own rules for
conviviality and collective action. Their housing units
are spacious, adequate for family composition, and
complete with shared common areas. Even with all
these advantages, this kind of housing is cost-effective
and requires less public investment than private-led
construction.
What makes these experiences radically trans-
formative, however, is the way they strengthen
NACLA_51-4.indd 393
social networks and community practices through
arrangements that prioritize collectivity and
open up possibilities to shape urban space as a
common endeavor. They involve the production of
de-commodified housing meant for use instead of
investment, in a process that is constantly challenged
and updated. Self-management relies on a participa-
tory logic that, through collective decision-making
and resource management, reconfigures not only the
built environment, but also empowers residents to
effectively appropriate their city.
Of course innumerable tensions can challenge this
self-management perspective. An instrumental logic
does not automatically translate into members’ polit-
ical preferences or votes. However, housing achieved
through social organizations has the potential to
promote social relations that enhance dignity, citi-
zenship, and care, not in a utopian or idealized way,
but in the midst of everyday life. Thus, this model
enhances a radical strategy of transformative poli-
tics that aims at a truly participatory democracy.
Through self-managed urbanism, urban residents
actually become thoroughly part of the city, achiev-
ing this through organized collectives rather than
individual memberships, and influencing how the
urban—and the common—is defined. It is in this
way that self-managed urbanism contributes its
grain of sand to the production of a radical city.  n
n
Valeria Procupez is lecturer of Anthropology at Johns Hop-
kins University and Co-director of the Project “Alternative
housing policies in Buenos Aires, Argentina,” 21st Century
Cities Initiative, JHU.
María Carla Rodríguez is professor of Urban Sociology,
University of Buenos Aires; Principal Investigator, CON-
ICET (National Scientific and Technological Research
Commission of Argentina); Member and Adviser to MOI
(Movement of Squatters and Tenants); and Co-director of
the Project “Alternative housing policies in Buenos Aires,
Argentina,” 21st Century Cities Initiative, JHU.
Winter 2019  |  NACLA  — Report on the Americas 393
11/27/19 8:00 PM