Contested Infrastructures: Water, Privatization, and Place-Based Protest in Greater Buenos Aires

Abstract

Activists opposing urban water privatization often continue organizing even after water infrastructure returns to the public sector. Why? Analyzing water privatization and renationalization in Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina, I argue that as these policy changes unfolded, activists from neighborhoods lacking necessary infrastructure organized not only about privatization but also around place. Place-based mobilization emerged from a longstanding lack of services as well as environmental threats like flooding and pollution affecting residents’ daily lives. While privatization activated collective action, amplified by a broader economic crisis and protest cycle, it was organizing grounded in local environmental conditions and associational spaces that sustained it. The analysis, based on historical and interview data, reveals continuities and disjunctures between neoliberal and state-led modes of social provision, showing how place makes large-scale policy changes tangible and shapes patterns of collective action in a major South American metropolitan area.