Boom, Echo, and Splinter

Buenos Aires began the twentieth century as a prosperous port drawing European immigrants to serve a booming export economy. It expanded outward from its core of urban power and prosperity through suburbanization, early on segregating slaughterhouse zones from sites of recreation for the comfortable. Mid-century industrialization drew workers to the peripheries—which became zones of labor politics and bases for active citizenship and Peronist power. Peronist economic and political power sustained an unequally shared prosperity past World War I. Then de-industrialization in times of population expansion accompanied by military dictatorship (1976-1983) and a new suburbanization to protect the wealthy brought the polarizing mix wealth and marginality, formality and informality faced earlier in other New World cities. Re-democratization failed to bring more shared prosperity—or an escape from repeated cycles of promise and crisis.