Where Rivers Meet the Sea: The Political Ecology of Water

6. Iconic Bridges of La Boca and Madero (Dereliction as Opportunity)

P uerto Madero, an internationally inspired model of waterfront development in Buenos Aires, is redolent with transnational corporate authority. La Boca, only one kilometer away, is in contrast a quixotic artistic attraction layered onto a stinking harbor scene. While each has a different relation to the seriously degraded and simplified riverine ecology in which it is embedded, both have played a significant historical role in the development of Buenos Aires as a major nexus of Latin American global trade. Neither, however, is central to the current container shipping industry located in Puerto Nuevo (“New Port”), just upstream from Puerto Madero. While these two waterfront locales share aquatic views and histories, the stark contrast between their “culturally coded geographies” (Shields 1991: 265) shows how development and degradation emerge differentially on a local stage. In this chapter, I compare these two waterfront sites with the aim of challenging the binary logic that underpins so much of conventional development discourse. This logic accords value to contemporary revitalized waterfront developments that target the affluent and devalue degraded industrial waterfronts, where the working class, poor, immigrants , and transients live. I aim to convey the vitality that inhabits marginal spaces like La Boca and juxtapose it with the obsolescence that underwrites the putative success of Puerto Madero. A focus on the signature bridges in each of these sites illuminates how port city dwellers , the porteños, strive to shape, to flow with, and to fix their relation to the rivers that embrace and encumber urban experience. Cultural studies scholar Beatriz Sarlo (2008: 44–45) argues that forces of globalization in Buenos Aires have created a “broken city.” She illustrates this with a photographic image of La Boca’s “industrial 6 Iconic Bridges of La Boca and Madero (Dereliction as Opportunity) It was in the nature of the river to be both turbulent and gentle; to be abundant at times and lean at others ; to be greedy and to yield pleasure. And it would always be the nature of the river to remember the dead who lay buried beneath its surface. —Ursula Hegi, Stones from the River Iconic Bridges of La Boca and Madero (Dereliction as Opportunity) / 117 iron bridge in ruins” paired with a textual assessment of Puerto Madero, whose newly developed space targeting the affluent she considers only nominally “public” because “although there is no interdiction, there is no reason [for the nonaffluent] to go there either.” I build on Sarlo’s impulse to compare the two waterfronts as part of the notion of a broken city. In my analysis, fixities in urban waterfronts are material structures and sociocultural practices that define and shape flows (e.g., of rivers, people , vehicles, and information). Within this schema, large-scale infrastructure dramatizes relationships between engineered fixities and more natural aquatic flows. Captured water runs through canalized networks for drainage , potable water, and sewage, while bridges, shipping docks, and dredging machines transcend, deflect, and reshape rivers; urban aquatic ecology is a synthesis and an encounter between infrastructural and aquat­ ic elements . Flows are multidirectional: rivers flow out to sea, and brack­ ish tidal waters flow upstream, pooling and eddying in marshes and man­ groves; people, goods, money, music, text, and images move and settle in di­ verse interlinking and layered channels, networks, and niches. Flows are unpredictable : storms overtake balmy weather, wars interrupt relative peace, crimes subvert institutional regulatory and decision-making mechanisms, and cancellations and robberies interrupt fieldwork. Thus, fixities and flows layer in and under the surface of earth and everyday life, creating productive tensions of differing magnitudes. Two movable bridges, one in La Boca and one in Puerto Madero, encapsulate the changing and contested meaning of the waterfronts in these two neighborhoods within Buenos Aires. Although both were built for humans crossing aquatic divides, they differ in transport function, design, and social history. Subconsciously or consciously, these bridges, like many others traversing city waterways, also function culturally; people who use and key their sense of identity to them shape the dynamic balance of their aesthetic and engineering significance (Cleary 2007). Such icons distinguish themselves from their hundreds of mundane counterparts. Although people are less conscious of mundane bridges, they nevertheless involve a choice of river crossing that determines how people traverse urban and national topography (Cooper 2006). Contested meanings, functions, and civic responsibilities for the preservation of iconic bridges change dramatically over time. And in this sense, bridges can be catalysts for communication (Guth 2008). As with the relationship between the Brooklyn Bridge and New...