The Right to the City: Popular Contention in Contemporary Buenos Aires by Gabriela Ippolito-O'Donnell (review)

The rich array of studies on social movements and democratization in Latin America notwithstanding, the relationship between the collective action of marginalized people and the expansion of democracy is still poorly understood. Ippolito-O'Donnell contributes to this long-standing debate by focusing on urban popular contention in contemporary Buenos Aires. She does so through studying, in depth, the emergence and collapse of a grassroots organization in a poor neighborhood in the southern part of Buenos Aires, the Villa Lugano Neighborhood Committee (CVL). She also places this particular experience in the history of popular contention in Buenos Aires, as well as in the study of popular political culture in Argentina. In her theoretical approach, Ippolito-O'Donnell emphasizes the role of geography, space, and territory ("the landscape of contention"), which she connects with an empirical focus on frames and discourses ("the politics of signification").

Following a brief introduction, the book reviews the state of social movement research (Chapter 1). Ippolito-O'Donnell here observes that the "spatial turn" in the social sciences has yet to be taken up by scholars of contentious politics, and she argues that taking "the relevance of geography in its dual reality (material and symbolic)" into account will help in understanding the dynamic relationship between political opportunities, processes of organization, and discourses (33). After a historical account of popular contention in Buenos Aires (Chapter 2), she demonstrates how social divisions in Buenos Aires are spatially structured and situates in this context the district of Villa Lugano, a conglomerate of poor popular neighborhoods that combines an old town, a series of state-built high-rise condominiums, and five shantytowns (Chapter 3).

The heart of the book is in Chapters 4 to 7, which focus on the recent history of popular contention in Villa Lugano. In an analytical narrative, Ippolito-O'Donnell recounts the emergence (in the 1980s) and the decline (in the 1990s) of the CVL, "a network-type organization that effectively mobilized residents and grassroots associations for improving environmental and living conditions in the neighborhood" (84). To understand the eventual failure of the neighborhood committee, she then looks in detail at the politics of signification, that is, at the cognitive frames of meaning that shaped popular contention in this particular context.

Ippolito-O'Donnell's core argument is that the CVL had to deal with a series of social and political divisions that crossed the popular political culture of Villa Lugano. These divisions were essentially rooted in different local territorial traditions and, therefore, place-based. As a consequence, frames of meaning that proved successful in Villa Lugano's old town could not simply be expanded to mobilize, for instance, the shantytown dwellers in Villa 20. But the problem was not merely discursive dilemmas. In the end, the CVL failed because of a deep-rooted social hostility that divided the urban poor according to the socio-geographical division of Villa Lugano. For instance, most old town residents "believed that their tax payments were being used clientelistically to benefit shantytown and state-built condominium dwellers" (223).

Two caveats for would-be readers: First, the "contemporary" in the book's subtitle is to be understood in relative terms. Fieldwork and media analysis mainly treat the 1980s and early 1990s. This is fine for the case study, but it means that the wave of popular contention in Argentina since the mid 1990s, as well as the country's complex transformation during the Kirchner governments (2003–15), is largely missing from the picture. Second, the book overall is less about the role of urban popular contention in processes of "democratization 'from below'" (2) than about understanding the internal logics of popular urban social movements and their contradictory relations with local politics. In this latter regard, it is however an important contribution, both in empirical and in theoretical terms. Its particular strength...