Peripheral urbanization in Buenos Aires, Istanbul, and Barcelona

A ‘southern’ look at the Spanish urbanitzacions

Abstract

In this paper I juxtapose the processes of urbanization that took place in Gran Buenos Aires, metropolitan Istanbul, and Barcelona’s metropolitan region under their respective developmentalist regimes through Teresa Caldeira’s (2017) conceptual lens of ‘peripheral urbanization.’ This comparative analysis flags the role of autoconstruction and autourbanization as central to sustaining developmentalist agendas across the globe by granting access to housing to large sectors of the population, providing in turn a much-needed pool of industrial laborers and a market of land-owning consumers. It also elucidates the key role of the State (too often dismissed as absent) and the ways in which different social groups engage in peripheral urbanization (from the urban poor to the middle classes, to the elites). By focusing on peripheral urbanization as a process rather than built form, this comparison also complicates analyses of Barcelona’s peripheral practices that mirror solely on north-Atlantic forms and models, turning instead to countries in the Global South that have undergone similar dynamics.