Gated Communities in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Thomas Murdoch Duncan p.1

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Gated Communities in Buenos Aires, Argentina: From the “Country Club” to the

“Private Town”.

From an urban point of view, one of the deepest transformations in the Buenos

Aires Metropolitan Region (RMBA1) since the 1990s has been a change in the patterns of

urban expansion operated through private initiative. The massive growth of gated

communities over the past decades raises a lot of problems with socioeconomic, political,

and cultural implications. A striking contrast appears at the outskirts of the metropolitan

area between the luxury gated community and the poorly urbanized vicinity, made of

crowded self-built homes and plots of rural land. The municipalities of the second and

third rings of the periphery, with high population growth rates and the poorest inhabitants

of the metropolis, have often limited resources and great difficulties guiding their own

urbanization, especially when dealing with the phenomenon of gated communities, and

their integration into the existing urban environment. The increasing self-sufficiency of

gated communities is an important factor of disarticulation and fragmentation; and the

lack of legal framework in which to place these new urban developments raise issues of

governability. This transformation directly questions the basic concept of “city”, not only

in its formal definition, but also in its everyday consciousness.

To try to explore all of these issues, I will first expose some facts about gated

urbanization in Buenos Aires, its history, and the contextual circumstances that allowed

for its escalation. Then I will focus on the municipality of Pilar, aproximately 50 km

1 The Buenos Aires Metropolitan Region (RMBA) is constituted by the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA) and 30 municipalities, of which 24 integrate fully and 6 only partially the urban sprawl.


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northwest of Buenos Aires, the historic epicentre for the gated community boom. This

municipality now contains the largest number of gated communities in the area. I will

discuss the physical, economic and social impact of those private urbanizations and

examine the ways in which local government has struggled to incorporate them into their

urban fabric.

The Rise of Gated Communities.

Gated communities in Buenos Aires have a long history that goes back to the

nineteenth century, when wealthy porteños (port-city dwellers) used to spend the summer

at their rural domains, called quintas, away from the crowded and polluted city. Sport

Clubs appeared at the end of the century, as an imitation of the English way of life, and

outdoor sports like football, polo, golf, cricket and rowing became increasingly popular

amongst the Argentine elite.2 At the start of the twentieth century, railroad, and later the

automobile, contributed to democratize the access to a secondary home. Chalets and

bungalows multiplied on the outskirts of the city, and they were often still called quintas,

even though they had little to do with the original great rural domains of the wealthiest.

The first gated development ever established in Argentina was the Tortugas

Country Club, founded in 1932 in the municipality of Pilar, 38 km northwest of Buenos

Aires. Originally, country clubs were leisure-oriented compounds, built along great sport

facilities, such as golf and polo courses (see Fig. #1), or marinas, and would be inhabited

only for weekends or holidays.

2 Troncoso, “Las formas del ocio”, pp. 93-102.


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Figure #1. Site plan of Tortugas Country Club, in the municipality of Pilar.3

The seventies were in Argentina a decade of social unrest, with state-sponsored

violence against Argentine citizenry. Jorge Rafael Videla’s military government was

responsible for the illegal arrest, torture, killing or forced disappearance of thousands of

people believed to be left-wing subversives (trade-unionists, students, activists, etc.).

Political murders, kidnappings, and brutal military repression created a growing feeling 3 www.tortugascountryclub.com.ar


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of insecurity and danger, which led the upper class to settle permanently in their country

houses. Most of these gated developments were situated 25 to 70 km from the city

centre, a distance that allowed for daily commuting.

But the real boom of gated communities as we know them today took place

during the second half of the 1990s. During the 1990s in Argentina, the real estate

market prevailed over any effort of urban planning. More than four hundred gated

communities of different typologies were built within a radius of 30 to 70 km of the city

centre. Around 75% were set up after 1991, most of them concentrated along the north

and northwest corridors of the region, in close proximity to the motorway “Accesso Norte

– Autopista Panamericana”.

MOTORWAY REGION # GATED

COMMUNITIES

% GATED

COMMUNITIES

Acceso

Norte/Panamericana

Ramal Pilar/Escobar

North/Northwest 344 73.35%

Acceso Oeste/ Ruta #7 West 54 11.51%

Autopista BsAs-La

Plata

Autopista

Ezeiza/Cañuelas

South 71 15.13%

Table #1. Gated Communities and Motorways.4

4 Elaborated based on information from www.verdecountry.com


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Figure #2. Map of RMBA showing gated communities (green), motorways (red), and

railways (black).5

Notwithstanding, the boom of gated urbanization came late to Argentina when

compared to other Latin-American countries (like Brazil, Venezuela, or Mexico). In

Argentina’s case, after 1989 (first presidency of Carlos Menem) a neoliberal model

became consolidated, which promoted deregulations and privatization of public

enterprises and services. Menem’s government led a vast program of privatization of old

and inefficient state-run industries and services (including telecommunications, airlines,

gas, water, energy, social security providers, and railway transportation), attracting

5 Centro de Información Metropolitana (FADU/UBA), 2008.


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important foreign investments.6 This period marked the end of the welfare state, and a

big part of the population became unemployed (over 20% according to the INDEC7), was

left out of social plans, and in the worst of cases, homeless. It is worthwhile pointing out

that the historic housing deficit as well as the impoverishment of the middle class had

started years before with the advent of the military dictatorship (1976-1983). The

absence of social policies resulted in the paradoxical situation of economic growth

without social development.

The years following 1990 were marked by the arrival of foreign investments,

attracted by a favourable and receptive business environment, most of which were

directed to the real estate business, particularly to private urban developments. By the

year 2000, U$S 4,881 million dollars were invested in projects of gated communities,

shopping malls, and movie complexes in municipalities located in the second and third

rings of the RMBA.8

The breach between the rich and the poor determined the growing phenomenon of

polarization that found its territorial expression in the gated community. The middle

class became fragmented, and in this new urban system the enclaves of the wealthy and

the poor shared the same territory. To the new emerging middle class, a marketing

campaign was launched in 1995 promoting “a new way of life – the country life”, copied

from the North-American suburban model. The format of the gated community offered a

house in a secure environment, with lawn in the front and backyards, and maybe, for the

wealthiest of them, a golf course, an artificial lake, or polo court nearby. The new urban

6 Svampa, Los que ganaron. La vida en los countries y barrios privados, p. 282. 7 Statistics published by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos de la República Argentina (INDEC). 8 www.reporteinmobiliario.com


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archipelagos scattered around the periphery provided direct contact with nature (ensured

by low population densities, generous plots of land, and a constant presence of green

areas), and every other service and infrastructure found in the city. Maybe more valuable

than nature, gated community residents could be sure that their neighbours were from the

same socio-economic level as them. Social homogeneity is probably, with security and

the lust for nature, one of the strongest appeals of gated communities.

The gated community was not the palliative for the deficit in housing availability,

but the offer of a different lifestyle for those sectors that were able to escape the

economic crisis that hit Argentina by the end of the decade. A systemic banking crisis

reached its peak in 2001 when the government enacted a set of measures (informally

known as the “corralito”) that effectively froze all bank accounts for twelve months,

allowing for only minor sums of cash to be withdrawn. This meant that the lucky few

who were able to withdraw their money were now investing it in what seemed a safer bet:

real estate. The offer of housing in gated communities with private services and

infrastructure transformed the landscape of the metropolitan area, and was able to expand

unchecked by the lack of urban regulations in the affected municipalities.

The boom generated so much optimism, profits and speculation, that a new form

of gated settlement was introduced: the megaemprendimientos or “mega-developments”.

These are great master-planed communities including various central and semi-public

spaces and amenities (shopping centres, schools, hospitals and healthcare centres,

universities, etc.), surrounded by various residential gated neighbourhoods, each designed

to target a specific social and economic profile. Currently nine of these “private towns”


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or “private cities” have been completed. Nordelta, the biggest of such projects, in the

municipality of Tigre, is 1600 hectares broad, and is designed to house 100,000 people.

Figure #3. Masterplan of Nordelta, in the municipality of Tigre.9

These patterns of urbanisation are not exclusive of the Argentine suburbia. In

1987, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) also produced a

9 www.nordelta.com


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grandiose vision of a ‘multifunctional polis’, a ‘high-tech’ city of 100,000 people, with

carefully customised infrastructure, which was proposed for a site to the north of

Adelaide, South Australia.10 The pattern of infrastructure in many other “megacities” in

the developing world shows a notable lack of horizontal coordination, either within or

between networks. All efforts to use infrastructure to integrate the city in a

comprehensive manner have been abandoned. Instead, concessions are being offered for

private developers to put in highways, metros and telecommunication lines connecting

the places they most want to serve without real efforts to coordinate or integrate the

resulting networks. Massive new private toll roads and expressways complement those

operated by the state. These are oriented to the business enclaves and affluent residential

spaces. In this new system, the private sector has become the only force in the process of

territorial ordering. Its magnitude is of superlative proportions, since the collection of

gated communities represents a territory of approximately 400 km2, or twice the surface

area of the city of Buenos Aires.

Case Study: The Example of Pilar.

Pilar proves an interesting example when trying to analyze the consequences that

gated communities have on their host environment. Pilar has been somewhat of an

epicentre for the gated urbanization boom in the RMBA (see Appendix). This city of

233,000 residents in 2001 is situated in the third ring of suburbs, around 50 km northwest

of Buenos Aires. Pilar presents many advantages for real estate developments: its size,

access and location. Firstly, Pilar is a huge municipality, with a territory of 352 km2, in

10 Graham, Marvin, Splinting Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and Urban Condition, p. 337.


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contrast to the whole city of Buenos Aires, which extends for 200 km2. Secondly, the

municipality is reached by the “Panamerican” or “Northern Access” motorway, which

crosses the municipality between km 38 and 67. This proves to be the perfect distance

from the city centre for gated communities: far enough to offer cheap plots of land to

developers, and close enough to allow daily commuting to the city through the

Panamerican motorway. To these benefits we must add the cultural factor of it being

situated in the northern sector of the metropolis, which has historically been the favourite

direction for the extension of upper-class residence.

All these factors explain why Pilar was at the heart of the gated community boom

and is today the municipality with the highest number of fenced developments. The city

hosts 114 of them, equal to one third of all gated communities in the RMBA. These

developments account for 53 km2, or 14% of the municipal territory. Pilar also holds the

record for the municipality with the greatest population growth during the 90s, rising

from 144,000 residents in 1991 to 233,000 in 2001, which is equivalent to a 61.8%

growth.11 But the residents of gated communities themselves account for little of this

growth, since the municipality hosts 15,000 residents in fenced developments,

representing only 6% of its total population. The explanation is that gated communities

generated an economic boost for the area, attracting many workers. In the year 2000,

there were 8,300 houses in gated communities in Pilar. It is estimated that the

construction of each of them provides 60 jobs for 90 days, and that every inhabited house

creates 1.8 additional permanent job (security, maintenance, cleaning, gardening, baby-

sitting, etc.). The municipality of Pilar estimates that gated communities give direct

11 INDEC


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employment to 30,000 persons, and to that we must add the creation of many indirect

jobs, resulting from the economic development generated.12 This begins to elucidate the

total population growth exhibited over this decade.

Commerce and services followed the wealthy to the gated suburbia. Shopping

centres and leisure malls are popping up along the northern motorway, as can be seen in

the intersection of km 50 in Pilar. In 1991, a developer, anticipating the gated

community boom in Pilar, created a shopping centre at km 50, named Torres del Sol (Sun

Towers), containing 152 boutique shops. In 1997 a Village Movie Multiplex with eight

theatres, an arcade, a bookshop and a few restaurants opened right across the Sun

Towers. And in 1998, on the other side of the motorway was built another mall with 150

shops, a Jumbo hypermarked, and an Easy Homecenter. A new commercial cluster was

born in Pilar, competing with the traditional Pilar central business district, but clearly

oriented to the new suburbanites of the gated communities. But retail commerce is not

the only change brought to Pilar, at km 48, a five star Sheraton Hotel & Convention

Centre of 141 rooms was built. Pilar also saw a strong change in the educational

institutions that settled in the area: dozen of private schools opened, all bilingual in

English and offering courses in computer science. Two private universities have now

campuses in Pilar, the Universidad del Salvador (USAL), and the Universidad Austral,

with a campus of 70 hectares where in 2000 was inaugurated the university hospital,

counting with 150 beds and the most modern medical facilities.

12 www.webpilar.com


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Figure #4. Map of Pilar municipality showing land uses. (light green=gated

communities, blue=education, bright green=agricultural, purple=industrial,

yellows=residential, brownish green=rural).13

13 C.I.M (FADU/UBA), 2008.


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In fact, Pilar like many other districts of the region is undergoing a transformation

of its territorial configuration in which “the private” is gaining grounds over “the public”.

Gated communities carry the risk of polarizing the city, opposing the enclaves of the

wealthy few, to the precarious settlements found in the periphery of Buenos Aires. But

they are also a source of opportunities for the municipalities, generating an arrival of

high-income residents and a potential for economic development. Local governments

struggle to control the implementation of gated communities in their territories. There is

no national legislation that directs town planning, and there is not even juridical

recognition of gated communities as a form of urban development. This forces

municipalities to exempt developers from certain local rules (ordenanzas) in order to

accommodate and approve gated community proposals. Plans and regulations are poorly

enforced, by both a lack of political will and also a lack of concrete means to ensure their

application.14 Local taxes for gated community residents are also kept quite low

(between 10% and 15% of what they pay in service charges to the private administration

of the development), as part of the competition between municipalities to attract these

high-income residents. This might explain why Pilar, the municipality with the greatest

number of gated communities in all of the RMBA, was close to bankruptcy in the year

2000.

Final reflections about private urbanisations.

We saw along this paper that gated community developments in the Metropolitan

Area of Buenos Aires were a massive phenomenon during the last decades, modifying

14 Dubois-Maury, “Les villes argentines”, pp. 695-714.


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strongly the face of the metropolis. We also noticed the inherent risk of building a more

dual city, where gated communities exacerbate social contrasts in a moment of

unbalanced economic growth, creating deepened socio-economic inequalities. This

provides a real challenge for town planning and urban governance, for state and private

actors together. Because of the structural lack of real powers and resources of the

municipalities, it is clear that local authorities have the greatest difficulty controlling

these urbanizations, and following the dynamism of the private sector, boosted by a

speculative market. Paradoxically, the poor neighbourhoods surrounding gated

communities, as well as local governments, draw uncertain benefits from the installation

of wealthy people in the area. Local political leaders hesitate between the desire to try to

get more economic benefits from the fenced developments, and on the other hand, reduce

even more the local urban rules and taxes, in a context of territorial competition between

municipalities to attract the developers and residents of these gated communities.

Likewise, the expansion of “private towns” with their own system of services and

infrastructure, rules of coexistence, codes of edification, and disciplinary comities in

charge of administering neighbour relations, puts into question some unresolved issues of

governability. There has been no in depth study of the different forms of administration

for “private towns” with capacities of over 100,000 residents. To the lack of legal frame

in which to place these new forms of urbanization, we can add other issues such as

unregistered labour within said developments; the withholding of land for speculation; or

the evasion of fiscal fees.

Yet the biggest transformation in the real estate business was the proposal by

entrepreneurs to “generate city”. The leading real estate companies are developing


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commercial and service areas to supply the private urban developments close to them.

But the lack of coordination between these networks, combined with the pattern of large-

scale packaged developments results in oversupply in some areas and lack of services in

others.

We have to question the extent to which the word “city” applies to these

developments, since they have consistently failed to address issues such as integration

with the immediate surrounding urban texture, physically, culturally and economically.

To Rem Koolhaas these startling new urban spaces mean that:

we are confronted with a new urban system. It will never become a city in the recognizable sense of the word: each part is both competitive with and has a relationship to each other part. Now these parts are being stitched together by infrastructures, so that every part is connected, but not into a whole… In this model, infrastructures which were originally reinforcing and totalizing are becoming more and more competitive and local. They no longer pretend to create functioning wholes, but now spin off functional entities. Instead of network of organism, the new infrastructure creates enclave, separation, and impasse.15

Paradoxically, gated communities create a strange mix of social distance –

symbolized by walls and fences – and physical proximity between the richest and the

poorest dwellers of the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires. The gate itself summarizes

this double meaning, for it can be welcoming as well as exclusive. The presence of these

islands of wealth amongst a sea of popular neighbourhoods creates frustration and envy,

and finally generates insecurity and violence, those things that gated communities were

supposed to protect their residents from.

15 Quoted in Splintering Urbanism, p. 350.


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The spatial fragmentation of the land is nothing more than the physical

representation of the growing polarization of social classes, and the ongoing expansion of

“private towns” continues with no clear political or administrative solution within the

municipalities that contain them. The result of these actions have generated an enlarged

and hybrid periphery, where islands of urbanisation with very low densities have

consumed more surface area than the entire city of Buenos Aires, yet less than 1% of the

metropolitan population lives there.


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Bibliography CENTRO DE INFORMACION METROPOLITANA. Facultad de Arquitectura y Diseño Urbanístico – Universidad de Buenos Aires. October, 2008 <http://www.fadu.uba.ar/sitios/cim> DUBOIS-MAURY, Jocelyne. “Les villes argentines: une urbanisation sans urbanisme?”. Annales de Géographie, #556, 1990. GRAHAM, Steve and MARVIN, Simon. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and Urban Condition. London: Routledge, 2001. INDEC. “¿Qué es el Gran Buenos Aires?”. República Argentina: Ministerio de Economía y Producción, 2003. October, 2008 <http://www.indec.mecon.gov.ar> TRONCOSO, Oscar A. “Las formas del ocio”. Buenos Aires. Historias de cuatro siglos. Vol. II. Romero, José Luis; Romero, Luis Alberto (dir.). Buenos Aires: Altamira, 2000. SVAMPA, Maristella. Los que ganaron. La vida en los countries y barrios privados. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2001. Online sites and publications consulted: http://www.tortugascountryclub.com.ar http://www.verdecountry.com http://www.reporteinmobiliario.com http://www.nordelta.com http://www.pilardetodos.com http://www.webpilar.com


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Appendix16

DISTRICT % POPULATION GROWTH PRIVATE URBANIZATIONS CABA -7.6 0 1st ring Avellaneda -4.45 0 Gral. San Martín -0.41 0 Hurlingham 2.87 1 Ituzaingó 10.86 5 La Matanza 11.94 1 Lanús -3.43 0 Lomas de Zamora 2.85 0 Morón -7.54 0 San Fernando 4.5 10 San Isidro -1.94 24 Tres de Febrero -3.95 0 Vicente López -5.42 0 2nd ring Almirante Brown 14.42 0 Berazategui 17.85 8 (2 “private towns”) Esteban Echeverría 23.79 15 (1 “private town”) Ezeiza 59.26 14 Florencio Varela 37.5 0 José C. Paz 23.08 2 Malvinas Argentinas 21.5 5 Merlo 20.17 1 Moreno 32.96 11 Presidente Perón 47.03 3 Quilmes 1.46 1 San Miguel 19.01 15 Tigre 16.03 57 (2 “private towns”) 3rd ring Cañuelas 33.26 8 Escobar 41.58 41 Gral. Rodríguez 52.79 10 (1 “private town”) Marcos Paz 56.76 1 Pilar 61.8 114 (3 “private towns”) San Vicente 31.25 3

16 From www.verdecountry.com

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Gated Communities in Buenos Aires, Argentina