In this theoretically incisive and empirically well-grounded work, Anahí Ballent examines state intervention in urban planning, affordable housing programs, and aesthetic debates in Buenos Aires during Juan D. Perón’s administration (1946 – 55). Conceiving of aesthetics, technique, politics, and ideology as mutually constitutive processes, this work explores the material and symbolic dimensions of Peronist involvement in the urban landscape and contributes to the historiography of Peronismo and to ongoing innovation in cultural urban studies (e.g., Adrián Gorelik, Graciela Silvestri, Jorge Francisco Liernur, Fernando Aliata, Mark Healey, and others).
Ballent suggests that Perón concluded a process of urban reform and modernization of the built environment begun in the late nineteeth century. She argues that the critical novelty of the Peronista social project lay in the ways Perón politicized architectural languages and charged urban landscapes with political symbolic meaning. Building on the literature that has characterized the Peronist state as a politically...
