The papers collected in this book were originally presented in 1980 at a conference held at the Library of Congress and cosponsored by the University of Texas at Austin and the Municipality of Buenos Aires. The opening section on “The Historical City” is the best organized. Jonathan Brown and Susan Socolow effectively set the stage, covering the first three centuries of Buenos Aires’s commercial, social, and spatial development. The late James R. Scobie, to whose memory the book is dedicated, provides characteristically incisive reflections on the city in the nineteenth century. Scobie emphasizes the need for further work on three critical periods: the 1810s, 1830s-40s, and 1860s-70s. Mark Szuchman’s comment suggests the need to look at porteño society in evolutionary terms instead of focusing on the fragmentation and discontinuities of the period.
Richard Walter begins the section on “The Contemporary City” with an excellent synthesis of the modern (1910-80) socioeconomic growth of Buenos Aires. Walter suggests new paths for research on the impact of twentieth-century change on the life of the urban dweller. Merlin Forster’s essay treats culture and poetry in modern Buenos Aires, focusing on the city as the source of creative inspiration. “Buenos Aires: Today and Tomorrow,” by Roberto Etchepareborda, discusses serious problems the city faces as a result of rapid population growth and industrial development. Finally, Joseph Tulchin calls attention to aspects of life in Buenos Aires endangered by the present path of urban development. He acknowledges the enormous debt of historians of Argentina to Tulio Halperín Donghi and Jorge Enrique Hardoy; it is indeed unfortunate that they did not participate in the conference.
The book concludes with “Two Final Perceptions,” a view from the provinces by Christian García-Godoy, a native of Mendoza, and an inside view by porteño Luis Arocena. Both of these contributions focus on the emotional significance of Buenos Aires. García-Godoy’s treatment of provincial admiration for the capital, however, neglects the equally persistent image of the city as the “head of Goliath.”
This book will be enjoyed by all who share a fondness for Buenos Aires, and scholars and students with a historical interest in the city’s development will find many useful suggestions for further research. For those more interested in the present, it provides little in the way of analysis of contemporary alternatives, though it does raise a number of pressing issues: the impact of migrants from the interior and from Bolivia and their settlement in villas miserias skirting the city; the disruptions of superhighway construction; the siting of industry and the threats to the green spaces that enrich quality of life in the city. The continued domination of the interior by the port requires that any plan for Buenos Aires’s future be of national scope. At stake is more than just the future of a large city; it is the future of a way of life.
