As Diego Armus and Juan Suriano note in a recent review essay, Argentine urban history has been eclectic and sometimes imaginative in approach, but “short on debates” and “mainly focused on nuances.” While in the last decade scholars have produced detailed social histories of topics such as popular housing, neighborhood sociability, and political protest in modern Buenos Aires, they have not shaped these piecemeal advances into a overall argument about the city. With La grilla y el parque, Adrián Gorelik has taken a bold step toward a new interpretation. Building on the patchwork of existing studies, Gorelik has put innovative questions to sources ranging from tango lyrics to architectural plans and produced a compelling account of Buenos Aires between 1887 and 1936. In these 50 years, the population of the city increased more than six times, from 400,000 to 2.5 million inhabitants, and nearly nine times in terms of built-up area, which by 1936 covered virtually all the land within its administrative limits. This dramatic expansion is the heart of Gorelik’s account: how urban growth was shaped and understood, and how it transformed public space and local politics.

Why is the city shaped as it is? Unlike previous social and political histories, Gorelik does not take the form of the city for granted, as the more or less spontaneous product of market logic. On the contrary, he argues convincingly for the central role of the municipal administration in consciously shaping that form, and explores with great subtlety and sophistication the debates about the future city among politicians, architects, and citizens that previous histories have ignored or side-stepped. At the center of these debates was “public space,” the contested site of the cultural and political transformation of city and nation. In 1875 Sarmiento said that “only in a vast, artful, and accessible park, will our people be a people; only here will there be no foreigners, no natives, and no plebeians. . . . a model of what the entire country could be.” He was proposing to form a public by reforming space, overcoming the dual “barbarism” of the pampa and the colonial city and, more broadly, remaking local and national citizenship on a democratic model. Although his project failed, the terms he set for the debate endured and serve as organizing motifs for Gorelik’s study: the reforming power of parks, the ambiguous status of the street grid — triumph of modernity, or persistence of colonial structures? — the general relationship between municipal politics and national politics, and the specific relationship between transforming Buenos Aires and transforming the nation.

Trained as an architect, Gorelik approaches familiar questions from unexpected angles. He is superb on the internal contradictions of the Generation of 1880, uses a thoughtful examination of monuments to reframe the cultural history of Argentine nationalism, synthesizes and deepens earlier scholarship on neighborhood identity and politics in the 1920s and 1930s, and rethinks the complex relationship between citizenship on municipal and national levels in these years of urban expansion, integration, and reform. His account of the end of reform in 1936 is masterful, tying the emergence of a “reactionary vanguard” of architects and intellectuals to the decisive actions of the municipal government, which turned the city inward on itself by sharply marking its outside border for the first time (with the Avenida General Paz) and making a new mythical center for city and nation: the Obelisco. Brimming with insights and dense with architectural and political allusions, this book rewards close reading and, above all, offers a way for urban and cultural historians to address fundamental questions of citizenship, nationalism, and public space in an imaginative new register.