Informality or informality? Popular Habitat and Urban Informalities in Consolidated Urban Areas (City of Buenos Aires)

During the last years, a debate on the consequences of investment and renewal processes in metropolitan areas has unfolded. Some authors have approached these processes from the perspective globalization bears on the cities and conclude that the deepness of social exclusion processes tend to generate a dual society (Sassen, 1991) In effect, the tertiarization of the economy, the privatization of urban services, and the development of real state related to new forms of consumption and recreation have deeply transformed the economic, social and urban organization of metropolitan Buenos Aires since the 70' s. "After almost 20 years of deindustrialisation and decapitalisation (deterioration of urban services, and infrastructure, reduction of real state value) the grand urban interventions of the 90' s integrated bits of the city to the globalized space and network society" (Keeling 1996). These interventions have in common the fact that they respond to a private logic, following a similar model, recycling spaces previously devoted to activities actually considered obsolete They requalify bits and pieces of the territory and produce an increase of the existing contrasts between the degraded southern area and the north always more modern, more dense. During many years it was assumed that the role of the state, through its public policies, was to tend to forms of integration-what some authors have named "a great homogeneity within the heterogeneity" (Kessler, 1999) Is it possible that in the present context the tendency has dramatically changed and that private logic changes bits of the city without tending towards integration? Are we in the presence of a tendency towards more homogenization in economic and social terms in the urban territory? Or is it possible that in the same territory, groups socioeconomically differentiated are integrated? Or is it possible that displacement and exclusion tend to predominate? What do these policies have, or how they differ from the previous ones in relation to possible integration processes? Having in mind these questions, our work analyzes data produced for our research project "Processes of change in the southern area of Buenos Aires city". Within this framework we developed a survey to 500 head households' residents in the southern area neighbourhoods- 500 in Barracas and other 500 in La Boca. The survey analyzes the position of the households in the production examining the head household insertion in the work force, the position of the household relative to the habitat, perceptions on urban change and tourism, etc. Likewise different government levels interventions on the city's territory are depicted, trying to show the effects on the territory and recovering the inhabitants view.