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Alexander Sell

• Herausgeber: Campus Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 514

Beschreibung

Nach dem Ende des Unabhängigkeitskriegs gegen die britische Kolonialmacht gerieten die Vereinigten Staaten in eine schwere Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise. Der hoch verschuldete amerikanische Staat verfügte über keine eigene Steuerhoheit und war auf freiwillige Kontributionen der 13 souveränen Gründungsstaaten angewiesen. Um die Kreditfähigkeit und damit die Handlungsfähigkeit der jungen Republik herzustellen, wurde ein verfassungsgebender Konvent einberufen, der den amerikanischen Staaten im Jahr 1787 einen Verfassungsentwurf zur Ratifizierung vorlegte. Alexander Sell kann zeigen, dass die amerikanische Verfassungsdebatte Argumente aufnimmt, die bereits im englischen Bürgerkrieg und der Glorious Revolution diskutiert wurden. Im Zentrum dieser Debatten der Frühen Neuzeit stand die Sorge, wie bürgerliche Freiheit vor der Macht eines starken Zentralstaats geschützt werden könne.

Leseprobe

Antonio Carbone

Park, Tenement, Slaughterhouse

Elite Imaginaries of Buenos Aires, 1852–1880

Campus Verlag Frankfurt / New York

About the book

Welche Wahrnehmungen und Vorstellungen von ihrer Stadt hatte die Oberschicht im späten 19. Jahrhundert? Antonio Carbone zeigt dies exemplarisch am Beispiel von Buenos Aires, wo sich – an einem Wendepunkt der Geschichte des modernen Argentinien und der globalen Stadtgeschichte – nach dramatischen Cholera- und Gelbfieberepidemien eine breite Diskussion um die »Krise des Urbanen« entzündete, die zu einer partiellen Umgestaltung der Stadt führte. In seiner Kultur-, Sozial-, Global- und Umweltgeschichte nimmt er besonders drei urbane Brennpunkte in den Blick: die industriellen Schlachthöfe, die von Migrant_innen bewohnten Mietshäuser und einen Park im Stadtteil Palermo.

Vita

Antonio Carbone works as researcher at the German Historical Institute in Rome.

Content

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Liberal Elites

Hygiene

Urban Space and Imaginaries

Critical History of Elites through Urban Space

Critical Junctures of Globalization: Park, Tenement, Slaughterhouse

Slaughterhouse: The saladeros and the Discussion on Industry∗

Hygiene and Medicine: Disease and Industrial Pollution

Saladeros between City and Country, Civilization and Barbarism

The saladeros and the Question of Industrial Modernity

Slaughterhouse: Conclusions

Tenement: The conventillos and the Question of Housing

The Invention of the conventillo: Hygiene between Private and Public

Visualizing the City: Conventillos, Panoramas, and Urban Desires of Orderliness

City of Neighborhoods, City as Totality: Concurring Imaginaries

The Social Boundaries of the City: Philanthropy and the Elites

Tenement: Conclusions

Park: Palermo, Elite Utopia for Buenos Aires

The Park of Palermo: The City, the Nation, and the World

Palermo, a Healing Democratic Spectacle

Park: Conclusions

Conclusions

Figures

Bibliography

Main Archives and Libraries Consulted

Main Newspapers, Journals, and Periodicals Consulted

Primary Literature

Secundary Literature

Acknowledgments

Books are often the result of a collective endeavor. The steps that have brought this study from being a simple idea to becoming a doctoral thesis and then a book would not have been possible without the contributions of many people, whom I would like to thank. I had the privilege of having Michael Goebel as supervisor of my doctoral dissertation and I am enormously grateful to him. He has followed with tireless patience the development of this study and has generously enriched and guided it with advice, comments, and sometimes with precious criticism. My gratitude goes also to Dorothee Brantz, who has been at my side from the early stages of this research and has constantly pushed me to go down roads less traveled. I have also greatly benefitted, especially in the periods I spent at Columbia University, from the inspiring insights that Gergely Baics generously shared with me. I am also very grateful to José Moya, Alexander Nützenadel, and Stefan Rinke who were essential to the development of this study, particularly in the initial stages of definition of the theme and research question. Regarding the final stages in the completion of this manuscript, I am greatly indebted both intellectually and personally to Sebastian Conrad.

The archival work behind this book was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which allowed me to be part of the Graduiertenkolleg “The World in the City” at the Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin. The fellows of this Graduiertenkolleg have become fantastic and inspiring friends. I would like to thank Afia Afenah, Marcela Arrieta, Elisabeth Asche, Sabine Barthold, Emily Bereskin, Laura Calbet i Elias, Christian Haid, Patrick Hege, Hanna Hilbrandt, Berit Hummel, Samuel Merrill, Johanna Rohlf, Anna Steigemann, and Meisen Wong. I owe special thanks to Annika Levels, Lisa Vollmer, and Botakoz Kassymbekova for being wonderful colleagues, friends, and for reading and commenting on many early drafts. I would also like to express my gratitude towards the entire Latin American History Colloquium at Freie Universität Berlin. I am particularly indebted to Cecilia Maas, Lucio Piccoli, and Katharina Schembs who had the patience to read and comment on almost the entirety of the manuscript. Without their enthusiasm in sharing their critical perspicacity and knowledge of Argentine history this book would not have been possible. I would like to extend my gratitude to my colleagues in the Global History department of Freie Universität Berlin, who enormously contributed in many ways to the completion of this book. I would like to thank Sarah Bellows-Blakely, Camilla Bertoni, Björn Blaß, Christof Dejung, Franziska Exeler, Michael Facius, Minu Haschemi Yekani, Lasse Heerten, Lisa Hellman, Valeska Huber, Christoph Kalter, Kristin Meißner, Timothy Nunan, Joseph Ben Prestel, Ulrike Schaper, Susanne Schimdt, Fabian Steininger, and Harry Stopes. I am especially obliged to Laura Wollenweber, who supported me as a colleague with detailed and insightful comments on many parts of this manuscript and shared with me as a friend the many laughs—and sometimes tears—of graduate student life.

The research for this book led me to spend long periods of time in Buenos Aires, a city I have come to love with enthusiasm. I am deeply indebted to many Argentine scholars, who generously helped me to find my way in the archives and libraries of Buenos Aires. I would like to thank especially Alicia Bernasconi, Maximiliano Fiquepron, and Graciela Silvestri. Diego Armus has been not only of great help in the process of identifying the right sources for my research but has been a constant intellectual reference and model. I would also like to express my gratitude to the librarians and archivists of the Biblioteca Nacional ‘Mariano Moreno’ and of the Instituto Histórico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. In Buenos Aires, I was lucky enough to meet Ingo, Kathrin, and Mariano, to whom I would like to express my deep gratitude for their friendship.

I would also like to thank Oliver Hochadel for reading and commenting on part of the manuscript and for being exceptionally supportive in one of the most challenging moments of this work. I am grateful to the entire sub\urban team for their great solidarity in giving me critical insights and generously reducing my editorial workload for a long period. I am indebted to Georg Wagner-Kyora for showing how intriguing the study of the urban past can be. Tom Alterman helped me with patience and precision to refine the manuscript and I thank him for his invaluable work. I am grateful to Maren Barton, Catharina Heppner, Jürgen Hotz, and Eva Janetzko from Campus Verlag, who accompanied with great kindness and competence the last phases of completion of the manuscript.

In the latter part of the process of writing this book, I had the great privilege of working at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin, whose librarians—especially Francisca Roldán Núñez—I would like to thank. In this period, I shared ideas, doubts, fears, hopes, and lunch with a group of fantastic scholars and friends, to whom I am immensely grateful. In addition to some I have already mentioned, I would like to thank Claudio Altenhain, Marta Lupica Spagnolo, Luciano Tepper, Jan Ullrich, Natalia Villamizar, and Rocío Zamora Sauma. I am especially grateful to Alina Enzensberger for helping me keep the wheel straight to get the heavy transatlantic ship to its final destination.

I would like to thank my sisters Lucia and Mariko, my friend Gabriele, as well as my parents Salvatore and Sara for their unwavering love and support. Clara Frysztacka has been a constant reference as a historian and friend throughout the process of thinking and writing this book. Without her constant solidarity and substantial contributions this book as well as many other beautiful things would have been inconceivable. The greatest debt I have incurred in these years is to Johannes Kup, my companion in life. I would like to thank him not only for being my emotional and intellectual anchor, but also for being a patient and tireless interlocutor who knows when to support and when to challenge me.

While what is good about this book comes from working with the people I mentioned and many more, its flaws are attributable to me alone.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Nino and Sebastiano who passed on to me their passion for history as well as for writing and teaching.

Introduction

This book concerns the history of urban space in Buenos Aires and of a specific social group, whom I call liberal elites. More precisely, in this study I look at the interlocking between the production of space and the city’s elites and, in order to do so, I primarily reconstruct urban imaginaries, namely the upper classes’ perception, conception, and envisioning of their city. Temporally, this study focuses on the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a major turning point in the history of modern cities and of modern Argentina. Within this wider temporal frame, this study concentrates on a series of dramatic epidemics that shook the foundations of Buenos Aires. These epidemic outbreaks, which were interpreted by contemporaries as crises of the urban, deeply questioned and destabilized the structure of urban space, triggering a wide discussion and a partial reconfiguration of the city. The analysis of hygiene as the main contemporary means to understand and come to terms with the epidemic crises serves as a tool in this study to explore connections between space and elite desires, values, and ideologies. In fact, hygiene drew connections between disease, space, and disparate aspects of society and the environment. Three spaces, the slaughterhouses, the tenements, and the park of Palermo, found themselves under the special scrutiny of hygienists and elites. The banning of slaughterhouses, the reform of tenements, and the creation of the park promised to tackle the problem of disease while giving rise to new visions for a city that would prove more responsive to the desires of the elites. In this study, I regard these three spaces as sites in which the local, national, regional, and global intertwined, and analyze the conflicts and convergences that were engendered by the entanglement of these different scales.

The focus on space and the discussion about it in the wake of the epidemics guide the structure of this book. Therefore, each of its three chapters revolves around specific forms of space that occupied a central role in the wider debate on urban space connected with the epidemics. The first chapter of this study concentrates on the saladeros, a specific La Plata River variation of industrial slaughterhouses, mostly located in the southern part of the city. These polluting establishments processed livestock that came from the surrounding prairies and produced export goods for the Atlantic market. The alleged role of these factories as the cause of the epidemics generated a series of questions concerning the place of industry in Buenos Aires and the city’s relations with both the surrounding countryside and the Atlantic market. Through the lens of the discussion about the saladeros, the chapter explores imaginaries concerning industry and the city’s position in both a regional and global context. The second chapter concentrates on the conventillos, tenements that housed lower-class and mostly foreign-born residents. These densely inhabited houses were also suspected of being among the main causes of the epidemics and, due to their location in the center of Buenos Aires, which was also home to the city’s upper-class porteños, as the inhabitants of the Argentine capital are called, provoked a discussion about the urban presence of workers, their housing, and more generally on relations between different classes. Finally, the third chapter analyzes the construction and first years of the park of Palermo, located on the northern outskirts of the city. The park emerged after the scourge of the epidemics as a solution that would make the city more salubrious and beautiful, and therefore prevent the outbreak of further epidemics. The chapter reconstructs how elite desires materialized in this space and explores the ways in which the park, as a liberal utopia, was viewed as the catalyst for a complete reconfiguration of the aesthetic appearance of the city, class relations, and Buenos Aires’ connections with the countryside, the nation, and the world.

The temporal frame of this study roughly spans the years between 1852 and 1880. From a political historical perspective, the three decades analyzed in this study were pivotal for the final decision on the institutional status of the city of Buenos Aires within the Argentine nation. The discussion about the role of Buenos Aires as both national capital, and customs and commercial intermediary between the country’s internal regions and the Atlantic market, had occupied Argentina since its de facto independence from Spain in 1810. Buenos Aires was, in fact, both the richest port city, enjoying lucrative far-reaching commercial relations, and the capital of the country’s wealthiest and most populous province. The year 1852 marked the beginning of a new era, in which free-trade oriented elites came to power. The end of Juan Manuel de Rosas’s authoritarian regime in 1852 resulted in the secession of Buenos Aires from the confederacy. From 1853, the Liberal Party of Buenos Aires, headed by Bartolomé Mitre, governed the city and its province without any significant political opposition. In 1861, liberal porteños were able to expand their political hegemony to include the entire country and Bartolomé Mitre became President of a reunited Argentina. Despite being highly contested in the remaining provinces, this opened a period of porteño hegemony over the whole nation. The porteño power bloc around Mitre began to crumble over the difficulties accompanying the outbreak of the dramatic epidemics in Buenos Aires and the bloody Paraguayan War that pitted the allied armies of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against Paraguayan forces between 1864 and 1870. Following these crises, Nicolás Avellaneda, a candidate unpopular among porteños, became president in 1874, a change that signaled the ultimate crises of Buenos Aires’ liberals.1 Throughout these years, even while functioning as de facto national and provincial capital, the status of Buenos Aires remained one of the main issues of conflict between porteños and the other Argentines. After a brief armed conflict in 1880, the rising power bloc around Avellaneda and Julio Roca concluded the era of porteño hegemony by imposing the federalization of the city of Buenos Aires, its port, and customs revenues. The city thus became the official capital of the nation but, in order to curb its overwhelming power, was severed from its rich province.

The decades analyzed in this work thus represent a crucial turning point in the political history of relations between Buenos Aires and the remaining provinces of Argentina. In the central years of these decades, between 1867 and 1871, a series of dramatic epidemics hit Buenos Aires. From 1867 to 1869, cholera plagued the city in recurring waves, killing people by the thousands. In 1871, just two years after the end of the cholera epidemics, yellow fever broke out, claiming the lives of almost 14,000 porteños.2 Informed by the medical and hygienic theories of the time, urban elites largely interpreted these outbreaks as crises of the urban environment. The epidemics showed porteño elites that, while aspiring to control the whole nation, they struggled to manage the space and the population of their own city. Therefore, in addition to questions concerning the institutional status of the city, the fundamental structure of its space such as the width of its streets, the height and density of its buildings, the customs of its inhabitants, the presence of industry, the quality of its soils, and even the origin of its winds came under ‍scrutiny.

In this study, I place a particular focus on the timeframe of the epidemics as the primary means to approach the question concerning the history of urban space and elites. In fact, contemporary knowledge viewed the epidemics as a quintessentially urban problem and the sense of urgency, doubts, and fears unleashed by the diseases spurred contemporaries to discuss fundamental elements of urban space and its connection to the city’s everyday practices. Seminal studies in the social histories of cities such as those of Louis Chevalier, Richard Evans, and Frank Snowden all focus on epidemics as a heuristic and narrative tool to access the intricacies of urban history.3 In each of these investigations, the epidemics constitute a dense but spatio-temporally limited cross section, as crises that immediately questioned all aspects of urban life, which enables a formulation of narratives that bridge compartmentalization between social, cultural, economic, and environmental accounts. Inspired by these works, this study concentrates primarily on the smaller timeframe of the epidemics between 1867 and 1871, while also delving into the preceding and following decades to track both the genealogy and progression of the imaginaries and processes under analysis.

Liberal Elites

Throughout this book, I use the term ‘liberal’ both to foster a global contextualization of Buenos Aires’ elites and to ensure a clear periodization within Argentine history. In Buenos Aires, ‘liberal’ was principally a self-denomination of a group that initially organized around the Liberal Party.4 Since there was no substantial opposition to the liberals in Buenos Aires during the 1850s and the first part of the 1860s, the term does not designate a specific sector among the urban upper classes.5 However, the term ‘liberal’ is, firstly, important in distinguishing the elites that ruled between 1852 and 1880 from the previous power bloc supporting Juan Manuel de Rosas’s authoritarian regime, as well as from the partially newly founded group that came to hold the reins of the so-called “conservative regime” after 1880.6 Secondly, the term ‘liberal’ facilitates the situating of Buenos Aires’ elites within the broader European and American framework in which they saw themselves.7 In fact, if their liberalism was not always very strict in political terms—and one could arguably affirm that there is no such thing as strict liberalism—they certainly shared a liberal cultural horizon with other urban American and European bourgeois that comprised references to republicanism, free-market ideology, modernity, and individual freedom.

As used in this study, the term ‘elites’ refers to the leading group of a complex alliance between different sections of society. Porteño liberal elites may not necessarily have had common economic interests or a sentiment of class belonging, but they did share similar political, moral, and aesthetic references. For instance, the prominent Argentine historian Tulio Halperín Donghi remarked that different social groups such as landowners and merchants converged in support of the liberal hegemony in Buenos Aires, despite their partially conflicted economic interests.8 In selecting the elites as the object of analysis, this book highlights a wider group of actors than the so-called ‘generation of 1837,’ as referred to in historiography. This last term has traditionally designated a handful of leading politicians and intellectuals who occupied key positions between 1852 and 1880 and shaped their liberal and romantic sensibility around the Salón Literario, which was founded in Buenos Aires in 1837.9 The idea of the ‘generation of 1837’ conjures up an image of a very limited group of intellectuals and politicians. This book instead looks beyond the circle of the ‘generation of 1837’ and also considers other pivotal figures in the production of space, such as hygienists, physicians, city officials, entrepreneurs, journalists, and artists. The term ‘elites’ therefore denotes a group that is broader and more complex than a small group of intellectual and political leaders but simultaneously conveys, as intended, a sense of both a numerically exiguous yet powerful group.10 Although both ‘elite’ and ‘liberal’ are unspecific terms to some extent, their lack of specificity makes them a perfect fit for the purpose of referring to a social group that had unstable boundaries and weak internal cohesion but that nevertheless shared a common though elusive frame of political, moral, and aesthetic references.

Hygiene

If the conception of epidemics as crises that destabilized urban space is pivotal to this study, the history of hygiene is likewise an essential component of this book as it represents the primary contemporary means of understanding and responding to these crises. Before professionals in urban sociology, architecture, and urban planning appeared on the scene, hygienists were the main experts in the field of the urban.11 In two of the three chapters of this study, hygiene represents the starting point of the analysis. By choosing hygiene as a central point of departure, I do not intend to suggest that hygiene was the cause of the fears concerning the epidemics and urban space; indeed, the number of fatalities was in itself sufficient to do so. Nevertheless, hygiene was the discipline from which contemporaries attempted to make sense of epidemics. On the one hand, hygiene reproduced deeply-rooted anxieties, while on the other hand it connected these concerns to the urban environment and reconfigured them in peculiar ways.

Four main aspects of the ability of hygienists to reconfigure preoccupations concerning urban space are especially relevant for this study. Firstly, from a heuristic perspective, hygiene provides a tool to reconstruct middle and upper-class desires and fears in their connection with space, materiality, and practice. As Bruno Latour has underlined, hygienists often conceived their scientific field as virtually unlimited and all-encompassing. They programmatically described and intervened in all possible aspects of life, on “food, urbanism, sexuality, education, the army” as well as on “air, light, heat, water, and the soil.”12 Hygiene grouped and articulated every possible fear, desire, and expectation of bourgeois urbanites. These fears and hopes literally concerned life and death and thus also facilitate the reconstruction of arguments and rationales that “lay outside simple calculations of profit”—as Linda Nash states—and therefore offer an insight into the moral economies of the urban middle and upper classes.13 Furthermore, the system of values associated with hygiene is not abstract but articulated in adherence to concrete environments, practices, and spaces. In other words, hygiene connected bourgeois moral economies with a sometimes prodigiously detailed system of prescriptions regarding bodies, space, practices, and morality. If hygiene analyzed and fragmented the world into a myriad of pieces, as Michel Foucault argued,14 it was also a tool of synthesis that grouped together the most disparate elements of society and the environment. The holistic epistemological system of hygiene connected health, morality, and aesthetics with matters such as the width of streets or the quantity and quality of air. Hygiene therefore represents the foundations from which to gain a greater understanding of the complex system of connections that formed the bedrock of the relationship between elite imaginaries and materiality.

Secondly, hygiene connected moral economies and aesthetic bourgeois taste to materiality in a peculiarly political way. Thus, hygiene was an articulated ideological system that formed part of what Bruno Latour calls the “scientific religion” of the second half of the nineteenth century. Hygiene thus created a largely coherent system that offered a version of reality and a pragmatic set of prescriptions, which in turn enabled not only the navigation of individual life but also fostered dreams of social reform. However, hygiene did not present itself explicitly as a belief system but rather as a system based on objectively and empirically proven facts. The betterment of society promised by hygiene rested on a scientific and objective basis and was therefore viewed as untainted by the factionalism of political interest or opinion. Hygiene differed from religion in the sense that its way of producing truth was not based on divine revelation but on an epistemological system that allegedly allowed nature to speak in its own right.15 It was therefore at once a political apparatus in that it constituted the basis for profound social reform, while ensuring that any such reform of society would be implemented on the basis of a scientific objectivity that denied its partiality. In summary, hygiene can therefore be seen as a political project that aimed to “eliminate political dispute” in the name of health, an allegedly objective value, and scientific reform.16

Thirdly, as part of the “scientific religion” that aspired to eliminate political dispute in the name of scientific truth, the multiple levels of convergence between hygiene and liberalism, as the broad political and cultural framework of the rising urban bourgeois of the second half of the nineteenth century, are particularly striking. Even though liberalism was a disparate agglomeration of ideologies, it possessed a defining core in presenting itself—as Simon Gunn argued—as a project of restoring nature. Resting on the idea of nature speaking in its own right, the scientific religion inscribed itself in economic and political liberalism that in turn presented itself as a ‘natural’ form of government. For instance, returning to the origins of liberalism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand ultimately rested on a concept of the market as a system that could regulate itself due to the natural laws which underpinned it; John Locke, the main theorist of liberal contractarianism, also imagined liberal society as a path to ensuring natural rights. As Simon Gunn and James Vernon have argued, liberalism “had its roots in the long eighteenth century but came of age during the nineteenth century and sought to ‘restore’ what was projected as a natural condition of liberty and freedom.”17 Hygiene encapsulates the ambivalence of liberalism that was both a project aimed at restoring the alleged natural freedom of humanity as well as a governmental system that sought to produce what Patrick Joyce called “the rule of freedom.”18

What is more, the promise of the “scientific religion” to eliminate political dispute through scientific objectivity corresponded to specific idiosyncrasies of the Argentine liberalism of the 1850s and 1860s. As Halperín Donghi reconstructs in his Una nación para el desierto argentino, Bartolomé Mitre, the leader of the porteño liberals, did not view his party as a representation of specific class interests. In fact, resting on an originally egalitarian declination of liberalism inscribed in the anti-ancien-régime revolution of 1810, Mitre refuted class-based interpretations of society. His liberal party attempted to oppose the violence and factionalism that characterized Argentine society and politics with a project that held the utopia of eliminating and overcoming political strife as one of its core values. As Halperín Donghi argued, the superiority that liberals assigned to their position “did not derive from the pretension of faithfully representing a social reality in the political field […] but rather, on the contrary, from the pretension of identifying with a system of valid ideas […].”19 Mitre and the porteño liberals did not regard their position as the political articulation of their socially situated vision of society but as a project based on truthful and universal ideas. In a similar way as was the case in Britain regarding the relationship between liberalism and imperialism, as Uday Singh Mehta argues, liberal universalism was deeply connected with the idea of an unquestionable civilizing mission,20 which in the Argentine case was articulated in the form of an imagined patronizing relationship between the enlightened liberal elites vis-à-vis the other layers of society. This study shows that while this project intended to ‘civilize’ Argentine politics by overcoming factionalism and political violence, it in fact resulted in a systematic de-legitimization of political opponents that finally produced deep fractures within society. The link between liberalism and science, which regarded the political as a field for the implementation of universally “valid ideas,” was not exclusive to hygiene. In fact, further scientific fields could provide the allegedly “valid ideas” that the liberals strove for. However, the specifically holistic nature of hygiene, which enabled all aspects of material, moral, and aesthetic life to be packaged together under the guise of science and in turn to produce direct linkages between socially situated imaginaries and materiality, grants it a crucial position in an investigation of the history of urban space.

Urban Space and Imaginaries

Informed by the idea that urban residents and space reciprocally constitute themselves, I view the two objects of this study, urban space and elites, as deeply entangled. Indeed, inspired by the work of Henri Lefebvre, this book aims to historicize space and to reconstruct its constitution as an ever-changing social arrangement.21 In order to formulate a research question that is able to explore the production of space through a combination of a range of factors, this study resorts to the concept of the urban imaginary. Néstor García Canclini and Armando Silva perceive the urban imaginary as an aesthetic category by which the aesthetic, or the domain of perception and experience, is the result of the convergence between individual senses, socially constructed categories, and materiality, thus enabling a perspective on the entanglement between physical, mental, and social space.22 In a similar fashion, Alev Çinar and Thomas Bender view urban imaginaries as a way of regarding the city as “a field of experience” in which a dialectic between the physical and the social constitutes space.23 According to Bender, this emphasis on experience and perception shifts scholarship away from the ahistorical dilemma on the urban “essence” towards a historical consideration of urban space as a contingent arrangement “marked by complex, conflicting, multiscaled, and dense processes, relations, and interconnections.”24 Bender and Çinar underline that as the result of socially situated horizons of desire and taste, urban imaginaries are configured as competing narratives “conditioned by underlying relations of class, ethnicity, gender, race, or religion [seeking] to attain a hegemonic status.”25 Therefore, urban imaginaries are always plural, contingent, and socially situated. By linking the questions concerning a social group and urban space, this book investigates how the liberal elites of Buenos Aires perceived and contributed to producing their city. More precisely, elaborating on the idea of the urban imaginary, it investigates how this experience was constructed at the intersection of socially situated horizons of desire and taste, global and local power relations, and materiality. Furthermore, it investigates the ways in which these imaginaries translated into proposals of urban reform and finally how these proposals were articulated, given the constraints created both by the confrontation between concurrent imaginaries and materiality.

Critical History of Elites through Urban Space

One of the central ideas of this study is that a focus on the production of urban space allows complementing the intellectual history of elites by countering its potential phantasmagoric tendencies. In fact, elite writings, fantasies, and desires for a certain urban space did not automatically bring it to life, as if by magic. The focus on urban space, intended as an arena where complex, multilayered, and diverse social constructions entangle and clash, allows a critical sense of perspective to emerge, from which the ambivalence and limits of the historical contribution of elites can be observed more clearly. Therefore, this book not only reconstructs how elites conceived and envisioned their city but also investigates the extent of the successes, limits, contradictions, and ambiguities that emerged as a result of the encounter between elite desires, the constraints of materiality, and the wishes of other social groups. In this regard, even though the entire study focuses on a group of white bourgeois men, its goal is to show the partiality and ultimate fragility of their imaginaries. As Donna Haraway argued, one of the main biases underlying the imaginaries of bourgeois men concerns their assertion that the minority position that they occupy is both universal and objective, thereby systematically marginalizing alternatives and rendering them invisible.26 By highlighting both internal contradictions and ambivalences within elite imaginaries and their confrontation with alternative and conflicting imaginaries, this book reveals their partiality and aims to avoid the reproduction of their one-sided claim of universality and objectivity.

The need to figuratively plunge intellectual history into materiality in order to redress its potential phantasmagoric excesses, and to show the partiality of elite imaginaries through the means of urban history is especially urgent in the case of the porteño elites. In fact, despite its great diversity in terms of style and political background, historiography has conferred a role on the porteño elites in many cases that I consider to be problematic. This is especially true for the elites of the decades between 1852 and 1880, which historians commonly refer to as the years of ‘national organization,’ thus the period of modern Argentina’s inception. Historians have often turned to these years and to the liberal elites who ruled the country during this period in the search for the origins of Argentina’s national greatness, or alternatively its contrasting misery. On the one hand, so-called ‘official,’ state-supportive, and celebrative historiography has succeeded in projecting this group of men as the symbolic pantheon of the nation and declared them the heroic founders of the nation’s greatness. On the other hand, ‘revisionist’ historians have preferred to view them as responsible for having sown the seeds for the suffering that followed. Right-wing ‘revisionists’ considered the liberals as the primary corrupters of the original rural, creole, and gaucho spirit of the nation. Left-wing ‘revisionism’ has instead portrayed the policies of the liberal elites as the driving force behind the country’s submission to British and international capital.27 Though the consideration of these elites has become far more nuanced and multifaceted since the 1980s, due to the scholarship of Argentine historians such as Tulio Halperín Donghi and Hilda Sabato, this tendency has been relatively slow to make inroads into Anglophone historiography on Argentina. Nicolas Shumway, for instance, spotted the ideological origins of the authoritarianism and populism in these elites that went on to afflict Argentina in the twentieth century.28 More recently, historian Julia Rodriguez identified the unique connection between physicians and state elites that emerged in the last third of the nineteenth century as an explanation for what she describes as a general failure of the Argentine nation “ to live up to its promise.”29 Outside the strict field of history, scholars driven by dependency theory have also viewed the creole elites, not only of Argentina but of Latin America in general, as a lumpenbourgeoisie that was entirely subjugated to European and North American capital, both culturally and economically.30 Similarly, Walter Mignolo has considered the creole elites as utterly incapable of delivering any form of original cultural or economic contribution whatsoever.31

Notwithstanding their diversity, ‘officialists,’ ‘revisionists,’ and dependency-theory-inspired scholars converge on one point; the liberals of Buenos Aires were capable of steering the destiny of an entire country—arguably also of the whole of South America—and laying the foundations that underlie its identity even today, for better or for worse. These narratives have implicitly ascribed coherence, logic, clairvoyance, and a power bordering on omnipotence to this group of men. By looking at urban space, this study intends to question this implicit myth of omnipotence and, therefore, the centrality of these elites. In order to do so, I programmatically delve deeply into elite perceptions, knowledge, desires, and fears. This approach reveals that elite imaginaries were not a coherent system but rather a series of arrangements dictated by contingent urgencies and fears that rested on fragile elite-internal compromises. This focus on elite imaginaries proceeds to expose their contradictions and ambivalences, revealing that the elites—like the emperor in the famous tale—have no clothes.

Critical Junctures of Globalization: Park, Tenement, Slaughterhouse

The temporal frame of this work originates in Argentine national historiography but simultaneously constitutes a privileged vantage point from which to observe the interlocking of the urban history of the American and European continents.32 In fact, the rise of steam navigation and railways, mass migration, and urbanization within the selected time frame also accelerated global circulations and led to new transnational urban experiences. Epidemic diseases soon began to expand in pandemic waves across the world, most notably cholera. Cities across the globe faced analogous health crises that produced a feeling of synchronized urgency in both the discussion and reformation of urban space.33 Aside from the epidemics, shared new challenges connected major cities throughout the American continent, Europe, and beyond. On the American continent, for instance, the populations of cities as geographically distant as Chicago and Rio de Janeiro exploded for the first time during these years, while New York and Santiago de Chile engaged in urban reform by inaugurating new landscape parks. At the same time in Europe, Haussmann carried out his famous reforms in Paris. Buenos Aires underwent a series of similar changes in this period: urban elites planned and executed major urban reform projects, including, for instance, the inauguration of the public park of Palermo; the population grew prodigiously, from roughly 50,000 in 1855 to almost 450,000 in 1887, a boom only paralleled at the time by Chicago.34

Starting from these transnational experiences of urbanization, this study shows that porteño elites imagined their city as having a profound connection to other places, mostly to cities in Europe and on the American continent. At the same time, by reconstructing these imaginaries, the study reveals that they were also deeply rooted in local idiosyncrasies. Porteño elites mostly referred to Paris, London, and New York and sometimes to Vienna, Berlin, or Santiago de Chile as cities that embodied their imagination of urban progress. However, although they all agreed on identifying these cities as models for Buenos Aires to some extent, the content of these models was fiercely contested. For instance, while it was argued by one section of elites that industry was necessary in a modern city, others disagreed and imagined an unpolluted city as the standard of civilization. All referred to London, Paris, or New York to substantiate their diverse and partly diverging positions. As this study shows, major cities in Europe and America were a strong reference point that enabled porteño elites to articulate their desires and visions for Buenos Aires. However, the specific content of these models was also controversial and open to contrasting interpretations.

By showing that urban progress for porteño elites did not automatically involve a relationship of subordination to and imitation of urban models produced elsewhere, this study contributes to the debunking of Eurocentric myths that have interpreted nineteenth-century global urban history as a mostly unsuccessful effort, carried out by a sizeable majority of cities across the globe with the aim of catching up with a handful of cities in the North Atlantic region. The liberal elites of Buenos Aires did not regard their city as a copy of western European and North American models. At the same time, the North Atlantic models have had an indisputable influence on the history of Buenos Aires, as with many other cities. Therefore, this book rests upon an unsolvable tension. Drawing on Jennifer Robinson’s Ordinary Cities on the one hand, it questions the urban hierarchies and regional categories that have often conjured up an image of Buenos Aires as a surrogate for European urbanism.35 On the other hand, it analyzes the ambivalent power hierarchies that characterized relations between Buenos Aires and other cities on the American continent and in Europe. In this study, the references made by porteño elites to other cities are considered part of both a global and local urban dialogue that implied ambivalent and multiscaled hierarchies and power relations. In other words, I contextualize the American and European models within the local debate on urban space and highlight that they were just one among a number of factors, such as Spanish American heritage, for instance, or the fear of epidemics, that contributed to shaping the urban imaginaries of the elites.

Finally, by analyzing the urban space of Buenos Aires and the imaginaries of its elites, this study contributes to the field of global history by delving deeply into local history and shedding light on what Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann called “critical junctures of globalization.”36 The concentration on specific spaces within the city and on a determined group of actors who operated simultaneously on multiple scales enables an investigation into the micro-level conflicts and challenges caused by the intertwinement of different scales. The focus on the intricacies of the local aims to counterpoise the “sense of totalization” and “analytical imprecision” that, for instance, urban historian Anthony King detected in global-history and global-city narratives and in “the smooth, circular, and evenly balanced spherical image” that they convey.37 If global history emerged as a critique of history’s traditional role in sustaining nation-states, its interpretation as an enthusiastic celebration of transnational exchanges, flows, and connections risks diminishing its critical power, especially vis-à-vis global capitalism. In an effort to follow a critical path within global history, this book does not underline the consistency of connections, but rather emphasizes the ambivalent, uneven, and brittle nature of urban spaces at the problematic crossing of global, national, regional, and local scales.38 Considering urban spaces as critical junctures of globalization, this study invites viewing Buenos Aires not only in its national or Latin American context but in its location at the crossing of different regions and scales, thus synchronizing its history with that of other major cities on the European and American continents, such as New York, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and London.39

Slaughterhouse: The saladeros and the Discussion on Industry40∗

In the 1850s, porteño newspapers commented thoroughly on the new opening of almost every brick, candle, soap, tannery, and meat-salting factory. Indeed, industry was one of the main issues occupying the minds of the urban elites of the period. For instance, a series of articles published by La Tribuna in 1856 marked an enthusiastic celebration of the opening of a gas factory for a new streetlight system. The author of the articles saw major progress, both in the factory and the new streetlights. In his opinion, gas would bring the “century of light” to Buenos Aires and “clarity” into the darkness caused by the regular use of bothersome oil lamps.41 Notwithstanding the journalist’s connection between industry, progress, and modernity, the gas factory was forced to endure workers’ strikes and several “attacks” by the “enemies of gas” during its first months of operation.42 Many porteños feared the pollution and risk of explosion that were linked to gas production. In fact, while some saw both the gas factory and industry more generally as forces that guaranteed wealth, progress, and modernity, others regarded such developments as a hygienic, aesthetic, and social threat and as an obstacle on Buenos Aires’ path to a clean, beautiful, and harmonic modernity.

Especially the saladeros, the meat-salting factories that represented the major manufacturing branch in Buenos Aires, engendered mixed opinions and emotions. The saladeros were slaughterhouses that mainly produced cowhides, jerked beef, and tallow for the export market. These factories were associated with major economic and political interests, yet they were also the cause of dramatic pollution levels that inspired a vast array of fears and concerns. Supported by hygienist arguments, many perceived the pollution caused by the saladeros as a threat to public health. During the cholera and yellow fever outbreaks between 1867 and 1871, many questioned the saladeros’ right to pollute and endanger the lives of the city’s inhabitants. Most notably, the dramatic yellow fever epidemic of 1871 triggered a controversial discussion on the saladeros that eventually resulted in the decision to ban meat-salting slaughterhouses from the city and to impose a resettlement 50 km south of their original location on the southern outskirts of Buenos Aires.

This chapter reconstructs porteño elites’ views and emotions on the saladeros and industry in general, and how these conceptions intertwined with the production of urban imaginaries and space. The chapter shows the uncertainties, ambivalences, desires, and contradictions that characterized elite opinions and sentiments on the saladeros. By highlighting these contradictions, ambiguities, and uncertainties, this chapter proposes a new historical perspective on the relationship between urban elites and discourses of urban modernity. In fact, though the elites unanimously agreed on modernity as the requisite path for Buenos Aires to follow, this chapter reveals that industry was not necessarily part of the urban elites’ imaginary of urban modernity, and more generally that this imaginary of modernity was somewhat vague, undefined, and malleable.

The first part of this chapter shows how modern science and especially hygiene, as the main field of urban expertise of the time, was plagued by conflicts and contradictions. This first part illustrates, on the one hand, the importance of science for conceiving and producing urban space while, on the other hand, underlining that science and hygiene were contested and partially unsuccessful. The second part reconstructs the system of dichotomies, such as those between urban and rural, barbaric and civilized, and modern and backward, that characterized the way elites interpreted space. This second part revolves around the idea that the saladeros had an economic, political, spatial, and cultural position that troubled this system of clear-cut dichotomies. Finally, in the last part this chapter focuses on the discussion on the saladeros that took place during the epidemics and reconstructs the urban imaginaries that were connected with the two options of allowing the saladeros to remain in Buenos Aires or of banning them from the city.

Hygiene and Medicine: Disease and Industrial Pollution

At midday on January 3, 1868, a clear and hot day of the austral summer, as reported by the newspapers El Nacional and La Tribuna, porteños gathered in the streets to pay their last respects to the Argentine Vice President, Marcos Paz, who had succumbed to cholera on the previous day.43 On the day of the funeral, Buenos Aires appeared a city in mourning: the flags on all public buildings were at half-mast, as were the flags of the big ships anchored in the roadstead overlooking the city. Since the streets were already lined with hearses for the many victims of cholera, the government, calling for national mourning, decreed that a special funeral train should carry the body of the Vice President from his suburban house in Flores to the Estación del Parque, in the city center.44 As El Nacional and La Tribuna reported, common porteños and the remaining school pupils who had not fled the pestilence-stricken city stood at the side of the railroad waving and throwing flowers at the rolling bier. When the special train entered the station, a group dressed in black solemnly greeted the casket. The gathering of army officials, foreign diplomats, representatives of public institutions, and public servants formed a cortege behind the honor guard and the catafalque, pulled by four white horses in black cloaks. As soon as the catafalque began to move, followed by the men wearing black frock coats despite the summer heat, volleys of artillery fire sallied forth from the Spanish fortress onto the central plaza, while the city’s church bells tolled simultaneously. The cortege moved along the Calle Libertad towards the northern outskirts of the city to reach the Recoleta Cemetery, where the Minister of the Interior, the hygienist Guillermo Rawson, held a eulogy for the Vice President.

Rawson’s dramatic and patriotic speech paid homage to Marcos Paz, who was the incumbent head of state in the capital at the time of his death. The President, Bartolomé Mitre, was in fact in the Chaco, leading the Argentine army in a series of endless military operations against the Paraguayan army. In his speech, Rawson identified the Paraguayan President Francisco Solano López and the “cólera asiatico” as the two major enemies of the state.45 Rawson’s words served as a rebuttal to critics such as Raoul Legout, who had broken the spirit of national unity on the day of mourning in the columns of the francophone newspaper Le Courrier de La Plata, attacking both Mitre and his government. In the article, Legout argued that cholera was not a scourge of God but rather the result of Mitre’s ungodly politics, which had brought the devastating Paraguayan War upon Argentina. According to Legout, the allied Brazilian army had brought cholera to Buenos Aires and he identified therefore the war as the primary cause of the epidemic. The Francophone journalist asserted with extreme clarity: “Mitre is the cholera; the Alliance [the Triple Alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay against Paraguay] is the cholera.”46

As a leading member of Mitre’s government, Rawson replied to such criticism in his funeral speech, presenting an opposite argument. He did not deny the connection between the war and the cholera epidemic but rather suggested a different form of connection: cholera was not embodied by Mitre but in fact by President Solano López of Paraguay. Rawson illustrated that the death of Marcos Paz had followed the death of the Vice President’s son, who had fallen on the battlefield of Curupayty, a major defeat inflicted on the armies of the Triple Alliance by the Paraguayans. In Rawson’s words, Paz’s son had been killed by “the dark despot of Paraguay, who left his wilderness [selva] […] to invade our territory gratuitously and treacherously, […] troubling the pacific inhabitants of our land.”47 Paz himself had then fallen victim to cholera, another dark despot, described as “a mysterious enemy, who assaults its victims, chosen by the finger of God, in the dead of night, squeezing, devouring and freezing them without pity and eventually throwing their corpses into the mass grave.”48 In Rawson’s words, both Marcos Paz and his son were victims of treacherous and aggressive enemies, exactly as the Mitre government was the victim and neither the perpetrator of cholera nor the Paraguayan War. Responding to the accusations, which stigmatized the government’s engagement in the Triple Alliance as the true origin of the epidemic, Rawson argued that cholera and the Paraguayan army were the same, being both violent and barbaric. Therefore, the Paraguayan War and the battle against cholera were parallel and inevitable battles that a civilized nation such as Argentina had to fight to oppose violence and barbarism.

Concluding his speech, Rawson made an invocation: “Oh Lord, might the revitalizing and healthy airs, which made these regions famous and gave them name in other times [Buenos Aires literally means good or healthy air], come back […].”49 This last prayer succinctly expressed a further political aim of his speech. In this invocation, the Minister of the Interior underlined that the front of the war of civilization against cholera was in the city and that the enemy could be vanquished by restoring salubriousness. Hereby, Rawson’s statement encapsulated the idea that something in the urban space of Buenos Aires was responsible for the spread of epidemic diseases. Thus, if urban space was the breeding ground for the epidemics, the solution to the problem had to involve a reform of the city that aimed to civilize urban space and restore salubriousness.

Vice President Marcos Paz was not an isolated victim of the disease. In the first days of January 1868, cholera claimed approximately seventy lives per day in Buenos Aires. Many had already fled the city and sought refuge in the countryside, spreading the disease from the city to the whole province.50 To make things worse, cholera had already struck the city in the early months of 1867, causing approximately 2,000 victims.51 Following the outbreak in 1867, the disease peaked again in December 1867 and January 1868, causing around 3,000 deaths and, despite a reduction in the number of victims after this period, cholera did not completely disappear until 1869.52 In the first months of 1871, another disease, this time yellow fever, broke out, causing the most dramatic epidemic in the city’s entire history, with a catastrophic mortality rate that rose to almost 600 daily victims in April 1871. From February until May 1871, yellow fever killed 14,000 porteños, literally decimating the population.53

From 1867 to 1871, the city lived in an almost permanent state of epidemic crisis. An anonymous journalist for the Anglophone newspaper The Standard described the exceptional situation in Buenos Aires during the first cholera epidemic in April 1867, giving an impression of the scale of these recurring crises,

“fifty thousand people have fled this city within the last six days. The ordinary means of transit […] were insufficient, wagons and bullock-carts were called into requisition, and such was the extent of the stampede that hundreds of Italian workmen left for the camp on foot. On Thursday morning the scene at the Western Railway terminus baffled all description, such was the impetuosity of the affrighted crowd that although extra officials were posted at the doors, the human tide swept over every barrier. […] along the Calle Larga in Barracas from Monday evening until Good Friday morning there was one continued string of coaches, bullock-carts, wagons, horsemen, and even pedestrians, which impressed on the minds of even the strongest and most stoic, feelings unsusceptible of expression.”54

Similar scenes of panic and collective exodus also took place during the subsequent major epidemic outbreaks of 1868 and 1871. The dimension of this collective urban flight became even more dramatic during the epidemic of 1871, as fear of infection also spurred the federal government to leave Buenos Aires and order the evacuation of the city. An American commentator, describing the yellow fever epidemic of 1871, reported that as soon as news of the epidemic was confirmed, “the people became alarmed and began to leave the city by the thousands” and estimated “that no less than ten thousand people left the city in a single day.” The New York Times journalist calculated that during the Easter week of 1871, when the epidemic reached its peak, of the approximately 180,000 inhabitants of the city, only between 35,000 and 40,000 had not left their homes.55 Between March and April 1871, the commercial, political, religious, and social life of the city came to a complete standstill.56

Searching for the causes of these epidemics during the first cholera outbreak of 1867, an English-speaking journalist pointed out that “the saladero nuisance has poisoned the waters of the Riachuelo” and identified saladero pollution as the main source of the disease.57 The journalist’s concern about the saladero problem was not isolated, as many porteños feared that the pollution of the waters of the Riachuelo was linked to the epidemics. One of the most noticeable and universally perceived signs of pollution was the foul stench that pervaded the city, especially in the warm summer months and under specific wind conditions. In 1860, a journalist ironically reported that “the delightful scent of the Plata breeze coming from our river has kept the whole city well perfumed for the past day. The perfume of this excellent cologne could be perceived as far as the Plaza de la Victoria!”58 Accounts reporting on the foul odors reaching the city center were very common in the 1850s and 60s.59 The smell came from the Riachuelo, a small tributary of the La Plata River, and the location of most of the city’s saladeros. In fact, following a decree in 1822, which had prevented saladeros from being built within a radius of twenty leagues from the central plaza, the slaughterhouses had found a convenient site along the Riachuelo.60 The slow-moving stream, situated to the south of the city center, allowed the meat-salting factories to easily dispose in the water of their organic waste, the very origin of the strong smell that so disturbed the noses of the porteños.

Many perceived the foul stench from the Riachuelo as not only a disturbance to their noses but a clear danger to public health. The same journalist who ironically talked of the delightful “Plata breeze” also added that the foul odor was extremely hazardous and that only “thanks to the healthy airs [buenos aires] of Buenos Aires we are being spared from an epidemic!”61 Following the many instances of outbreaks in Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, or Buenos Aires, the newspapers highlighted the mephitic exhalations of the Riachuelo as one of the possible main causes. For instance, in 1856, when porteños received news of cases of yellow fever in the city, the press urged the municipal authorities to clear all “foci of infection” and published a collective denunciation of the “unpleasant exhalations of the saladeros.”62 As the same ghastly scenario repeated itself time and again throughout the 1850s and 1860s, the discussion on the saladeros’ right to pollute water—and consequently air—became inescapable.

The problem of industrial pollution, the resulting foul stench, and its connection with disease was an extensively discussed issue in contemporary cities throughout America and Europe.63 In Buenos Aires, as well as in other American and European cities, hygiene had become one of the main elements that enabled contemporaries to make sense of disease and, in the search for its causes, to establish a connection between disease and pollution.64 In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, the main feature of hygiene was precisely its focus on the investigation of connections between disease, health, and the most disparate aspects of society and the environment. Referring to cholera, José Antonio Wilde, a leading porteño hygienist, highlighted the all-encompassing nature of modern hygiene that studied “the relation between the terrible disease and specific conditions like filth, polluted air, the breaking of dietetic rules, overcrowding in small rooms, etc.” In this list, Wilde included pollution, individual diet, and overcrowding among the possible causes of cholera, showing the multiplicity of directions that hygienists followed in the search for the reasons behind the outbreaks of epidemic disease.65 In this search for connections, space, and especially urban space, played a pivotal role. In fact, relations between individuals, society, and environment materialized in the context of space. The interest in space was a consequence of the hygienists’ holistic conception of their discipline. Therefore, a reform of space would prove the foundation for a holistic intervention in the lives of individuals, society, and the environment in one fell swoop.

In his handbook for hygiene published in Buenos Aires in 1868, José Wilde also defined his opinion of the historical novelty implied by modern hygiene. Wilde contrasted present hygiene with an imagined pre-hygienic phase, in which urban inhabitants passively “waited with terror for epidemics,” and physicians limited their action to prescribing palliative medicines “to relieve the sick.” In opposition to this passive approach vis-à-vis epidemic disease, Wilde imagined modern hygiene as the science that actively intervened in society to identify and prevent the causes of disease.66 This form of interventionist hygiene revealed an intimate connection with a political utopia. Hygiene studied interconnections between society, individuals, and the environment, in order to reform and ameliorate collective health. In this sense, the goals of hygiene coincided with politics as two domains that both aimed to improve the well-being of society. In a fashion similar to his colleagues in Europe, Wilde believed that “hygiene is the first need of people, its conservation and development is the principal task of governments.”67 However, in contrast to politics, which was plagued by factionalisms, hygiene rested on a scientific investigation of the world that allegedly produced universal and credible knowledge. Wilde imagined himself and his fellow hygienists as holders of a knowledge that remained above political struggle and factionalism, and that could therefore guide a scientific reform of society. Wilde’s view was not isolated, and during the yellow fever epidemic of 1871, for instance, an anonymous journalist in the daily newspaper La Prensa expressed the hope that the shock caused by the epidemics had taught “the rulers and the people […] that there is something more than just politics in their hands.” The anonymous journalist added that both the nation’s leaders and its people should “start thinking that public health and life come before anything else.”68 Thus, in the view of the journalist, the question of life and death engendered by the epidemics gave the discussion on public health and consequently hygienists, as the main possessors of scientific knowledge of health, a new relevance and power.

Nonetheless, it would be misleading to equate power aspirations, such as those expressed by José Wilde and suggested by the La Prensa journalist, with actual power. In fact, the scientific and political prerogative, which hygienists granted themselves in interpreting the effects of pollution, did not necessarily meet the approval of the other actors involved in the production of urban space. As Diego Armus recently underlined, the hypothesis of a continuous, linear, and inexorable triumph of hygiene in Buenos Aires, as well as in other cities across Europe and America, requires substantial revision.69 Though hygiene may have enjoyed a special and powerful position among the disciplines that intervened in the interpretation and reformation of urban space, this position was controversial and challenged by many parties, nonetheless.

The influential position of hygiene in defining problems and solutions concerning urban space was partially derived from its early institutionalization and inclusion into the state apparatus. The porteño