Dossier: Recent urban policies and real estate entrepreneurs in the construction of the city

Abstract

This dossier arises from an effort to combine research and researchers focused on the study of the underexplored link between "firms, entrepreneurs and bureaucracies" in the production of the city in Argentina. This effort materialized in 2018 in the conference "Firms, entrepreneurs and state bureaucracies in the production of urban space through history" organized in Buenos Aires. One of the central axes of the Conference had to do with understanding the city as the result of a process of social production in which various agents dispute a material and symbolic place in it. In this sense, the texts gathered here converge in trying to understand urban policies as a product of the articulation of different actors with diverse rationalities and from various scales. To do this, they critically mobilize notions such as ‘urban regimes’ or ‘growth machines’, to highlight particular constellations or specific moments in which certain alliances between actors are activated to achieve certain ends. The authors propose a nuanced view of the capacity and homogeneity of these alliances, pointing out the importance of local oppositions, limits, resistance and dynamics.