A Critical Analysis of the Housing Policies Aimed at the Extremely Poor: the Case of the Social Development Secretariat of Buenos Aires City

Abstract

Since the declaration in 2004 of a housing emergency in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, the different policies applied by the City Government have failed to resolve the problem. An essentially temporary situation (an emergency) has thus turned into a permanent one. The aim of this chapter is to examine the strategies through which the Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires discursively constructed its housing policies aimed at the extremely poor since the declaration of the housing emergency in that city in 2004 and until 2007.

This study was carried out within the framework of the University of Buenos Aires Science and Technology Project F127: ‘A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Discourse of Extreme Urban Poverty in Postmodern Argentina and Latin America: the Latin American Network for the Critical Discourse Analysis of Poverty’. The research was conducted by the Argentinean team of the Network, under the direction of Professor M.L. Pardo. The chapter was translated into English by Mónica Descalzi.