In this well-researched and often insightful book, Gabriela Ippolito-O'Donnell analyzes the rise and fall of contentious forms of popular mobilization from the mid 1980s to the early 1990s in Villa Lugano, a low-income neighborhood district in southern Buenos Aires. The approach to contentious politics generally builds on existing literatures in sociology and political science, in addition to the work of social historians such as E. P. Thompson, George Rudé, and Hilda Sábato. Somewhat surprisingly, there is little engagement with the work of ethnographers and urban geographers, especially those inspired by Henri Lefebvre, the urban analyst who coined the term that Ippolito-O'Donnell uses as the title of her book.
In Chapter 1, “Contentious Politics in Space,” Ippolito-O'Donnell provides an extensive, if somewhat schematic, review of the literatures that have informed her thinking. She goes on to argue that contentious politics must be understood in historical and spatial terms. As such, Ippolito-O'Donnell situates Villa Lugano within long-running histories of Buenos Aires and within the uneven geographies of the city, including the inequitable social landscapes of Villa Lugano itself. She also argues that the rationalist, structuralist, and cultural approaches to contentious politics that she surveys need to be integrated and brought into greater dialogue.
In her analysis, Ippolito-O'Donnell at times achieves this kind of integration into the dialogue. This seems to happen, however, only across the entirety of the book, as each individual chapter generally covers a relatively distinct interpretive approach. The majority of the chapters, in fact, can fruitfully be read in isolation for both key empirical points and analytical findings, if not for the kind of integration that Ippolito-O'Donnell rightfully seeks.
Following the introduction and literature review, Chapter 2 provides an overview of popular mobilization across the twentieth century in Buenos Aires. Drawing primarily on historical literatures from Argentina, the chapter successfully demonstrates how important neighborhood politics became over the course of the twentieth century for low-income groups. Issues of housing and other forms of infrastructure became key themes through which social mobilization, patronage politics, and the demands of citizenship played out. In Chapter 3, Ippolito-O'Donnell provides a superb analysis of the inequitable development of Buenos Aires in the two decades following the end of the last Argentine military dictatorship in 1983. Supported by an array of maps, photographs, and graphs, this chapter reveals the deepening divisions that mark contemporary Buenos Aires in terms of income, security, and access to services, including legally sanctioned forms of housing.
In a fourth chapter, Ippolito-O'Donnell moves into the heart of her case study, demonstrating how residents and activists in Villa Lugano successfully mobilized to receive paved roads. This inspiring tale of success is tempered, however, by the fact that the paving proceeded extremely slowly, and efforts to receive other services, such as local access to health clinics, were much less successful. There was ultimately little enduring solidarity between residents and neighborhood organizations in their struggles for services and rights.
Chapters 5 and 6, most often through survey data and interviews, reveal the diverse views of Villa Lugano residents toward the legitimacy of state projects, the rights of citizenship, forms of social mobilization, and the role of political parties. In these chapters, Ippolito-O'Donnell successfully disaggregates the urban poor, underscoring just how divided and contentious residents of Villa Lugano can be. She returns to this theme in the final, poignant, chapter, “Hell is Other People,” describing how residents in different areas of Villa Lugano often stigmatize and mistrust people from other areas of the district. Many from legally established areas, for example, look down on those from informal settlements, a profound social division that was a major factor in Villa Lugano's failures in social mobilization.
The analysis provided in these final chapters, especially the last one, is compelling. Yet, it does not always clearly build from what has come before. Even though Ippolito-O'Donnell provides a chapter on the great divisions of Buenos Aires, in addition to some contextualization on the tensions in patronage politics and the troubling legacies of dictatorship, these issues are sparingly discussed in terms of the conflicts and schisms in Villa Lugano. Yet, it is these dynamics that are at the very heart of the book, and they are part and parcel of how the residents of Villa Lugano reside in their city and nation. In short, Ippolito-O'Donnell does not sufficiently integrate and synthesize the elements of her book within the fractured landscapes of Buenos Aires and the violent histories of Argentina, including its political economy. Still, Ippolito-O'Donnell's impressive research, theoretical insights, and deep knowledge of Argentina make this book well worth reading.
