Cities for sale: Contesting city branding and cultural policies in Buenos Aires

A historical snapshot on cultural policies

City branding needs to be understood as part of the broader policy context in which it is embedded. In recent years, Buenos Aires’ urban cultural policy has experienced a shift from a concern with widening access to cultural activities under a ‘taking culture everywhere’ motif, to a focus on cultural policies as a magnet for global tourism and economic development. Since 1983, the transition to democracy after seven years of military government had seen the explosion of cultural activities in public space, previously censored and violently controlled by the armed forces. This revival in public culture was accompanied at the neighbourhood level by a municipally organised network of cultural centres, offering citizens a variety of lessons and workshops for free, ranging from football, drama, music, clowning and traditional forms of dance to ceramics, knitting, cooking, crafts and painting, among many others. However, by the 1990s, the political content of culture began to evaporate with the implementation of neoliberal policies whose seed was sown under the military dictatorship.

The 1990s were marked by neoliberalism in Argentina and in many Latin American countries, with a deepening of social inequality, growing levels of unemployment, poverty and insecurity alongside widespread social unrest and public funding cuts. A combination of bureaucracy, the corrupt relationship between the state and economic power groups, indifference towards social issues and a loss of credibility in politics led to a process of increasing de-politicisation of society (Wortman, 2009: 12). The denigration of politics produced by Menem’s era, characterised by corruption, media spectacles and rampant consumerism, led to the erasure of the political component of cultural activities through an emphasis on the economic, commercial value of culture. Previously created community cultural centres were closed down in 1993 as part of Menem’s capitalist cultural policy oriented towards spectacular mass culture in the form of the cultural industries and the proliferation of the shopping mall (Wortman, 1997).

Argentina’s financial entanglement with the International Monetary Fund triggered the government’s appropriation of individual savings in banks, which in turn led to these policies’ most visible impact: the economic, social and institutional crises of 2001–2002. Although in the aftermath of these crises public funding was widely cut and cultural activities were particularly hit, the revival of political participation in the public sphere – exemplified by public assemblies and clubs del trueque (barter clubs) based on solidarity and mutual cooperation – was accompanied by the re-emergence of non-commercial, voluntary and self-managed cultural initiatives, following their previous relegation.

Soon after, the arrival of Mauricio Macri as City Mayor in December 2007 brought about a ‘professional’ enterprise logic to cultural policies to distinguish his party (Propuesta Republicana, aka ‘Pro’) from what was seen as a large public sector ruled by an inefficient state. Such logic was behind a number of initiatives, many of which were aimed at promoting the city through culture in order to attract tourists and investors. These included urban regeneration projects in the southern and central city areas, attempts at ordering the public transport system through the creation of unique lanes for buses and bikes in some areas, and a boost to creative industry programmes through tax incentives and the spatial organisation of ‘creativity’ into specialised clusters.

In contrast, the reduction of existing cultural programmes, such as the cultural centres network ‘Programa Cultural en Barrios’, in place since 1983, and the closure of independent, non-profit cultural centres in the name of health and safety irregularities have given clear signs about the stance the city government would take towards grassroots culture in Buenos Aires. The election of Hernán Lombardi, a man with a background in tourism, ³ as Culture Minister would later confirm the subordination of the city’s cultural policies to policies for tourism development.

Cultural policies for city branding

Culture has been at the heart of the branding of Buenos Aires. Since the 1990s the construction of the city brand has been structured around culture’s role for urban regeneration, the development of the cultural industries and the preservation of heritage, as part of a marketing plan of a ‘city-company’ targeted at a globalised market (Bayardo, 2013: 105). Far from being a purely rhetorical operation, the city has been the target of urban renewal projects, which have been oriented towards privatisation and resulted from an alliance between the state and urban land, for the benefit of private business (Rodríguez et al., 2011).

This rise of tourist-oriented cultural entrepreneurialism in Buenos Aires, based not only on the exporting of tango abroad but also a wide range of spectacular festivals locally, has enabled the continuation of a form of neoliberal urbanism oriented towards globalisation (Kanai, 2014) with socio-spatial inequality, social exclusion and urban fragmentation as its key features. Despite the anti-neoliberal, progressive rhetoric of Argentina’s national politics, market mechanisms have continued to shape policy agendas, planning goals and urban interventions at the municipal level (Lederman, 2015). Rather than moving away from state restructuring, culture marketisation and public service privatisation, the ‘pro’ municipal politics has been oriented towards deepening the legacy of the 1990s. In contrast, at the national level the revival of the idea of a ‘national culture’ centred around the values of democracy, social inclusion, diversity and federal participation has highlighted, since 2003, the need to question a hegemonic neoliberal logic by implementing a popular national model for Argentina.

The city government’s invocation of culture for urban marketing happens in the context of the city’s decentralisation into comunas and in an operation that, apart from subordinating cultural policies to creative industry clusters – which follow global models of development professed by international organisations and which are friendly to real estate development – paves the way for the constitution of a territory centrally defined around ‘investors and talents’, rather than in relation to neighbourhood and barrio identities (Bayardo, 2013). In times of strong urban entrepreneurialism, emerging concerns about urban environmentalism, tied with creative city policy imperatives, can become productive in legitimising exclusionary neoliberal urbanism (Lederman, 2015). As an example, in the midst of political electoral campaigns and a severe housing crisis in the city, on 3 April 2015 Macri inaugurated the new and costly sustainable City Hall building by star architect Foster + Partners in Parque Patricios as part of a wider, creative industry-led urban regeneration scheme. This mobilisation of sustainability and creativity policy narratives gives the city ‘a green, clean and cool’ character and becomes productive in opening up undercapitalised areas of the city for private investment (Lederman, 2015) and middle-class consumption, limiting the urban imagination to a city branding-friendly operation.

From a creative economy perspective, the municipal government has kept some of the policies developed by the previous political administration to organise urban creativity spatially. Such policies have been implemented through the activities of the Design Metropolitan Centre (CMD), a governmental body created in 2001 to support small and medium sized businesses in the field of design, which under the Macri’s administration passed from being under the Culture Secretary remit to depend on the Economic Development Ministry, making explicit a view of creativity as an economic resource (for a review of the CMD, see Kanai and Ortega-Alcázar, 2009). A landmark of this administration has been the organisation of creativity into urban clusters, the so-called polos or distritos creativos. The polos model – currently comprised of four disciplines, from technology and design to audiovisual production and the arts – rests upon two pillars: a tax reduction policy for companies in the cultural and the creative industries and the agglomeration of their products and services for regenerating decayed areas in the south of the city, as well as reinforcing the cultural branding of the wealthier north.

Marketing, politics and the subordination of culture to tourism

Similarly, the city administrations that followed (Macri, 2007–2011, 2011–2015) have continued the branding strategy of Buenos Aires as the Cultural Capital of Latin America, developing an urban marketing programme based upon an alliance between culture and tourism as its central axis (Rodríguez et al., 2011). Currently, the city government uses a number of brands which are based upon the formal features of the political administration brand, mainly Macri’s signature colour; yellow (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

City brands of the Macri administration.

The ‘Buenos Aires, Cultural Capital of Latin America’ slogan ended up constituting a key element of the city’s tourism branding strategies for the foreign market. Yet this was a somewhat unlawful operation, since the brand was not produced by the Ministry of Culture’s Ente de Turismo – the only governmental body with the legal authority to create the city’s tourist brand (Law 2627/2007). For the national market, the brand ‘Buenos Aires, la Ciudad de Todos los Argentinos’ (BA, the city of all Argentineans) was aimed at rhetorically balancing the city’s centrality in the urban imaginary and its concentration of offerings, services and resources, in contrast to the poorer rest of the country – a historically tense relationship that dates back to the 19th century in view of the city’s economic and political pre-eminence.

In practice, the Haciendo Buenos Aires municipal government’s brand-slogan suggests the intertwining of urban development and political advertising. The current official city brand is based upon the Mayor’s party political marketing, failing to incorporate references to local resident’s cultural identities (Méndez and Tyrone, 2014). Here the political brand becomes the city brand, blurring the distinction between marketing and politics, with urban marketing becoming the only urban policy alternative under globalisation (Gorelik, 2002). This might explain why the Macri administration has not shown interest in creating the new urban brand legally – there is little motivation, since the city could be promoted through the publicising of (their) urban policies, subordinating the promotion of the city to the promotion of the local political administration.

Beyond the brand, Buenos Aires is promoted through a variety of attractions, ranging from theatre, tango and museums to steaks, Messi, nightlife and the Pope. ⁴ High impact international festivals, such as the Tango World Cup or the Book Fair, underscore the desired position of the city within a global cultural map, failing to address the neglected needs of local cultural venues and artists.

Three case-studies

In Buenos Aires, the non-commercial cultural landscape is vast and ever-growing, particularly since the late 1990s. The 2001–2002 crises paved the way for the emergence of myriad community initiatives which, through collaboration and self-management, provide the city with a lively, diverse and democratic public culture. Although often implicitly and from a bottom-up perspective, these initiatives also brand the city through their activities, networks, festivals and promotional materials, particularly in their contacts with international groups, challenging the top-down nature of city branding as the only possible means of urban promotion. Three are amongst the most well-known organisations in the city, two of which have a long tradition in the popular cultural sector. First, the Grupo de Teatro Catalinas Sur. The theatre group started in 1983, staging community-based street theatre as a way of reclaiming public space (after the bloody military dictatorship of the 1970s) through social participation and solidarity networks among residents of all ages in the barrio de la Boca, one of the most deprived – and most tourist-friendly – city districts. The arts are perceived as being a right for all, as a space of political resistance, memory and identity, as a transforming tool whereby to communicate and learn about history from a popular perspective. Free community arts workshops on traditional artistic forms, such as theatre, circus, puppetry, murga and candombe, are on offer and participants often end up becoming part of the cast of the various theatre plays. The multiple award-winning Group has become the inspiration for the growth of many other community-based groups, both nationally and internationally.

Second, the Circuito Cultural Barracas. It came into being after the successful experience of the Catalinas Group which shared similar goals and features. Since 1996 it has been located in the barrio de Barracas, also in the southeast part of the city, in a district characterised by social polarisation and fragmentation. It stems from the idea that art is a tool for social transformation, whereby quality of life, citizenship, creativity and social inclusion are enhanced both at the levels of the family and the neighbourhood. Working in street theatre, clowning and murga, mainly targeted at working-class residents of all ages, to produce collective arts practices represents for the Circuit ‘alternative forms of expression to neoliberal individualism’, thus promoting collective encounters among neighbours.

Third, the Centro Cultural de la Cooperación Floreal Gorini. This cooperation cultural centre was created in 2002 by the cooperative movement as a space for the formation of a ‘critical, left-wing and anti-capitalist way of thinking’, fostering social mobilisation and advocating the values of ‘cooperation, fraternity, peace, dignity, democracy and solidarity’. The centre offers a wide range of low-priced cultural activities, such as theatre, music, dance, cinema and arts courses and conducts research on a variety of social sciences subjects. The ideological framework around which its participatory activities are structured turns the centre into an alternative space situated outside the commercial culture circuits, although it is physically located within one of the most visited – the Corrientes Avenue.

Non-commercial cultural forms

The content of the activities in which these three cultural organisations are engaged reflect the importance of conceiving culture beyond its commercial forms:

[Culture] A set of social practices that express the world and also create it, tending to transform it by means of developing new ideas against the dominant thinking of individualism; culture promoting senses of identity inherent to the people. (Cooperation Cultural Centre Assistant Director, personal interview)

We understand culture not as fine arts but as all that means how a society lives, how it communicates, how it struggles, how it enjoys, all this is culture … the arts do not appear after solving economic problems, the arts come first and from there, from a collective dream we can transform the rest of society. (Barracas Cultural Circuit Director, personal interview)

We speak of culture as art, as memory, identity, work and organisation; and within the scenic arts, music, dance, language, puppets, all that we use to communicate, reflect on and think. (Catalinas Group Director, personal interview)

These broader views of culture are clearly bound up with artistic forms and a strong political content in terms of enabling social change. They differ from purified, ideologically ‘neutral’ views of culture, as depicted in city branding made by the local government, based on stereotyped conceptions of culture which exclude mixed and hybrid forms. In part this explains why the community cultural organisations showed no particular interest in being part of those initiatives.

Linked to these groups’ lack of interest in official city branding is also their historical relationship with the local government, which provided the framework for the negotiations over the benefits to be received through city branding infused with a cultural aroma. If there was no governmental support previously given to the cultural organisations, rarely did any benefit result from city branding campaigns. Considering that it is mostly the commercial cultural venues organising tourism in the city who benefit from city branding, especially those linked to tango dinner-shows in iconic neighbourhoods such as San Telmo or La Boca, community cultural centres do not see particular benefits arising from the exploitation of the urban brand through ‘culture’.

Through self-management, these organisations function on limited funds gathered through performances a la gorra (pay-as-you-wish method), sale of tickets and food on site, donations, membership fees, revenue for workshops, external financial assistance and limited city government subsidies. Even though they receive some public funding, this is not without its problems. The fact that on some occasions the directors of the Catalinas and Barracas organisations were offered political positions which they rejected, was pointed out as one reason affecting the allocation of public resources. Conversely, in the case of the Cooperation Cultural Centre, this problem was related to the content of its activities which are not ‘ideologically aligned to the official discourses’, as its director explained. Nonetheless, these groups have received awards from the government throughout their trajectory and jointly implemented programmes in recognition of their outstanding work.

Under the Macri administration, however, Culture Minister Hernán Lombardi’s approach to culture has given priority to international events over supporting existing cultural initiatives locally. Since 2008, social protests by artists and community cultural workers have been opposing Macri’s reduction of community cultural centres, demanding better salaries and formal employment conditions and defending intangible heritage and access to culture, viewing the local cultural office’s policies as a threat to the survival of popular culture in the city (Raggio, 2013).

The activities developed by these cultural organisations are strongly embedded in the local area. Issues concerning neighbourhood problems, such as pollution, floods, insecurity, crime and lack of solidarity, informed the content of their activities as an attempt to enhance inter-neighbour relations and strengthen community development. While a place-bounded view of culture underpins the work of these organisations, an important factor in their development is the link with other national and international organisations. This provides them not only with more visibility at the regional and international levels, but also with a significant exchange of experiences that nurture their everyday cultural activities. The creation of shared projects that transcend national boundaries was seen as an effective way of exercising pressure on the public policy-making domain so as to secure further resources locally, as well as learning from each other. Some of the cultural organisations studied here are members of the Latin American Network for Social Transformation, the National Network of Community Theatre and the Community Live Culture – People Make Culture Collective; others have agreements with Latin American universities for the exchange of information and experiences. Being deeply rooted in the local while aiming to reinforce the regional dimension differentiates these organisations from other cultural centres in the city, which have a different cultural programme, seen by respondents as ‘part of the commercial circuit of individualist consumption’, and ‘not of the community but for the community by the state’.

Contesting the brands

In the street, these contradictions are reflected in the very space of the promotional signs and the marketing slogans. Here I present three examples that contest the city (political) brand, by appropriating the official local government language, colour and font to revert its meaning and construct oppositional content. Macri’s slogan ‘Making Buenos Aires’ (Figure 3, left), referring to the city’s material redevelopment initiatives and highlighting the construction of the new underground line H (Haciendo is Making in Spanish), has been turned into a ‘Turning Buenos Aires to Shit’ condemnation, playing with the Spanish verb ‘to make’, in the context of a social protest. By adding ‘Macri: the city is not your company’, the sign establishes an explicit link between businesses, politics and urban destruction. In this case, this is not an official sign but one made by protesters.

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Figure 3.

Contestation over the Mayor’s branding signs.

Another example is street sign (Figure 3 centre) ‘Reporting: In 2 years, we did more than in the last 10. We are making up the lost time’, which makes an implicit reference to a common claim that the local government has done more than the national authorities, in power for over 10 years. It became ‘Reporting: In 2 years, we made more MONEY than in the last 10 …’ suggesting a repeated and familiar metonym associating local government directly with private business. Similarly, official construction sign ‘Making Buenos Aires’ (Figure 3 right) became ‘Un-making Buenos Aires’, through a simple creative linguistic act of political contestation, which shows how the brand can become instrumental for political resistance.

The idea of cities for sale has never been more appropriate in relation to Buenos Aires than under Macri’s administration, in view of the business logic it has applied to urban cultural planning, giving priority to symbolic and artistic productions that are market-friendly and profitable (Kanai, 2014: 1114). This echoes Dávila’s (2004: 61) study of the branding of East Harlem in New York, where tourism strategies showed a business treatment of culture and were not based on ‘culture’; instead the cultural industries were the object of economic interest, with the main beneficiaries being not the local residents or their needs, but rather developers and visitors.

Then it is not surprising that the current city’s visual identity has neither wide acceptance among citizens nor cultural identification with the city brand (Méndez and Tyrone, 2014). Yet this is not peculiar to the current Macri administration. In the words of urban marketing expert Puig Picart:

The problem I notice in Argentina is that people don’t trust their political institutions or their Mayors. Citizens don’t feel they are included in public policies. Rather, they feel they are being used … Buenos Aires positions itself as a brand in the world, despite its political institutions. (Puig Picart, cited in Reinoso, 2008, author’s translation)

These views were expressed a few years ago, when the aftermath of the 2001–2002 crises still pervaded media discourses and public opinion. Elsewhere (Dinardi, 2015) I have examined how the policy invocation of culture for urban regeneration in Buenos Aires operated under a logic that clearly speaks to the aforementioned quote: seen as an ideologically neutral, a-political resource, culture was expected to function as a panacea whose universal, ‘positive’ nature was taken for granted and was deployed to help ‘clean’ politics of its dirty image in post-2001 Argentina. Puig’s words also signal an important point that is sometimes forgotten in city branding accounts: that the city will brand itself, regardless of how it is officially branded by the local authorities. Like it or not, the real city imposes itself on the ideal city, defying official urban narratives targeted at wealthy tourists.