The flammable city: Infrastructure, temporalities, and social struggles in Dock Sud, Buenos Aires

This article explores the impacts of large-scale infrastructure operations in Buenos Aires. Focussing on neo-extractive and logistical infrastructures in the southern area of Dock Sud, it investigates how these infrastructures urbanise – namely, how they integrate into urban spaces and the socio-spatial and material dynamics they generate. It does so by investigating the relationships between materiality and temporality, highlighting their complex and multifaceted interplay. While adopting a view from below – that is, by analysing the social conflicts experienced by those living in the spaces surrounding these infrastructures – the discussion sheds light on how Dock Sud’s urban materiality is contested through the creation of distinct and often conflicting temporalities. Specifically, the article delves into the socio-material situation of Villa Inflamable shantytown by scrutinising what it terms the politics of ‘mientras tanto’ [meanwhile], showing how residents reversed the state’s and municipality’s promotion of a prolonged condition of waiting to confront their extremely precarious and hazardous urban conditions. It contends that the mientras tanto reveals the fragmented ‘time – space’ of infrastructure, shedding light on its profoundly uneven socio-material dynamics and the related disputes that play out at the level of temporalities. The article argues that Dock Sud can be understood as the manifestation of a flammable city – specifically, the combination of the tireless political action conducted by the residents on the one hand, and the severe environmental conditions that the area suffers on the other.