From Villa to Barrio: Buenos Aires's Villa 31 and the Politics of Belonging

1. Introduction

In Buenos Aires, Villa 31, one of Argentina’s most emblematic informal settlements, also referred to as villas miserias, stands as both a physical presence and symbolic reminder of the city’s deep socio-spatial inequalities. Located in the affluent district of Retiro and home to over https://ipr.blogs.ie.edu/ Aires’s Villa 31 and governance in one of Buenos Aires’s villas miserias Mugica. The paper interrogates how urban integration and the state. Villa 31 has long represented an example recent urban renewal initiatives, including the Barrio Mugica settlement through large-scale infrastructure investments. such efforts and policies remain largely top-down, instead and residents. Drawing on theoretical frameworks like the ways in which participation and belonging are shaped a qualitative analysis of media reports, policy documents and tables (mesas de gestión participativa) and grassroots media rhetoric and practice. Residents are often consulted paternalistic forms of governance. The study argues that participation using strategies that centre local agency. It management bodies, community media partnerships and promote decision-making from those who are being of Villa 31 demonstrates that integration cannot be imposed participation from token inclusion into a practice of shared belonging, local narratives, socio-spatial inequality 40,000 residents, it has long been associated with economic marginalisation, infrastructural neglect and social stigma. Historically framed as a space of danger, Villa 31 has long occupied an ambiguous position within the urban imaginary, being physically located within the most affluent part of the city while symbolically excluded from it. This paradox highlights how the settlement is highly visible on both a physical and symbolic level: everyone in Buenos Aires knows about it and acknowledges its central, unavoidable location, yet at the same time, it remains socially and politically invisible, excluded from official discourses. Although there have been earlier, often fragmented interventions, recent state-led initiatives, particularly the ‘Barrio Mugica Integration Project’ (Barrio Mugica is the name for the former Villa 31), mark a shift in approach. These multimillion dollar programmes have sought to transform this stigmatised villa into a more formal neighbourhood (barrio) through urban development policies in housing, infrastructure and public services. The aim has been to place citizens at the centre of the design and decision making, with the law which governs the upgrading process requiring citizen engagement in all phases of the planning and implementation. However, as The Guardian and Gehl People observe, these efforts have also exposed ongoing tensions between modernisation and residents’ sense of belonging, raising questions about who is truly able to take part in shaping the neighbourhood’s integration into the city. The shift from villa to barrio is therefore not only a spatial transformation but also a deeply political one. Whilst the Buenos Aires city government has portrayed integration as a necessary developmental project, residents have often experienced the contrary, viewing it as an externally imposed process that disregards local voices and their history. Scholars such as Matthew Toland highlight how urban policies affecting Villa 31 have historically been shaped by paternalism and institutional heteronomy, restricting local autonomy. Therefore the gap between participatory rhetoric and the reality of those living within the settlements reflects a broader failure of communication between residents and governing authorities. However, participation often remains tokenistic, framed as informative consultation rather than genuine cooperation or collaboration where their voices are heard. Here, Villa 31 exemplifies a wider challenge in participatory governance: the politics of who gets heard. Some voices are amplified whilst others are pushed to the margins. Similar tensions have surfaced in other Latin American urban upgrading efforts, such as Rio de Janeiro's favela integration programmes, where state-led interventions ended up reinforcing preexisting hierarchies instead of genuinely empowering residents, generating widespread dissatisfaction and frustration. This article therefore asks the following question: How can participatory governance mechanisms foster genuine collaboration between Villa 31 residents and external authorities during urban integration processes? It considers what forms of communication could strengthen bilateral collaboration, and how local narratives challenge the state’s official discourses of modernisation and development. Drawing on models such as Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation, this paper situates Villa 31 within wider debates on participatory urbanism, inclusion and the right to the city. By examining community assemblies, participatory management tables (mesas de gestión participativa), and local media initiatives, as well as resident perspectives documented in Matthew Toland’s 2021 study, the research explores how residents articulate belonging and resist top-down representations of their neighbourhood. The paper will begin by tracing the historical evolution of Villa 31, highlighting the intersection of urban policy, class and race in shaping its social geography. It will also examine participatory practices and communicative structures within the integration process, comparing official narratives with local accounts. The discussion will then evaluate the disjunction between participatory ideals and their implementation, while the policy recommendations will propose mechanisms to institutionalise collaborative decision-making, strengthen community media and embed listening infrastructures into governance systems. The central challenge, this paper argues, lies in shifting from top-down planning to bottom-up collaboration, recognising that genuine integration requires not only material investment but also the redistribution of voice and authority. This will transform participation from a minimal consultation into a form of bilateral decision making. Theoretically, this paper is situated within debates on participatory governance and the politics of space. Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation provides a framework for distinguishing between tokenistic consultation and genuine citizen power; with many of Villa 31’s participatory mechanisms positioned on its lower rungs, marked by ‘informing’ and ‘consultation’ rather than ‘partnership’ or ‘delegated power’. In the Latin American context, theorists of participatory planning have emphasised the importance of grassroots urbanism, where communities act as co-producers of space rather than passive beneficiaries of state reform.

2. Background

Written into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, slum upgrading has prioritised community involvement and participation. Within Villa 31 there is no official sewage system, running water or an official power grid, with residents’ homes relying on improvised connections from the rest of the city and informal infrastructures. Its origins date back to when European migrants and rural workers in the 1930s began settling near the port in search of employment. Over time, successive waves of migration from Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru transformed the settlement into a diverse, transnational community. Yet, despite its longevity, Villa 31 has been persistently stigmatised, with the term villero being adopted and used pejoratively to connote criminality, low-income workers and poverty, reinforcing the area’s image as an internal ‘other’ within the Argentine capital. Throughout the twentieth century, governments alternated between policies of eradication and containment, rather than integration. During the dictatorship of 1955, for example, plans were drawn to eliminate the villas miserias entirely, reflecting a broader vision of the ‘modern’ city as homogeneous and sanitised, where forced relocation to the metropolitan area was suggested. The election of Mauricio Macri as mayor of Buenos Aires in 2007, and later as president, marked a narrative of necessary eradication of Villa 31, with Macri even stating before he was elected mayor that 31 had to be eradicated. However, his successor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta launched large-scale urban integration projects, most notably the Barrio Mugica Integration Project (2016-2020) which was supported by the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and UN-Habitat. This $250-340 million project sought to convert Villa 31 into Barrio 31 through 1350 new homes, as well as new schools, health centres and public infrastructure. Whilst the initiative promised social inclusion, many residents criticised its top-down implementation and lack of genuine participation. Government representatives, such as Diego Fernández of the Secretariat of Social and Urban Integration, framed the project as an effort to ‘educate’ and ‘formalise’ the community, language that reveals enduring hierarchies between policymakers and residents. The concept of needing to ‘educate’ the community suggests that residents of Villa 31 lack the knowledge to manage their own urban environment, needing the state to be the bearer of progress and development. Furthermore, the relocation of households beneath the Illia Highway and the hiring of external contractors instead of local workers all signalled a paternalistic logic that treated residents as recipients of reform rather than partners in transformation. These relocations have meant that many people have been displaced, with less accommodation available for the number of residents in the settlement, and the risk of gentrification being another significant concern. However, Fernández has acknowledged this risk of gentrification, explaining reforms to the Urban Planning Code, which created regulations regarding the use of air space and accumulation of plots.

3. Analysis

At a macro level, the transformation of Villa 31 into Barrio Mugica has been framed by the Buenos Aires city government as a milestone in urban inclusion. Whilst the project has reaped undeniable benefits, behind the rhetoric of integration lies a complex paradox between the official narratives of modernisation and local expressions of belonging. The city’s official discourse, centred on formalisation and progress, frames integration as a one-way process: a ‘marginal’ space that must be absorbed into the formal city rather than a mutual relationship in which the city must also adapt. This divergence exposes a deeper gap in communication between authorities and local residents. However, the urban development of Villa 31 has not only been implemented through material intervention but also through symbolic strategies. The renaming of Villa 31 as Barrio Mugica, in honour of the activist priest Carlos Mugica, who fought to improve the lives of the villeros before being murdered by the dictatorship of the 1970s, was an attempt at both rebranding and reordering the space’s place within the city. Whilst this gesture recognises and acknowledges the villa’s past and honours those who fought to protect it, the ongoing dissatisfaction among residents suggests that such nominal changes do not automatically dissolve stigma. These tensions become even more evident when examining how participation has been put into practice. At the micro level, the same paradox emerges in the institutional participatory mechanisms, which were introduced as part of the Barrio Mugica Integration Project. These include mesas de gestión participativa, neighbourhood assemblies and consultations organised by the Secretariat of Social and Urban Integration. These spaces were designed to ensure horizontal dialogue between residents and governmental organisations. However, in practice, participation often remained symbolic rather than substantive. Meetings were largely shaped by technical experts and political intermediaries, which meant that residents had little real influence over decisions that affected their own neighbourhood. This reflects what Arnstein would classify as the tokenistic mid-level rungs of participation, ‘consultation’ and ‘placation’, where citizens are heard but seldom paid attention to. To counter their position at the mid-level rungs of participation, bottom-up communication networks have emerged to challenge these hierarchies. Local newspapers, such as La Garganta Poderosa (the powerful throat), provide platforms for residents to share their own narratives. An example of this can be seen in an article in the Buenos Aires Times, which exposes how officials failed to protect residents in the neighbourhood during the Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the death of campaigner Ramona Medina. The pandemic only made these shortcomings even more visible, showing how inadequate infrastructure in the settlements directly affected the quality of life and health of their inhabitants. As a result, local newspapers and social media platforms have become informal accountability tools, recording what life in the villa is really like, citing housing shortages and the loss of community spaces. These initiatives push back official portrayals of the villa, highlighting community solidarity, creativity and resilience, whilst also holding the government accountable for their shortcomings. Therefore, such local media forms represent a listening infrastructure where participation is practiced as dialogue rather than compliance. In response to these limitations, grassroots actors have forged alternative spaces of bottom up participation. Local assemblies have coordinated with NGOs to co-design public spaces, advocate for fair relocation processes, and create participatory mapping projects that record the community’s evolving landscape. Furthermore, civil society organisations and residents have used the open contracting approach to build participation and inclusion processes into the design, so that residents too could have a voice in the decision making. The Civil Association for Equality and Justice (ACIJ) worked with the residents to collect data and monitor the progress of the works that had been promised. These initiatives mark an attempt to reclaim spatial agency, positioning residents as producers of urban knowledge. Nevertheless, structural barriers remain. The city’s institutional design still prioritises bureaucratic expertise over the knowledge people have from living in the neighbourhood, and funding streams remain tightly controlled from the top. This reveals how integration has only been implemented by top-down governance, rather than a shared process. True inclusion depends on redistributing communicative authority in initiatives such as ACIJ, empowering residents to define their own priorities and recognising the villa not as a problem to be solved but as a legitimate voice within Buenos Aires’s urban imaginary.

4. Discussion of Findings

The examination of Villa 31’s integration process reveals a persistent gap between participatory rhetoric and real participatory governance. The constitution of a ‘shared governance’ in the ‘Agreement for the Urbanization of the Villas’ was agreed in 2017 so that local organisations could participate actively in decision making and integration. Within this agreement, residents are also invited to participate through public meetings or surveys including the Participatory Management Council, a body made up of 25 members including neighbourhood representatives. However, whilst these agreements portray the Barrio Mugica Integration Project as an inclusive effort, in practice, decision-making remains centralised within the Buenos Aires city government. Independent monitoring data from the platform Caminos de la Villa confirms that the formal participation score for Villa 31 stands at only 54/100, highlighting the limits of these councils which, consistent with Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation, offer consultation, placation and the legitimisation of state authority. The Guardian’s reporting on residents’ frustration with being ‘talked down to’ exemplifies this asymmetry: participation exists, but communication is one-directional with locals stuck on the middle-rungs of the participatory ladder. As Toland notes, institutional frameworks in Buenos Aires restrict local autonomy by channeling decision-making through bureaucratic hierarchies. These dynamics reproduce paternalistic assumptions that state actors know best, undermining community trust. The result is a paradoxical form of ‘managed participation’, fostering superficial inclusion without empowerment. Furthermore, Rodríguez Larreta began to use the slogan ‘De Villa a Barrio’ (from slum to neighbourhood), promoting this urban transformation. However, this shift from villa to barrio, while symbolically framed as progress, has also reintroduced debates about the politics of belonging. Renaming Villa 31 as Barrio Mugica aims to destigmatise the area by integrating it into the city’s formal landscape. Yet, for many residents, this change carries varied meanings. On the one hand, it brings legal recognition, including the naming of street names, meaning that residents have an official address. However, on the other hand, it risks erasing the community’s history and identity. To rebrand the villa as barrio without addressing the inherent structural inequalities risks reproducing symbolic exclusion under a new label rather than tackling the root cause. This echoes other Latin American situations and development plans, including the favela ‘pacification’ (UPP) in Rio, in which integration projects sanitise informality without dismantling the structural inequalities and hierarchies that produced it. Ultimately, participation, or its absence, redefines what urban citizenship means in practice. In Buenos Aires, belonging has long been defined through more formal markers such as legality, property and infrastructure. For residents of Villa 31, belonging is more than this: it is also emotional and cultural; shaped by collective memory, mutual aid, and the everyday use of shared spaces. When participation is limited to tokenistic consultation, as Arnstein describes, these lived forms of belonging are pushed aside and replaced with a top-down idea of citizenship. In contrast, when participation is community-led and decisions are made through collaborative dialogue, real change can happen from within, allowing the barrio to shift from a space defined by exclusion to one acknowledged as an active contributor to its development. It is also important to consider how other countries have approached similar urban development policies and challenges. For example, in Rio de Janeiro, a large urban upgrading project took place between 1995 and 2006, costing over $600 million. However, despite these investments, local gangs attempted to reassert control by destroying new infrastructures such as street surfaces and street lights. This resistance reinforces not only a rejection of externally imposed change but also the limitations of development policies that focus on physical transformation without addressing underlying social dynamics, a recurrent theme also in debates about Villa 31. Therefore, in response, the Brazilian government implemented the Pacifying Police Units (UPP) programme in order to establish a permanent police presence in these favelas. This example demonstrates that transforming an informal settlement into a recognised part of the city requires more than material investment: it also depends on social development and community participation. Similarly, in Villa 31, urban improvements need to be accompanied by sustainable social investment, eliminating the assumption that physical development alone can produce transformation.

5. Policy Recommendations

To bridge the gap between rhetoric and practice, participatory governance in Villa 31 must move from representation to cooperation. This requires institutional and communicative shifts that place resident voices at the centre of every stage of decision making. It is also essential to ensure that the redevelopment programme is accompanied by sustained social investment capable of supporting the tangible development initiatives. Create co-management committees with real veto powers. Establish mixed governance bodies composed equally of settlement representatives, public officials and local NGOs. These settlement representatives should have binding authority over design, relocation procedures and budget allocation. Crucially, these settlement representatives must be able to reject proposals that undermine community priorities, rather than simply being passive attendees in meetings. Develop community media partnerships to share public narratives. Work with local radio stations and youth media organisations to circulate accurate information about ongoing projects and to create channels for resident feedback. Supporting media created within the community strengthens accountability and reshapes the public image of Villa 31 from within. By allowing residents to share their own narratives, these partnerships help challenge longstanding stigmas associated with the Villa, so that people outside are able to see the realities beyond the stereotypes. Implement participatory mapping to document and preserve local history. Coordinate resident-led mapping initiatives that record housing patterns, cultural landmarks and social networks. These maps not only support equitable urban planning but are also a way of cementing local memory, countering the possible erasure of the villa’s past through development. Offer targeted training in communication, participatory budgeting and urban planning to local residents. This would give them the tools they need to engage confidently with government officials and take on leadership roles. Building local leadership in this way helps cement participation as a sustainable long-term social investment rather than a short-term intervention. Urban integration should include transparent monitoring mechanisms that centre resident feedback. These should include public dashboards, surveys, review assemblies and audits. This helps hold the developers accountable and offers a concrete way of evaluating the effectiveness of their infrastructure reforms.

6. Conclusion

Ultimately, the case of Villa 31 demonstrates that participatory governance must be created from the ground up and cannot be achieved through top-down policies or tokenistic consultation. Despite the fact that the Barrio Mugica Integration Project has significantly improved infrastructure, with The Economist highlighting the laying of sewage pipes, paved roads, three public schools and a bank, its execution still demonstrates enduring hierarchies in decision-making and a lack of sincere cooperation between locals and officials. This paper has argued that genuine collaboration requires developing communication channels from within, centring local narratives and redefining integration from the ground up. By coordinating development with lived experience, this kind of bottom-up involvement is not only more democratic but also yields more credible and sustainable results. This paper highlights that participation must evolve from inclusion simply as representation, where residents are present but largely passive, towards inclusion as cooperation, where they help shape the policies that directly affect their lives. This shift from the informal villa to the formal barrio should not be understood as merely a change in legal status, but rather the beginning of meaningful recognition of residents’ right to participate and the acknowledgement that these spaces are integral parts of the city and can carry their own social capital. In a wider Latin American context, the experiences from Villa 31 echo the ongoing struggles seen in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas during the 1995-2008 urbanisation initiatives. In the favelas, community-led opposition to the development projects questioned centralised models of governance and upheld the legitimacy of local and parallel power structures. By investigating how transnational frameworks, like UN-Habitat's participatory planning agendas, function in local sessions, future research could expand on this comparison. Comparing policies across similar contexts remains essential for redefining and strengthening one’s own policy approach. As resident Silvana Olivera expressed: ‘In urban redevelopment, participation is key... It’s important to listen to the people because they are the ones who live there.’ Therefore, creating a sense of belonging in the city is not just about building new residences, but generating new conversations, building trust and the shared right to define the urban future.