Mercedes Di Virgilio

Di Virgilio works with a unit of analysis housing policy almost never uses: the residential trajectory, the full chain of a family's moves across decades. Seen that way, informality stops being a condition and becomes a stage. A family goes from renting a room to a relative's house, from there to a settlement, then to a consolidated villa, and sometimes to a state scheme, each step responding to a change in work, in family or in land prices.

The practical conclusion is uncomfortable for standard programmes. Handing over a finished house on the periphery, far from work, from school and from the network of relatives that makes survival possible, interrupts that trajectory instead of completing it, and some recipients end up renting out or selling the new house to return where they were. What is missing is not always square metres: it is location.

María Mercedes Di Virgilio is a sociologist, a CONICET researcher and a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, where she has directed the Gino Germani Institute and the Faculty of Social Sciences. Her field is popular habitat in metropolitan Buenos Aires, studied through surveys and life histories at the same time.

Barrios al sur (2014), which she co-edited, examines the renewal of the south of the Argentine capital and the effects of public investment on the residents already living there. Her other line is the social production of habitat: the observation that most of the Latin American city was built neither by the state nor by the formal market but by its own inhabitants, in stages and out of their savings, and that any sensible policy has to start from that fact.