David Foster: Buenos Aires as Cultural and Political Stage

Buenos Aires as a cultural and political stage is the subject of Buenos Aires: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production (1998), the book in which David William Foster (1940-2020), a professor of Latin American literature at Arizona State University, read the Argentine capital as a text: a city produced in literature, film, theatre, tango and protest as much as in the layout of its streets, and whose identity has been contested in the Plaza de Mayo, in cafés, in neighbourhoods and on screens. His thesis is that Buenos Aires, the most European metropolis of Latin America and one of the most cosmopolitan in the world in the twentieth century, is best understood through the works that represent it, because those works do not reflect the city but interpret and argue over it.

Borges, Arlt, Cortázar and Puig: the written city

Foster starts from literature. Jorge Luis Borges turned the outskirts, the pink street corners and the knife-fighters of the 1920s into urban mythology, and Julio Cortázar made the city a labyrinth of encounters and disappearances; Roberto Arlt portrayed the Buenos Aires of immigrants, inventors and swindlers, and Manuel Puig the popular cultures of cinema and serial fiction. Foster shows that this literary production not only describes urban life but works as critique and reflection on the inequalities and transformations the city undergoes, and that each neighbourhood, San Telmo, La Boca, Palermo, Barrio Norte, carries a symbolic charge that literature fixed.

Film, theatre and tango: the represented city

Film and theatre complete the picture. Foster analyses how Argentine cinema of the first half of the twentieth century, and later directors such as Leopoldo Torre Nilsson and María Luisa Bemberg, consolidated the image of Buenos Aires as a modern, cosmopolitan, European-influenced metropolis, with neighbourhoods representing social classes and tensions between modernity and tradition; independent theatre and tango, from Gardel to Piazzolla, gave the city a voice of its own. Those representations, he argues, have been fundamental to understanding how the city sees itself and how it is perceived from outside, and therefore belong to urban space as much as its buildings.

Evita, the Mothers and minorities: the occupied city

Politics is the third dimension. Foster devotes chapters to Evita and Peronism as an urban mass phenomenon, to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who from 1977 turned the founding square into the place of memory of the disappeared, and to the city's Jewish and gay cultures, which produced their own spaces and narratives against exclusion. His reading shows that Buenos Aires's public space has been defined by who occupies it, the march, the weekly round, the pot-banging protest, and that the dictatorship of 1976 to 1983 tried to empty it through terror while culture kept it alive.

From Sarlo and Gorelik to Puerto Madero and San Telmo: the thesis confirmed

The book converses with Latin American cultural studies, with Beatriz Sarlo and her Buenos Aires of peripheral modernity, and with Adrián Gorelik and the history of the grid and the park, and has been read as a model of how cultural production can be used to study the city. Since its publication, Buenos Aires has lived through the crisis of 2001, the conversion of Puerto Madero into a luxury enclave, the gentrification of San Telmo and Palermo driven by tourism and investment, and the pot-banging protests and square occupations that confirmed Foster's thesis: the city is produced in the street and in culture, and both are contested.

Foster's lesson is that a city is known not only through its plans but through what its residents have written, filmed, sung and shouted about it, and that this cultural production is an archive of its conflicts and a force that transforms them. For planning, Buenos Aires shows that public space is a stage where politics and culture are performed, and that planning a city without reading its texts is planning a set without a play.