The management of urban services in the city of Buenos Aires

Abstract

This paper reviews the changes in the management of urban services in Buenos Aires over the last 100 years and discusses their implications for the quality of service provision in recent decades and for the future. It identifies three distinct stages. The first, decentralized private management, was evident in the late nineteenth century when provision for infrastructure and services was of a quality comparable to cities in Europe at that time. But, over time, municipal regulation and control of private enterprises became instruments in the partisan struggle for power. A crisis in service provision and an increasingly interventionist government led to the second stage, centralized public sector management, but this created a growing gap between local users and federally controlled utilities. When this coincided with economic decline, it led to poorer quality services and increasing numbers of unserved inhabitants. The third stage, introduced in 1989, was the centralized private management model but this failed to address a weakness of the earlier models, namely the lack of political influence and representation for users. In addition, the companies responsible for service provision assumed no responsibility for those people who were unable to afford the prices they charged.