Four perspectives on popular suburban settlements in Rosario (Argentina), 1933-1943

Abstract

This article analyzes four perspectives on popular suburban housing in Rosario, Argentina. The aim is to understand the contrast between scientific knowledge that proposes an abstract and homogeneous space and literary forms that represent an imaginary and sensitive space. First, the discourse on hygiene is problematized through its limits in order to reflect on phenomena different from the conventillo and the tenement house. Then, the diagnoses and proposals of urbanism on the modalities of extension and regulation of the suburban city and popular housing are studied. Subsequently, the presentations of previous diagnoses and programs in the state-political sphere at the First Pan American Congress of Popular Housing are analyzed. Finally, social literature allows the reconstruction of the material and symbolic universes of a slum. The article shows the limits and possibilities that the different thought matrices found to describe, represent, narrate and think about the new phenomena of urbanization in the suburbs of Rosario. Likewise, it tries, from the confluence of four points of view, to make the image of the urban peripheries more complex in the period of their appearance after the crisis of 1929.