Buenos Aires heads ‘nonstop from 19th to 21st century’

In the wealthy Buenos Aires district of Palermo, the authorities are removing the animals from the city zoo. There are well over a thousand and many will be taken to nature reserves around Argentina that can provide a more suitable environment.

Now deemed obsolete, the 140-year-old zoo is being turned into an ecological park with attractions ranging from a virtual reality jungle tour to composting workshops. Officials hope it will become a model of what to do with old zoos.

“We are going from the 19th century to the 21st century with no stops,” says Andy Freire, the city’s minister for modernisation, enthusiastically. 

“The zoo occupies 18 hectares right in the middle of the city, just 10m from 14 bus stops. It makes no sense.” When the zoo was built, he notes, Palermo was in the leafy city outskirts. 

The ornate zoological garden — as much an architectural treasure as a place to see exotic animals — is a vestige of the grand past of Buenos Aires and the change it is undergoing is one of the city government’s prime initiatives in reinvigorating the Argentine capital. The animals may take some time yet to move but the sense is that something needs to be done. 

Although it remains one of the great metropolitan centres of Latin America, Buenos Aires was in a different league a century ago and the capital of one of the richest countries in the world. This was thanks to the fertile plains of the Pampas beyond the city that provided the basis for booming agricultural exports.

That belle époque is still yearned for by many porteños — or people of the port, as the city’s residents are known. Its sometimes stately buildings testify to that time, as does its appearing to have more bookshops and theatres than most other capital cities of the world.

“Without any doubt, 50 years ago Buenos Aires was the premier city in Latin America,” says Jorge Pérez, a 67-year-old billionaire property developer who, born and bred in Buenos Aires, is based in Florida. “It just hasn’t kept up and it’s a pity.” He cites the example of the city’s restaurants and notes that the likes of São Paulo and Mexico City enjoy a higher reputation.

Despite humble beginnings as an outpost of the Spanish empire, frequented by pirates and smugglers, the city enjoyed its best times from the late 19th century to the 1940s, says Adrián Gorelik, an Argentine urban historian. Rare in Latin America, it had a remarkably equal society thanks to a wealthy state that could provide good schools, hospitals and infrastructure. These sustained a huge immigrant population from Europe, which from about 1870-1920 outnumbered people born in the city.

Even by the 1970s, only a small portion of Buenos Aires’ inhabitants lived in poverty compared with the other leading capitals of the region. It was not until the 1990s that people began to talk of the “Latinamericanisation” of Buenos Aires, says Mr Gorelik. “The same problems as the rest of Latin America started to become very visible,” he notes of the city’s dramatic levels of inequality.

“There is nowhere else like it in the world,” says Jorge Telerman, who served as mayor of Buenos Aires a decade ago. The greater metropolitan area houses some 14m of Argentina’s population of about 44m, while not a great deal more than 1m people live in each of the country’s next two biggest cities, Córdoba and Rosario.

“We are concentrated in an area where 90 per cent of [Argentina’s] problems are found,” he adds. From grinding poverty to drug gangs and violence, all the country’s worst features come together in the vast urban sprawl of greater Buenos Aires. “This is the central problem of Argentina today, ” Mr Telerman says. 

The capital itself — where only 3m people sleep owing to boundaries that were fixed in 1880 — doubles in size on weekdays as people from the surrounding conurbation swarm in to work. Wages outside the capital are considerably lower than those within it, where per capita annual incomes are comparable with a developed country such as Portugal at about $25,000. 

The national government led by President Mauricio Macri, the capital’s mayor from 2007 to 2015, is acutely aware of its problems. One advantage he has is that his centre-right party, the Republican Proposal, or PRO, controls not only the capital, through his successor as mayor, Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, but also the surrounding province of Buenos Aires. Traditionally run by Mr Macri’s opponents from the Peronist party — whose influence has long dominated Argentine politics — the province today has as its governor María Eugenia Vidal. She served as deputy mayor of Buenos Aires to Mr Macri and is one of Argentina’s most popular politicians.

Fernando Straface, the city government’s secretary-general, argues that Buenos Aires’ greatest asset is its “capacity to generate talent”. It has “more universities per square metre than anywhere else in Latin America”, he says, and of some 500,000 students in Buenos Aires, 160,000 are studying “hard”, or natural, sciences. 

Buenos Aires has consistently bred exceptional individuals. In academia, the Universidad de Buenos Aires, the city’s main university, has produced no fewer than five Nobel laureates, the most recent being César Milstein, for medicine in 1984, and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, who was awarded the Peace prize in 1980. In sports, Buenos Aires has raised some of the best footballers on the planet, including Diego Maradona, who almost single-handedly hauled Argentina to World Cup triumph in 1986 in Mexico. Even Pope Francis is a porteño.

In business, four of Latin America’s six “unicorns” — tech start-ups valued at $1bn or more — hail from Buenos Aires. Guibert Englebienne, co-founder of one of them, Globant, says the city has a government “that is willing to really connect Buenos Aires to the rest of the world”. As well as this month’s Latin American version of the World Economic Forum, the capital hosts the Summer Youth Olympics next year. “We have everything lined up for Buenos Aires to continue growing,” he says. 

Foreign investors are taking notice. There is “a huge amount of pent-up demand that is not satisfied”, says Mr Pérez, who is building a number of luxury towers in the capital’s exclusive waterfront district of Puerto Madero. After the pre-Macri years of Peronist economic stagnation, “the future of Buenos Aires is incredibly rosy,” he argues. 

Not everyone shares his optimism. Gabriela Massuh, a writer and author of the 2014 book El Robo de Buenos Aires (“The robbery of Buenos Aires”), accuses developers of being responsible for the “Disneyfication” of her city and the loss of its soul. “The future of Buenos Aires looks like a cross between The Truman Show and Blade Runner,” she says, adding that there are “absolutely no controls” over property developers. 

Mr Englebienne maintains his faith in Buenos Aires, not least from the business perspective. “I am confident that the next Google or Facebook will be born here,” he says, with an outward self-assurance that is characteristic of porteños.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/7853aca6-f9e5-11e6-bd4e-68d53499ed71