Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses a long term research project that builds close relationships with schools and the urban context in neighbourhoods marked by extreme poverty where “in the end it is always the same story” told differently.

Paper long abstract:

This ethnographic work embeds genealogical routes exploring urban life and its actual as well as historic configurations. The focus lies on the urban life in the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires (RMBA) by investigating the details of an area where neighbourhoods have grown by an exponential factor – especially during the last decades of the 20th century – often receiving names as villas, chabolas, favelas or slums. In our project we understand the urbanisation processes in those territories as part of a fight for land. At the heart of these processes and contestations are processes of colonization that assemble the power relations that fork through the present urban landscape. The long-term research provides rich data that has been compiled over more than ten years of building and maintaining close relationships at the school-neighbourhood junction. We propose an analysis of the ways by which the territory is understood and lived based on the stories of the inhabitants. “In the end it is always the same story” was uttered by a secondary school student when reflecting the continuities of the colonial past and the urban present at the junctions where life dissolves between the precarization of existential living conditions and the fight for a place to live.