Urban transformations and communication. Three processes involved in the class organization of the city of Córdoba (Argentina)

Abstract

The present article describes and analyzes from an interdisciplinary perspective certain recent urban transformations in the city of Cordoba, Argentina, presenting empirical and theoretical dimensions that allow us to reflect on the long-term tendencies in socio-territorial changes in Córdoba, that configure what Jesús Martín Barbero (2015) calls ways of being together and being apart. The article, there for, presents how three converging and complex processes of have transformed the city of Córdoba: i) social-residential segregation and geopolitical control over population; ii) strategic embellishment, patrimony appraisal and turistification as esthetic/politic transformations; iii) the consolidation of a regime based on speed and circulation. These three processes are elaborated in their specificities, presenting cases that are relevant in the current time, and that allow to analyze the phenomenon from both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective. The article closes by explaining how such phenomenon build a class order in the city, that means an unequal distribution of production and reproduction means of life, according to economic groups. Such order, with a clear class orientation, is not only physical, material or architectural, but also symbolic, bodily, and sensitive. The text proposes a special approach of the bond between cities and communication, by identifying processes that are acting in Córdoba but also operate in other cities, in the space and time of current capitalism in its integrated and global spectacular phase (Debord 1995, 2006).