Housing policy and citizenship: the "Mi Casa, Mi Vida” (my house, my life) program in the city of Cordoba, Argentina

Abstract

Public policies are important mechanisms that have the capacity to organize social relations. This article analyzes the creation of “barrios-ciudades” (city-neighborhoods) from eradicated shantytowns, under the housing policy “Mi Casa, Mi Vida” applied since 2003 in the city of Córdoba, Argentina. The paper’s main thesis maintains that far from stimulating a social and political inclusion process among its beneficiaries, this policy has changed the ways in which the city is accessed and enjoyed, creating new ways of relating that are characterized by inequality and exclusion. This new order is made evident by a new category of citizen defined from three focal points: the way beneficiaries are designated and defined (“vulnerable and needy”); the social processes generated by the new ways of living in the “barrios-ciudades” (the creation of ghettos, disconnection from the job market and an interruption of integration and solidarity links); and in the habilitation of participation spaces. The interpretations presented here are the product of a systematic analysis of in-depth interviews carried out with the inhabitants of the “barrios-ciudades”.