Author:
Gorelik, Adrián, author.
Edition Statement:First edition in English.
Imprint[Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania] : Latin America Research Commons, 2022.
Descriptionxxi, 454 pages : illustrations (some color), maps (some color) ; 23 cm
Note:Translation of: La grilla y el parque : espacio pblico y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires, 1887-1936, published: Buenos Aires : Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, [1998].
Note:A metropolis in the Pampas -- A new city: the utopia of "Argentine thought" -- A concentrated city: the shape of order -- An extended city: the metropolitan division -- The city and history: first birthday -- Envisioning the new city -- From the vecindario to the barrio -- Toward a metropolitan public space -- "In the shadow of the beloved barrios" -- End of the cycle: second birthday.
Bibliography Note:Includes bibliographical references (pages 423-445) and index.
Note:Since its publication in Spanish in 1998, The Grid and the Park not only revitalized studies on the history of Buenos Aires, but also laid the foundation for a specific type of cultural work on the city -an urban perspective for cultural history, as its author would describe it- that has had a sustained impact in Latin America. Public space, embodied in the grid of city blocks and the park system, here appears as a particularly productive category because it encompasses dimensions of the material city, politics, and culture, which are usually studied separately. From Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's figurations of Palermo Park in the mid-nineteenth century to Jorge Luis Borges's discovery of the suburb in the 1920s; from the modernization of the traditional center carried out by Mayor Torcuato de Alvear in the 1880s to the questioning of that centrality by the emergence of the suburban barrio, the book weaves the changing ideas on public space with urban culture to produce a new history of the metropolitan expansion of Buenos Aires, one of the most extensive and dynamic urban centers of the early twentieth century.
