Agents' spatial dispositions and capital valorization in a case of a "megaurbanización": Nordelta, Argentina

Abstract

We are witnessing the expantion of a strictly capitalistic logic in metropolitan development, granting the urban increased value the rank of basic urban criterion (de Mattos, 2002). The state government is replaced by governance and the private enterprise revalues its role as a constructor and decision-maker. The State withdraws and capital finds new niches to valorize itself. The normative redefinition and private management alter the city's constitutive property as a value of complex use (Topalov, 1979). Capital is valued in itself and achieves partial control over rights, public services and goods while producing urban elements which were previously unfeasible. Thus, city planning and the commercialization of a new lifestyle for privileged sectors becomes a new form of capital valorization. Can estate agents by themselves create lebenswelt (Habermas, 1987), in its double concept of sociability spaces and appraisal horizon and therefore assure their consumers? The megaenterprise takes form in its inhabitantsïlifestyles, a metamorphosis undergone in its dispositions and spatial scope reorganizes the sense of its territorial representation and actions. These habitus (Bourdieu, 1997) are constituted together with the new spatiality as a structure structured by enterprises such as Nordelta and as structuring structure of these new urban objects. That is, the habitus (Bourdieu, 1997) are not the consequence of the mechanical impression of the capitalistic social structures but a complex process irreducible to the known dichotomies between objectivism-subjectivism, action-structure, etc. The dispositions and spatial scope can be thought as the articulation of the dialectic pair presented by Santos (1996) who refers to the geographic space as a set of object systems and action systems, considered as the unique context in which history occurs.