New forms of "governance", social participation and conflict. Some reflections on the processes of re-urbanization of villas in the City of Buenos Aires (Argentina)

The objective of the article is to analyze the processes of social participation and conflict generated within the framework of the Re-urbanization Program of Villa 31 and 31 bis promoted by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires (GCBA) (Argentina) since 2016 until today. Through a qualitative methodology of construction of primary data coming from in-depth interviews (to inhabitants of the town, members of social organizations, officials and state workers) and participant observation in dialogues with technical actors driven by the executing agency of the political, it was evident that there is great discontent of the inhabitants around the instances of social participation wielded by the program, with high levels of territorial conflict. This implies that the permanent mechanisms of participation in the execution of policy are not guarantee per I know that all the actors have the same weight in the decision making. Rather, the different techniques deployed by the new governance refer to practices of legitimation of a housing policy that implicitly seeks the valorization of the neoliberal city, far from building instances of consensus and real participation that result in the reduction of socio-urban inequality.