Reflections on urban social struggles from the experience of collective land and housing occupation of the Federal Plan in the city of Tandil, province of Buenos Aires (2009-2011)

Abstract

This article investigates an experience of collective land and housing occupation developed during the 21st century in the city of Tandil (Buenos Aires, Argentina). Specifically, the process of collective occupation carried out from 2009 -to date-, on land and houses belonging to the works of the Federal Plan, in the La Movediza neighbourhood.
The problem of knowledge investigates the ways of accessing the urban habitat in the process of capitalist urbanization, based on the study of an experience of territorialized social struggle in a differential space of a peripheral neighborhood in the interior of the province.
Particularly, the forms, strategies, and experiences of urban social struggle were addressed as an object. In turn, the objectives of the work focused on the reconstruction of the experience of urban social struggle, taking into account both the confrontation actions, as well as the territorialities expressed in them, in order to know how the strategies of struggle and organization were built social, political and territorial.
The methodological approach was qualitative, developing a historical and territorial method to empirically study experiences of urban social struggle through various sources of information. Likewise, the techniques used were documentary research, digital information survey with logical operators and oral history interviews.
The results obtained allowed us to deepen the study of differential spaces from an experience of urban social struggle developed in a medium-sized city in the interior of the province of Buenos Aires.
Likewise, they allowed an approximation to the inhabited dimension and to the territorialities built during the process of collective occupation of lands and houses of the Federal Plan, inviting to reflect on the political and territorial characteristics of the urban social struggle and its link with spatial inequalities and injustices, the counterspaces and the construction of territorialities of resistance.