Terapolva - Utopian Dreams and Urban Realities in an Ecovillage in Buenos Aires

Abstract

Terapolva is a settlement geographically located within the inner city borders of Buenos Aires. Characterized as an ecovillage, its members seek away from an urban lifestyle and opt for a life in closer contact with nature. Its main practice is reciclaje (recycling) where vegetables that are to be trashed by stores in the closest urban barrio are given new purpose by being rinsed and cooked to serve the community s members and visitors. Terapolva s ideological worldview is based on The three R s : Recycle, Reutilize and Reduce. Terapolva s organizational structure draws on anarchistic principles where visible borders and officially regulated commitment is absent. Members, who call themselves aldeanos (villagers), are in theory free to come and go as they please, and the community has no legal claim to the terrain it occupies – which in fact belongs to the University College and the government of Buenos Aires. Next to Terapolva s main territory lies a state owned bioreserve with an overgrown river and a rich wildlife. Aldeanos claim themselves to be protectors of the zone, seeking to maintain the flora and fauna by removing contaminating material and keeping the area free of trash. My main question throughout this thesis is: How is community identity and individual needs connected to Terapolva s aim to be an ecovillage, and how can the place be seen as a generator of meaning and livelihood for its inhabitants? I seek to understand how a community that has a very high frequency of changing members and which lacks clear borders and regulations still manages to maintain a unity and to reproduce itself. Ideologically Terapolva is though to be an ecovillage, and there is an overall notion that Terapolva is a place very much distinguished from the rest of Buenos Aires. I investigate what kind of mechanisms exist in the creation and maintaining of boundaries, where differentiation between inside and outside are confirmed both by aldeanos themselves and groups in its near surroundings. Since the open structure and anarchistic organization allow members to operate based on voluntarism I ask how the community s common ideals and goals are kept alive and how these are reflected, or not, in the actions of the individuals and their strategies for satisfying daily needs.