| dc.description.abstract | This thesis looks at Parque 3 de Febrero and Parque Las Heras in Buenos Aires in an attempt to establish the role of public greenspace in ‘modernizing’ a city. Rather than looking at modernity as a stagnant collection of values and beliefs, this thesis will look at how modernity can be understood as an always-shifting condition, one which produces ‘ruptures’—as phrased by Arjun Appadurai—that divide a more progressive present from a past. This analysis begins with the establishment first of Parque 3 de Febrero, under the orders of Domingo Fausto Sarmiento in the mid-19th century, as an attempt to civilize the city. This will be followed by examining the changes made by subsequent actors, including park steward Carlos Thays (representing fin-de-siècle landscape design trends), the Peronist era, and the military dictatorship. After tracing its changing function throughout history, the recent changes enacted by former Mayor—and current President—Mauricio Macri and the autonomous city government will be analyzed through the prism of infrastructure. In this sense, borrowing from Kregg Hetherington’s definition of infrastructure as ‘part of a series of complex processes to which one draws attention in a causal argument about linear history,’ we can see the parks as playing a crucial part of these processes. For Sarmiento, this meant using the parks as a symbol of taming the wild and backwards pampas, whereas for Macri it was an attempt to recast the parks as sites of connectivity and consumption, in line with the aims of the newly-started Ministry of Modernization in the Buenos Aires Autonomous Government. The information used to support this thesis was gleaned from historical sources, interviews, and mental maps provided by park-visitors, which help to flesh out the different activities taking place in the parks. Through these, along with ethnographic data, it is possible to see how the modernization project of Macri has been received and internalized. This will be possible by looking not only at how space is contested, but definitions of modern as well. As the site of many of these projects, the parks serve as a window into the ‘ruptures,’ so that it might be possible to understand more about the process of modernization itself. | eng |