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Abstract

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Since 2007, Buenos Aires has been governed by a centre-right coalition that has made participation an integral part of its approach to governance. Under mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (2015–2023), the idea and practice of proximity became central, notably through weekly meetings with neighbours across the city. This article demonstrates that proximity was a strategy for building urban democratic legitimacy. In so doing, it introduces the work of Pierre Rosanvallon to an urban studies readership. Contemporary literature on urban participation is at risk of establishing ontologically fixed positions, as seen in recent debates on the ‘post-political city’. Rosanvallon’s legitimacy of proximity is an analytical device that provides an open and non-essential reading of participation. Based on extensive qualitative research, the article examines how and why Larreta and his city government deployed the strategy of proximity, while also highlighting its limits.

Keywords

Buenos Aires legitimacy participation proximity urban democracy

Introduction

Buenos Aires is a city saturated with political participation, yet to date little attention has been paid to a central participatory governance strategy based on proximity. Since 2007, a centre-right coalition led by the PRO political party has become hegemonic, making ‘citizenship participation’ a central feature of its administration. This was particularly evident under the mayorship of Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (2015–2023), who created a secretary of ‘nearness and participation’¹ and innovated an activity of weekly ‘proximity’ meetings in which he moved around the city’s 48 neighbourhoods (barrios) to host open meetings with residents. Although the idea and practice of proximity – bringing democracy to the people through direct fora for citizen participation and exchange with their elected leaders – is something that has been deployed by mayors elsewhere (e.g. Mayor’s Question Times in UK cities, or the Mayor of Huelva, Spain’s ‘Coffee with Pedro’), Buenos Aires presents an example where it has been deployed intensively and as a central feature of the city government. Moreover, Buenos Aires is insightful for understanding how proximity has been deployed as a strategy of participation in response to democratic crises. From the crisis of representation at the turn of the century to the polarisation provoked by the subsequent rise of a left populist national movement, proximity has emerged as a means of generating and sustaining legitimacy against multiple ‘threats’ to democracy. At the same time, however, proximity as a strategy of participation has reached its own limits as it confronts a range of grassroots demands and participatory institutions across multiple scales. This article thus asks: how and why did Larreta make proximity central to his strategy of urban participation? Moreover, what can a conceptual focus on proximity add to debates on urban participation, including claims that the latter is increasingly void of political content?

Our central argument is that proximity is a strategy for building urban democratic legitimacy. We thus build on the work of French democratic theorist Rosanvallon (2011: 7), who argues that the legitimacy of proximity – based on ‘the generality of attention to particularity’– is a defining quality of contemporary democracies against the ongoing crisis of representation and ‘the older legitimacies of election and selection’. The article demonstrates how the urban scale of proximity became central to Larreta’s strategy of participation, against participatory processes at both intra-urban and national scales. On the one hand, national politics has been dominated by populist approaches to participation, based on the mobilisation of grassroots forces by a charismatic leader. Against this, Larreta promoted a form of democracy in which his proximity to city dwellers (or ‘neighbours’, vecinos, as he calls them), through weekly meetings and other initiatives (e.g. online participatory budgeting, open meetings with police stations), allowed for an ‘active dialogue’ and a seemingly more legitimate mode of democracy. On the other hand, at the intra-urban scale, participation has been promoted by local councils (comunas) seeking to decentralise participation through their institutional structures, threatening to undercut Larreta’s leadership and detract from his own participatory agenda. In response, proximity provided a means to re-centre the participatory agenda of his urban government.

A core contribution of the article is to introduce the work of Rosanvallon to an urban studies readership, adding to ongoing debates on the role and nature of public participation. Contemporary literature on urban participation is at risk of establishing ontologically fixed positions. This has been most notable in the explosion of discussion on the pages of this and related journals on the so-called ‘post-political city’ (Beveridge and Koch, 2017; Davidson and Iveson, 2015; Derickson, 2017; Legacy et al., 2018; Swyngedouw, 2017), which has charted how the rise of a neoliberal urban governmentality has displaced democratic debate and disagreement, rendering public participation a hollow discourse that evades confrontation and merely supports neoliberal urban planning. Yet Buenos Aires demonstrates that despite a global vision of neoliberal urbanism becoming hegemonic in recent years (Bertelli, 2021; Sternberg, 2023), participation remains a politically charged strategy that articulates across diverse meanings and practices. Although the post-political city provides a powerful critique of the effects of neoliberal urbanism on public participation, it risks overlooking the political strategies and relational dynamics that drive participation in practice. We deploy Rosanvallon’s legitimacy of proximity as an analytical device that provides an open and non-essential reading of participation, further arguing for the need to ground it in its historical and geographical conditions.

Public participation in the (post-) political city

Debates on public participation in urban governance appear to be reaching an impasse and risk establishing entrenched positions. On the one hand, there is an ongoing normative commitment to the potentials of participation as a means for deepening democracy and re-animating its core values (Fung, 2015). Often based on readings of deliberation and the public sphere, a large body of literature follows a rationalist and communicative model for participation in urban planning and governance (Forester, 1999; Healey, 1997; Hoch, 1984; Innes and Booher, 2010). This has led to extensive analysis of institutional design, innovations and procedures for enhancing public participation (Melo and Baiocchi, 2006; Smith, 2009). On the other hand, there are longstanding critiques over the underlying power relations that constrain participation (Friedmann, 1987; Pateman, 1970) and the growth of participation as a ‘tokenistic’ practice that merely supports the status quo (Arnstein, 1969; Monno and Khakee, 2012). This literature has been complimented by in-depth, often ethnographic research into participatory urban governance that critically interrogates the possibilities of the limits of participation (Taylor, 2007), with a strong focus on civil society and the state, much of it based on Latin America (Baiocchi et al., 2011; Goldfrank, 2011). In some cases, this has generated a critique of participation, shifting attention towards insurgent practices at the margins of political institutions (Holston, 2008).

In recent years, urban studies has become particularly attuned to radical critiques of public participation (Purcell, 2009), something well captured in the aforementioned debates over the ‘post-political’ city. This literature draws on the readings of post-foundational thinkers (Mouffe, 2005; Ranciere, 2010; Zizek, 1999) who have charted the separation between the antagonistic substance of democratic politics (i.e. the political) and its sanitised, detached and politically empty forms of politics. Translating this onto the urban condition, scholars such as Swyngedouw (2009) see the city as a space void of its ‘proper’ political content, that is, democratic public space and contention, as it is reconfigured through empty signifiers such as the ‘smart’ or ‘sustainable’ city that replace the political (MacLeod, 2011). Institutional participation is now governed by neoliberal logics (Kothari and Cooke, 2001; Peck and Theodore, 2015) that aim to produce a politics of consensus, while simultaneously evading ‘confrontational and challenging public discourse about the way the urban is constituted and re-created’ (Legacy et al., 2018: 178; Purcell, 2009; Swyngedouw, 2009). Here, participation is primarily understood as a discourse of planning that is used to legitimise the unequal material effects of neoliberalism, making it an easier project to ‘sell’ to citizens. Participatory fora for deliberation become merely performative sites in which agreement is to be arrived on decisions that have already been made by dominant urban planners.

Debates on participation and the post-political city have focused on the thorny question of locating grassroots political agency. Urban scholars are concerned that by describing a universalising condition, the post-political thesis forecloses political agency by rendering it either invisible or impossible (Darling, 2016; Davidson and Iveson, 2015; Lees, 2014; Nicholls and Uitermark, 2017; Temenos, 2017). In response, its proponents point to a diversity of ‘disruptive and integrative’ moments of the political (Dikeç, 2017), calling for greater attention to insurgent ruptures (Derickson, 2017; Swyngedouw, 2017; Wilson and Swyngedouw, 2015). Yet, as Beveridge and Koch (2017, 2022) highlight, there is a risk that the ontological binary presented by post-political readings of participation, based on a clear binary between depoliticising governance and ‘real’ political agency, has the effect of eliminating ambiguity.

We extend this critique and highlight that the normative commitment to locating ‘true’ spaces of grassroots participation risks downplaying the strategic logics through which participation is deployed also by hegemonic (neoliberal) political actors. We share the concerns of critical and radical scholars of urban participation who focus on the agonistic and counter-hegemonic possibilities for transforming existing power relations. Yet we highlight the risk of falling into reductive or essentialist oppositions (bottom-up versus top-down) and, in particular, argue for greater attention on the political logics that drive institutional participation, without reducing them to political-economic structural forces (i.e. neoliberalism). Crucially, there is a greater need to understand how it is that participation comes to be before we attempt to judge its relative success and outcomes. We thus respond to Baiocchi and Ganuza’s (2017: 15) call for greater ontological agnosticism when studying participatory processes. Doing so requires an open and non-essential reading of participation that is grounded in its historical and geographical conditions.

Proximity as legitimacy

Through extensive historical analysis, particularly of France, Rosanvallon is refreshing for providing an account of democracy as an open and contested concept that exists as a multiplicity of forms and ideas. His recent work has documented how contemporary democracy shifted in response to ongoing crises of representation in which legitimacy needs to be constructed through practices that exceed the mere act of voting. In response, innovative forms of ‘counter-democratic’ political investment have allowed democracy to expand beyond the ballot box and develop new sources of legitimacy (Rosanvallon, 2009). Rosanvallon highlights proximity as one means of re-legitimising the democratic offering at a time of disillusionment and crisis in electoral politics. For Rosanvallon (2011: 143), proximity provides a new language capable of meeting the growing expectations of citizens that democracy should exceed periodic elections and speak to all of society, not just the majority: ‘Leaders appropriated the term in the hope of regaining lost legitimacy, while citizens seized on it to express their disillusionment and their hopes for change’. Proximity points above all to a new way of governing, capable of paying attention to singular and particular experiences. It strives to develop policies through empathy rather than the abstraction of rules. It is based on a logic of a ‘descending generality’ that idealises local experiences as a model for politics, always returning down to the particular rather than rising into general abstractions.

Proximity demonstrates one way in which participation is a strategy of building representative links by leaders in a context of the personalisation of politics (Manin, 1996). For Rosanvallon (2011), modern political representation implies a combination of two opposing principles: that of identity and distinction. It is assumed that representatives are similar to the represented, yet, at the same time, that the former can be distinguished, that some are ‘better’ than others, even if that distinction comes from the vote of fellow citizens and not from pre-political qualities considered superior. The representation of proximity is a tendency to make the first principle predominate over the second, that is, to make similarity, identification or identity predominate. When representatives attempt to show themselves as ordinary people, capable of sharing the experiences of citizens, listening to their concerns, desires and obstacles and paying attention to the particularities of their lives, they activate identification. However, unlike populist strategies to articulate ‘the people’, proximity is used as a means of ‘anti-charismatic identification’ (Annunziata, 2018), in which representatives appear as natural instead of as supernatural, as human instead of superhuman and as ordinary instead of as extra-ordinary.

Rosanvallon’s notion of the legitimacy of proximity (and, more broadly, his theses on democracy) is based on a close reading of the history of French civil society and democracy, in which he has systematically sought to identify the centrality of political logics across shifting historical contexts. Although he has engaged relatively little with Latin America, we note that his approach is one that is ontologically open to a multiplicity of experiences, such that he calls for the ‘democratisation’ of universalism in empirical studies (Rosanvallon, 2009), and in this spirit we build on an existing dialogue between Argentine scholars (Annunziata, 2016; Roldán, 2002). Nevertheless, his historical and philosophical approach is often presented through a state-centric lens, and it is not surprising that urban studies has yet to engage in any depth with his work.² In this article, we make an explicit effort to ground the legitimacy of proximity in the historical and geographical context of Buenos Aires. In so doing, we further highlight the relevance of scale as a politically constructed and strategic level for deploying proximity.

Case study and methodology

The Autonomous City of Buenos Aires (CABA) is the capital of Argentina. With a population of 3,000,000, it has significant autonomy over fiscal spending and governance. Constituted in 1996, following national decentralisation, the city is governed by a directly elected mayor, and has a legislature of 60 proportionally represented legislatures alongside, since 2011, 15 local councils (each with an elected junta of seven members). As with other Latin American cities, CABA is marked by strong socio-economic inequality and has several informal settlements (villas). With a rich history of political participation dating back to the 19th century (Sabato, 1998), CABA contains multiple scales of governance (from neighbourhood to national) and is rife with conflict. Nevertheless, since 2007, it has been governed by the same right-wing party coalition who will continue governing after the 2023 elections. It is a city full of conflict, tensions and contradiction which, in recent years, have been represented by the neoliberal and global aspirations of the city government in contrast to the nationalist and popular vision of the Peronist opposition (in national power 2003–2015 and 2019–2023).

This analysis draws on several years of qualitative research with a total of 125 interviews, including with key members of the Larreta government, as well as participant observation in over 100 meetings and public activities across several rounds of fieldwork, alongside analysis of public discourse and social media accounts. First, in 2016, urban decentralisation was studied to understand the potentials for citizen participation in the city’s political institutions. Second, between 2017 and 2019, fieldwork was undertaken to understand mechanisms of institutional participation, particularly online participatory budgeting. Finally, between 2020 and 2023, the authors conducted research on political participation and inequality in the city, involving interviews with government officials to better understand Larreta’s logics of participation. The article draws on the findings from all three rounds of fieldwork to provide an account of how and why the Larreta government has deployed the strategy of proximity as a means of developing a participatory governance agenda in the city.

Proximity as urban strategy

Proximity was deployed by the CABA government as an urban strategy that promoted the participatory agenda of its mayor and allowed him to build democratic legitimacy in contrast to alternative attempts to construct democratic legitimacy at other scales. We trace this back to the intense political crisis that erupted following a deep process of neoliberalisation in the 1990s, and the subsequent erosion of public institutions and state–citizen linkage mechanisms this engendered, which culminated in the implosion of 2001 in which Argentine citizens asked ‘all of them to go’, rejecting the entire representative system (Dinerstein, 2003). The 2001 moment of democratic rupture was short-lived, however, and the crisis gave birth to a renewed centre-left version of Peronism, Argentina’s largest political movement which goes back to the populist government of Juan Domingo Perón (1946–1955). Part of a progressive tide of Latin American left-wing governments, Kirchnerism, named after the husband-and-wife Presidents (2003–2015), sought to mobilise the people into a national-popular movement against the oligarchy and political elite, polarising Argentine society. Although fraught with internal tensions, Kirchnerism remains Argentina’s largest progressive political project and continues to rally the people in a confrontational manner, developing legitimacy through the radicalisation of democracy (Mouffe, 2019). Its vision of participation is highly mobilisational and activist, in which organised society, through local party and union branches, takes to the streets in support of its national leadership (Halvorsen and Torres, 2022).

While the national-popular movement of Kirchnerism provided one response to the crisis of democratic legitimacy in turn-of-the-century Argentina, the city government would generate another one that was diametrically opposed. Following the 2001 crisis of political legitimacy, Mauricio Macri, ex-President of Buenos Aires football club Boca Juniors, together with colleagues from the business and think-tank world (including Larreta), created a new political party, the Republican Proposal (PRO), based on a technocratic anti-political agenda, orientated towards active management (gestión) over ideological content (Vommaro et al., 2015). The PRO recognised early on the need for strong communication, including digital communication (Slimovich, 2017). Most notable about the rise of the PRO as a political force that would eventually win presidency was its decision to use Buenos Aires as an arena to construct and consolidate its hegemony. This responded, in part, to the city’s large middle-class constituency as well as the historically weak electoral performance of Peronism, providing a political opportunity for the creation of a new political force.

The early 21st century saw institutional participation initially take prominence in CABA through a centre-left government (2000–2006), but since 2007 it has been promoted through the hegemony of the PRO’s coalition, which has developed a strategy of proximity, to distinguish itself from the national populist offering of Kirchnerism (2003–2015). Proximity, in the form of Larreta’s strategy, can thus be empirically distinguished from populism, in the form of Kirchnerism, due to the latter’s reliance on collective mobilisation under a charismatic national leader and the former’s attempt to foster individual participation in institutional mechanisms via an anti-charismatic mayor. Ironically, Kirchnerism was held as aloof and distant from ‘the people’, with proximity providing a practice through which to construct legitimacy. Later in his term, as Macri sought to consolidate his offering as an alternative to Kirchnerism, eventually setting his sights on national office, he noted: ‘The [national] government has distanced itself from the people. The deepening of the fictional story has generated a parallel reality that distances them’ (Rosemberg, 2012); ‘We govern through dialogue and learning’ (Vamos Buenos Aires, 2015). The use of proximity as a political strategy by Larreta (2015–2023) built on, and deepened, a set of practices that had initially been established under the Macri mayorship (2007–2015). The PRO city government had developed a repertoire of electoral campaigning tools that relied centrally on the legitimacy of proximity to residents, now re-cast more intimately as vecinos (neighbours). This included flagship practices such as: door knocking (known as timbreo, or bell ringing); visits to ‘ordinary’ people’s homes; and breakfasts with neighbours. Under Macri, this repertoire of proximity was predominantly deployed in periods of electoral campaigning and was used informally, with little opportunity for residents to request participation. Larreta, first as chief of staff in the final years of the Macri administration, and then as mayor, began to transform proximity into a central and permanent feature of city government and would go on to institutionalise it through a range of online and offline forms. During his eight years in office, Larreta established his credentials and public profile based, in part, on the legitimacy of proximity.

The legitimacy of proximity summarises one means through which political leadership is built through personal and direct communication with citizens, via one-to-one rather than collective relations. Following Rosanvallon (2020), while proximity is a strategy of listening and attending to singular and diverse experiences of the population, inscribed in the tools of liberal democracy, populism functions as a monistic strategy of homogenisation of ‘the people’. We can therefore think of proximity and populism as two poles on a spectrum for building direct links between leaders and the citizenry. Proximity promotes institutionalised and individual participation and treats demands separately, while populism promotes collective mobilisation and addresses demands in an articulated manner. In contrast to populist linkages where leaders rely on the idea and practice of the people as a mass basis for collective mobilisation, proximity instead crystallises in individual invitations to participate in participatory fora and media (social networks, digital platforms, face-to-face participatory devices, meetings with neighbours, etc.). Rosanvallon’s approach directs our attention to new ways in which political leaders are constructed in contemporary democracies, via the staging of attributes of closeness to and similarity with the citizenry. Mayor Larreta is a paradigmatic example of a leader who established his link with the electorate through the implementation of participation and proximity activities. Our analysis reveals that proximity is not an innate attribute of any level of government but is a personal bond that is constructed between governors and the governed through a chosen scale. Larreta built a scalar strategy of proximity against the populism of the national government and, simultaneously, against the more local forms of participation at the intra-urban scale.

Proximity through ‘active listening’

A key achievement of Larreta’s mayorship was to institutionalise proximity as a pillar of his urban government. Proximity was managed through newly created areas for ‘citizenship participation’. During fieldwork, the organisational structure consisted of the ‘Secretariat for Communication, Content and Citizen Participation’, at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the ‘Sub-secretariat for Communication and Citizen Participation’ and then the ‘General Directorate for Citizen Participation and Proximity’, all of which report directly to Larreta. This structural organisation indicates, on the one hand, the importance of communication and hence branding for how participation is represented to the public (i.e. an attempt to generate legitimacy through the public sphere). On the other hand, the explicit use of proximity (or nearness, cercanía) indicates the centrality of the legitimacy of proximity to Larreta’s political strategy. It also helps to distinguish his conception of participation, based on individualist interventions in particular problems, from the populist mobilisation of the people.

On a summer’s day in February 2023, one author arrived at a cafe on the northern edge of the city to attend Larreta’s flagship ‘proximity’ meeting. Around 20 people were present, all sat on tables close to the mayor (in our case less than a metre away) in an intimate setting that was remarkable for the lack of security or entourage. Most of the participants were aged between 30 and 50 and had been contacted by the city government through an email inviting them to ‘Have a coffee with Horacio’. After registering, those interested received a call from the team to confirm availability, becoming part of a WhatsApp group to finalise organisational details. Besides Larreta, those present included: a moderator who took notes of the order in which people asked to speak; an employee from the local council; the official who had moderated the WhatsApp group and organised the meeting logistics; as well as two more people from the Citizen Participation and Proximity team who provided further support.

Larreta begun by saying that he had been holding these meetings for many years and, thanks to them, he knows so much about the city. He then asked participants to tell him their ideas for improving Buenos Aires. Without further ado, the participants raised their hands and began to speak as they were given the floor. Many of the issues that arose were very specific: a neighbour complained of noise pollution generated by a social club, another asked why a bridge had been closed for so long; one participant asked for more lighting in a park, yet another asked that there be more mobile veterinary clinics because they do not reach all neighbourhoods. Some of the complaints led to concrete responses, either because an immediate solution was sought (such as noise pollution, or rats in a neighbourhood block, something that Larreta immediately asks the council employee to verify and write down), or because the negative answer is simple (it is not possible to collect garbage more than once a day). Those more ‘conflictive’ issues led Larreta to distinguish between ‘management’ (gestión) and political decisions: ‘If you say “I don’t like these priorities”, vote for someone else, you are within your right’; ‘I do not expect you all to agree with me, I give my explanation and defend it’. Larreta says he is comfortable with the debate (‘I love passionate people, who argue with me’) but, above all, he presents an arena in which all comments are heard and answered.

This scene is illustrative of the meetings with neighbours organised by Larreta and of the functioning of the legitimacy of proximity conceptualised by Rosanvallon (2011). The presence of the mayor in the daily space of neighbours is an operator of attention and empathy. At the heart of the interaction format is listening – listening to singular experiences. The contact scene favours the identification between Larreta and the neighbours; however, it is not a populist identification but an ‘anti-charismatic identification’ since Larreta shows himself as someone accessible, close, an ordinary person, while at the same time not establishing a link with a mobilised mass but with individuals, and their isolated demands. It is important to note that while this encounter demonstrates qualities of post-political participation – a technocratic government that vacates the participatory space of antagonistic elements – there was more to it than that. Larreta was part of a highly successful political party structure that honed its proximity strategy towards its aims and objectives.

Meetings with neighbours have become a characteristic activity of Larreta’s administration. Often, they involve hundreds of people in larger settings, and they crystallise a core mechanism of proximity based on listening to neighbours and occasionally entering into dialogue. When issues or demands are raised by neighbours, there are two types of response: the solution to a particular problem, or the delimitation between politics and management as a demarcation of the field of the possible (since it is only possible to act in the field of management, a key distinction with populist strategies). Moreover, the systematic and sustained realisation of this type of meeting shows how proximity is central to Larreta’s political strategy that provides not only a tool for governing but a value and, moreover, brand for his representation of the city.

A central figure in Larreta’s strategy of proximity was Manuela Maunier, the Subsecretary for Communication and Citizen Participation, a trained economist and key aide to the mayor since his time as chief of staff to Macri, and in charge of the participatory agenda in his government. She described to us the genesis of participation and proximity, explaining that ‘Horacio’ had begun to host regular meetings with neighbours (vecinos) across the city:

We had gone to one neighbourhood meeting … working with public construction on a city square … surrounded by three retirement clubs … we had removed the bowling lawn and replaced it with a brand new playground, shiny and very modern, really new … and so Horacio arrived at the meeting presuming that they were going to applaud him … he arrived, and they all started to insult him, and he didn’t understand … it turns out that the architects who did the work, which looked lovely, had been sat in their offices and never actually went to the territory to speak to the users … and following that meeting Horacio told me ‘this can never happen again. Every peso that we are going to invest must be worth it, we are going to have to listen to those who will be part of, those who will be final users’. And from then on he went three to five times a week to neighbourhood meetings, covering the entire city approximately every three and a half months … and told me ‘I feel this is the best way to govern, by listening to the people, being in contact’.

Maunier’s anecdote is significant, as the authors have since heard it repeated in public interviews and it thus provides an intentional representation of Larreta’s deployment of proximity as a mechanism of participation (Instituto Formación Política y Gestión Pública, 2022). Proximity is presented as a pragmatic strategy by Larreta to ensure that urban redevelopment and his government policy translate not only into what they understand as material improvement of the city but also into an improvement in the experiences of ‘users’. Larreta introduced a new mechanism to urban redevelopment by creating face-to-face (and later online) fora through which he could listen to the needs and concerns of residents. Proximity aimed to allow continual feedback in which city users are given, in principle, a capacity to have a say in urban policy. Yet participation was not solely deployed to build consensus for neoliberal urban planning; it also responded to the political objective of constructing Larreta as a legitimate democratic leader. As Rosanvallon (2009) argues, participation also responds to a purpose of efficiency in local management.

Maunier summarised Larreta’s approach as one of ‘active listening’, based on the need to not lose touch with ‘social reality’. During the first years of Larreta’s administration, Maunier and her colleagues in city government watched closely as Macri led a national presidency but quickly dropped in public opinion polls, something that could be attributed to precisely his loss of contact, his lack of proximity to social realities. Although Macri did attempt to continue deploying mechanisms of listening, for example by hosting phone calls with ‘ordinary’ Argentine citizens, there was a limit to how much proximity he could build at the national scale, and it was never promoted as heavily in the national branding. Larreta’s active listening would eventually transform, Maunier told us, into ‘active listening’ in which the city government would not just listen but respond to, speak back to and even debate with neighbours. She used the example of the implementation of bike lanes across the city, which polarised opinions and forced the government to take a stand (in favour but attempting to accommodate local complaints and issues).

Proximity thus provided a political strategy for consolidating the hegemony of the PRO and the leadership of Larreta in the city. For this reason, proximity was heavily tied to a communication structure through which Larreta built and sustained his urban brand. As city governments in the global north and south have taken on greater political, financial and administrative authority, there has been a growing tendency for mayors to cultivate new collective political identities, or brands, at the urban scale (Pasotti, 2010). The PRO has been painting the city with yellow signs and slogans that are indistinguishable from its party logo (Dinardi, 2017). Larreta has added proximity to the brand by investing in practices of active listening.

In Larreta’s 2019 electoral campaign for re-election as mayor, ‘listening’ became the predominant electoral message (Ariza and March, 2021). Numerous campaign materials were published, especially on his social networks, showing him chatting with small groups of neighbours, with a typical messaging stating: ‘In Villa Lugano, listening to the neighbours’ (official Twitter account, 9 May 2019).³ Videos or photographs of these scenes of active listening were circulated as part of his communication strategy. The activeness of listening was highlighted through the communication strategy, as can be observed in a Facebook post (8 July 2019) which showed a video made up of a succession of images of Horacio with different neighbours and their first names written on the image: ‘Agustina, Ariadna, Lina, Cristian, Graciela, Andrés, Guadalupe …’.⁴ The text accompanying this video is revealing:

For years I have listened to your proposals and answered your questions every time we meet on the street, at neighbourhood meetings, having a coffee in a bar and through the networks. And that is the way of working that I believe in: being close, listening to each other and exchanging opinions, so that together we can continue to build the city that we all dream of. Thank you! (Quoted in Ariza and March, 2021: 211)

Proximity strategies are a way of responding to the crisis of representation, opposing the staging of proximity to the distance of ‘the politicians’ (Rosanvallon, 2011). Proximity provided a mechanism and brand through which Larreta consolidated the hegemony of the PRO party and constructed his leadership at the urban scale, a strategy that responded not only to the threat of national populism but also to ongoing attempts to decentralise mechanisms of participation to intra-urban scales. However, Rosanvallon (2009) also warns about the potential ‘impolitic’ drifts of proximity: the multiplication of singular experiences and listeners cannot be articulated in a global view of the political community, something that emerges when we consider the limits to Larreta’s urban strategy.

Participatory centralisation and the limits to proximity

Larreta’s use of proximity was consolidated as a city-wide strategy outside and against the ongoing attempt to decentralise power to local (neighbourhood) levels. Through his weekly visits to neighbourhoods, the city government has been relatively hostile to attempts to deepen participatory decentralisation, a process rooted in progressive experiments in the region (Chavez and Goldfrank, 2004). Maunier described the government’s objective of installing participation at the (centralised) urban scale: ‘I don’t want this to be something that just depends on local councils; it should be a transversal area, with most areas of the city (government) having a participatory process within them’. Making participation transversal was thus dependent on centralising it in the city government. This is significant because, as Maunier recognised, the process of decentralisation in the city unfolded in parallel to their installation of a participatory agenda. Larreta’s government sought to separate participation from decentralisation, allowing the city government to maintain proximity as part of its own brand and not be undercut by local councils seeking greater autonomy. During our interview with Victoria Roldán Mendez, the sub-secretary for Council Management, and the key implementer of decentralisation in Larreta’s final years as mayor, she made a striking comment on the possibilities for local participation in councils:

You [the interviewers] mix up decentralisation and participation, from what you have told me. I see these as two distinct things … I would find it difficult to unite decentralisation, which is a mere act of administration and management … with participation, I can’t see that …

Given the intertwined history of participation and decentralisation in the region, such a statement is remarkable and sits directly counterposed to the historical tendency in CABA and other cities in the region of participation going hand in hand with processes of decentralisation (Goldfrank, 2011).

Participatory decentralisation has been a slow process in CABA that was initially written into the city constitution of 1996, incorporating multiple mechanisms of local citizen participation, yet to date has failed to devolve significant political and financial power (see Halvorsen, 2019). In 2011, under Mayor Macri, the 15 comunas (councils) were finally institutionalised and held their first elections, each having a President and six further councillors elected by proportional representation. The PRO has dominated this local electoral arena and only very occasionally has a comuna been won by the opposition. Despite the PRO’s hegemony across this new scale of urban governance, there has been a strong reluctance to relinquish power from the central to local urban government. In a striking interview from 2016 with Carlos Guzzini, the President of Comuna 11, who was part of Larreta’s coalition, he complained: ‘It has been very difficult to decentralize. No-one wants to hand over power … The secretary of decentralization should be renamed a secretary of centralization’.

Such frustration with how Larreta bypassed local participatory institutions was widespread. Representatives of the neighbourhood advisory council in Comuna 2 told us how they were rarely invited to speak in Larreta’s proximity meetings. One author witnessed this, with the council member intervening in the proximity meeting: ‘You don’t want us here, my colleagues were not even invited this time, but we have a democratic right to be here and present our demands to you’. This received a brief spoken acknowledgement before the individual was approached by an assistant with a clipboard who noted down their concerns. The strategy of participatory centralisation may be explained, in part, by the personalisation of Larreta’s strategy, with a subsequent view to his (failed) campaign in the primaries of his party coalition for Presidential elections in 2023.

A relatively successful case of participatory centralisation can be seen in the example of the ‘Station Park’. On 14 March 2017, Larreta spoke to a group of local activists and politicians in a central neighbourhood to announce the opening of the park, which neighbours had demanded for nearly two decades: ‘More than the outcome, which is more green space for the neighbours of this area, the process was very, very good in terms of the participation’. As he went on to comment, this participation was remarkable for bringing together neighbours, local councillors and members of the city legislature from all sides of the political divide. Upon making this announcement, he stood next to Carlos Tomada, a key figure of the opposition who served as Minister of Labour under the Kirchner government (2003–2015). This mutual celebration of local participation was remarkable against the backdrop of an intense conflict at the heart of Argentina’s democracy, with the opposition to Larreta and Macri’s political party more intense than ever. However, this celebration of participation was made possible by Larreta’s government extending their strategy of proximity through deployment of an intensive process of public participation in the neighbourhood dispute. Following years of local grassroots mobilisation, the city government sent a team from the area known as Urban Anthropology who, working alongside Maunier, deployed a set of resources aimed at incorporating local opinion in the design and construction of the park.

Javier Irigaray, the area’s director, told us that although they consulted with locally organised neighbourhood groups, they deliberately wanted to create an alternative participatory structure to allow residents’ voices that may otherwise not be heard to be included. This led to a tense yet working relationship with local activists and the council and, crucially, allowed Larreta to capitalise on the project and claim it as part of his broader agenda of ‘active listening’. Such an intervention thus facilitated Larreta in maintaining a claim over participation while simultaneously side-lining the process of decentralisation. In sum, as a strategy of participation, Larreta was able to extend proximity to a project that interacted with grassroots and activist practices of participation, indicating plausible openings for grassroots actors to appropriate hegemonic ideas and practices of participation. At the same time, however, Larreta used this to bypass the decentralised institutions for participation and keep it within the city government’s agenda and his personalised brand of politics.

Observing the relationship between the different scales (national, urban and intra-urban) allows us to nuance Rosanvallon’s concept of proximity by distinguishing it from that of decentralisation. Proximity can be a centralising strategy, insofar as it crystallises in its maximum expression as a link with an accessible and ubiquitous ruler. Although the (re)centralising tendency in Larreta’s deployment of proximity has provoked frustration, it has also come across limits in its capacity to govern, in turn provoking tensions and highlighting the need for Larreta’s government to take a more expansive approach to public participation. The limits to proximity as a strategy of legitimacy are particularly pronounced when deployed in popular (i.e. working-class) neighbourhoods.

For example, in 2016, Larreta arrived in Barrio Saldías, a small informal settlement on the edge of Receolta, CABA’s most exclusive neighbourhood, to host meetings with neighbourhoods and discuss their upcoming ‘urbanisation’ (i.e. infrastructure upgrading). On several occasions, Larreta and his team arrived to walk the territory and discuss key demands with neighbours. This raised hopes of a participatory transformation in which their historical demands for urban integration (e.g. installing sewage) would be responded to. Nevertheless, subsequent months led to frustration as the urbanisation project stalled, ostensibly due to a lack of government funding as they prioritised the flagship ‘villa 31’ neighbourhood in central Buenos Aires. This marked a crisis for the strategy of proximity. On the one hand, residents of Saldías decided to keep alive the urbanisation demand by attending his neighbourhood meetings. Yet the participatory voices of residents were marginalised and simultaneously stigmatised. As one resident, Elizabeth, told us, having attended several neighbour meetings:

… often they did not let me talk … the meeting ended and I hadn’t managed to express our demands … it was full of middle-class people from Recoleta, well-off people … and they saw us as gente villera [slum people], I was not going with anyone, represented by anyone, I was just considered a villero… it was not like when they came to our neighbourhood and I was in my territory, and I made sure everyone’s voice was heard.

On the other hand, however, the legitimacy of proximity was taken up by the local council, of the same political colour as Larreta’s government but with a capacity to maintain frequent meetings with neighbours and resolve demands. In the absence of the mayor’s leadership, the local council successfully took forward the installation of drinking water, public lighting and the construction of a local square, developing its own legitimacy in the neighbourhood. As Elizabeth went on to comment: ‘everything changed with the comuneros [local councilllors] … they were the first people we really mattered to and they, some of them, have really shown an interest and helped us’. The failure of Larreta’s strategy of proximity to support participatory governance in this small popular neighbourhood was met by an alternative strategy of grassroots articulation with the local council. Here, the issue was not over the political orientation or ideology of the democratic representatives (there was alignment between local council and central government), rather it was a matter of the capacity of Larreta’s government to maintain the necessary presence in the territory that proximity required.

Conclusion

Proximity as a modality of urban participation demonstrates the significance of scale as a political strategy for governing the city. Against the tendency to ontologically foreclose possibilities for public participation in urban governance, most recently captured in debates over the post-political city, this article works in line with recent moves to generate open, pragmatic and agnostic analyses of public participation (Baiocchi and Ganuza, 2017; Becher, 2010; Silver et al., 2010). In particular, we have demonstrated how Rosanvallon’s (2011) work on proximity as democratic legitimacy allows us to read particular strategies of participatory urban governance as historically and geographically situated. The outcomes of proximity as legitimacy are open and contingent. We conclude with two points.

First, proximity is not ideologically tainted, and can be simultaneously directed towards radical and conservative agendas in the city, including struggles over ‘new municipalism’ (Roth et al., 2023). Historically, Buenos Aires deployed proximity through a progressive government via the deployment of participatory budgeting as a means of responding to the national political crisis, in turn facilitating certain practices of grassroots activism (Rodgers, 2010). Nevertheless, we recognise that the Larreta government deployed proximity as a strategy that sought to contain rather than facilitate more insurgent practices and there was a tendency to create what Rosanvallon (2008) terms ‘impolitical’ consequences, that is, a difficulty in creating community out of the multiplication of particular demands and visions. As we demonstrated through our observation of his meeting with neighbours, political decisions are deferred to the ballot box, thus emptying the meeting of substantial conflict. Yet we note that such a manoeuvre was itself political –‘if you don’t like it, vote for another candidate’– and never shied away from the broader political project to which it belonged.

Second, proximity is a resource-intensive strategy that requires an ongoing physical presence in neighbourhoods, and may be hard to sustain, providing some indications towards the recent demise of Larreta’s political career. When necessary, Larreta demonstrated a capacity to extend proximity into a larger set of participatory urban practices in order to respond to insurgent demands and incorporate success stories of grassroots participation into his government’s repertoire. This was seen by the deployment of the Urban Anthropology task force in the case of the Station Park. However, as its director told us, they have to be highly selective when they intervene with limited resources. The case of Barrio Saldías demonstrated an incapacity to communicate with popular sectors, where proximity required an intensive period of supporting neighbours with their demands. In this case, the local council was able to take forward the city government’s agenda for ‘urbanisation’, as Larreta isolated himself by centralising his dispositif of participatory governance.

At a time of ongoing crises of representation worldwide, and a resurgence in right-wing populism in Argentina, further attention to proximity and other strategies of legitimacy (such as impartiality and reflexivity: Rosanvallon, 2011) will provide important empirical foci. Scholars of urban studies can provide insights, as cities are increasingly significant sites of democratic politics and generate specific political opportunities for governance and participation. We thus call on further studies into participatory strategies, including proximity, that do not collapse into ontological binaries, but remain attuned to actually-existing modes of urban democracy.

Footnotes

The authors are grateful to the three anonymous reviews,whose comments greatly improved the final version,and to the editorial guidance of Phil Hubbard. Thanks go to Cecilia Dinardi for comments on a draft version. They also thank the following people for support in parts of the research from which the article draws: Raffaele Bazurli,Leonela Infante,Sebastian Mauro,Eliana Persky and Gonzalo Zubia. A draft version was presented at the Society of Latin American Studies Annual Conference in Belfast,in March 2023.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: The authors acknowledge financial support from the British Academy,Grant No. TGC/200075.

ORCID iDs

Sam Halvorsen

Rocio Annunziata

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