Broad avenues define the limits of the city’s unofficial but familiar neighbourhoods and are lined by seemingly endless rows of apartment buildings. During rush hours these avenues are clogged with traffic. Each city neighbourhood has its own identity, and residents maintain loyalty to their local sports teams, political candidates, and traditions.

La Boca, a picturesque area at the mouth of the Riachuelo River, where the city’s first settlers landed, is filled with Italian restaurants, and some streets, such as the Caminito, are lined with wooden houses painted in bright colours. La Boca, now an artists’ colony, was the site of the city’s first meat-salting plants, which brought great wealth to Buenos Aires in the 19th century.

San Telmo, or Barrio Sur, south of the Plaza de Mayo, began to be restored and gentrified in the early 1990s after nearly a century of neglect and decay. By the later part of the decade the area had become trendy and bohemian. Its numerous jazz clubs and theatres attract a varied group of patrons, from journalists and artists to labourers. Most of the area’s buildings were constructed before the 20th century, and some of them are conventillos, abandoned mansions that were subdivided into smaller living spaces and that are now mainly inhabited by poorer Argentinians and recent immigrants. On the other hand, Barrio Norte, north of Plaza de Mayo, is an upscale area built during Argentina’s Gilded Age (the late 19th century). It is sometimes referred to as a miniature Paris. The area, which also encompasses the neighbourhoods of Palermo, Recoleta, and Retiro, was constructed around the ornate Recoleta Cemetery, where elite Argentinians such as Eva Perón are buried. A racetrack and polo field are located in Palmero, which also has numerous parks.

Other distinctive neighbourhoods in Buenos Aires include Monserrat and Puerto Madero. Monserrat, wedged between San Telmo and the Plaza de Mayo, is home to many of the city’s oldest churches, modern government buildings, and distinctive Beaux Arts buildings. Puerto Madero, once an area of dilapidated buildings and abandoned warehouses, has been transformed into a chic neighbourhood of luxury hotels, upscale restaurants, expensive apartment buildings, and offices. The neighbourhood’s streets are named after prominent women; Puente de la Mujer (“Bridge of the Woman”), a 335-foot- (102-metre-) long pedestrian suspension bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava, crosses through the centre of the neighbourhood.

Abasto and Once are quintessential working-class neighbourhoods; both are located west of Avenida 9 de Julio. Carlos Gardel, one of Argentina’s renowned tango singers, lived in Abasto. Once is famous for its Art Deco buildings. To the north of Once lies Belgrano, home to a relatively small Chinese community. Belgrano is dominated by high-rise apartment buildings and private homes squeezed between a series of small hills.

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Outlying areas

Buenos Aires’s suburbs lack the vibrancy and infrastructure of the city centre and are more typically Latin American in character. Suburban residents are generally not as well-off as urban dwellers, and the farther away the suburb lies from the metropolitan area, the more likely it is to lack basic services and access to economic opportunities. Most of the city’s shanty dwellings are located in the outlying suburbs.

Important areas beyond the official city limits include the industrial partidos (counties) of Avellaneda, Lanús, and Quilmes, which lie south of the Riachuelo River. There, petrochemical and oil-refining operations extend along the Río de la Plata. Tigre, a county to the north of the city that encompasses part of the Paraná delta and its many islands, is another important area. Tourism is Tigre’s major industry, and many porteños visit the delta region on weekends and holidays. A number of the city’s rowing clubs are also located there.

Most of the urban area’s industrial expansion since the 1970s has taken place in the northern and western counties of Greater Buenos Aires. Many textile, printing, and food-processing factories are located there. In the early 1990s a major industrial park in Merlo became a centre for foreign-owned automotive and food-processing plants. On the outskirts of the counties, near highways and other public transportation routes, new offices, gated communities, country clubs, and sprawling shopping centres have proliferated.

Housing

Architecturally, the city can be divided into four residential styles. The most common is a structure that began as a single-family dwelling along the street, with an interior patio or garden and rows of small rooms down either side that lead to a kitchen. These houses are attached one to another to form an unbroken facade at the sidewalk. As population density increased in the early 20th century, this basic house was broken up into smaller units and gave rise to a second style, a two- and three-story version known as petit hotel (“little hotel”), which was neither as wide nor as deep as its predecessor. The lots on which these houses were constructed defined the size of the first generation of high-rise apartment buildings that now dominate Palermo, Recoleta, and Retiro. These high-rises, representing a third style, were built one next to the other, stretching for block after block in the northern sector of the city. In Belgrano, just north of Barrio Norte, these apartment houses are freestanding; many are as large as city blocks, with their own gardens, because they were built on the lots of single-family detached houses that were common in outer areas of the capital and in the suburbs.

The fourth residential style, which has become a significant aspect of the urban landscape since the 1960s, is the corrugated metal shack, typical of the shantytowns that have come to constitute a significant amount of the housing in the metropolitan area and are home to a sizeable minority of the population. These shantytowns are referred to as villas miserias (“neighbourhoods of misery”) and are characterized by their precarious tenure and the absence of basic public services. Many of them are abandoned buildings overrun by squatters or located on unused industrial land next to rivers and streams at the margins of the metropolitan region. They are largely inhabited by rural migrants who have little choice but to reside on unoccupied land that is otherwise undesirable. In contrast to these overcrowded shantytowns are the upper-class enclaves of suburban estates, which are often gated communities occupying large areas of land, also located at the boundaries of the metropolitan area. Suburban estates began to appear in the late 1980s, when the expansion of urban highways and the wider availability of automobiles made commuting easier.