Popular urban economies and community self organization in Buenos Aires

The processes of territorial self organization and labour self management in Latin America are constitutive of popular economies, these heterogeneous frameworks of productive and reproductive activities, subjectivities, practices, spaces and social relationships that make possible reproduction of life of popular classes, facing neoliberal dispossession and exploitation. The debate on popular economies is actually developing throughout the academies, the public institutions and the popular organization in South America: from our perspective, popular economies frameworks combine production, reproduction, modes ofexploitation and accumulation and at the same time reorganize socio-spatial relationships, infrastructure in the territories and social conflicts. From this perspective, we focus on self organized popular strategies and analyze new configurations of urban life, sustainability over time of popular urbanization processes and the reinvention of community infrastructures. Starting from an ethnographic fieldwork developed in Buenos Aires and the analysis of memories and life stories, we present ambivalences and potentialities of the self organization and community finance frames in the popular neighbourhood Ramón Carrillo and the textile cooperative Juana Villca in Ciudadela. Analyzing the data we recollected during our fieldworks, our hypothesis is that these processes, developing new forms of producing, valorising and disputing the common in the crisis, represent a challenge for an extitutional perspective of urban planning and open up possibilities for reinventing urban-popular politics, inside and against the neoliberal city