https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4184-5205
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ABSTRACT
Ushuaia, one of five Antarctic gateway cities worldwide, is one of the most prosperous places in Argentina. However, its initial impression to visitors as a highly affluent town can be misleading. Since the mid-2000s, informal settlements have sprung up in the forest belt above the city with an estimated 14% of Ushuaia’s population. These contrasting representations, polar opposites in some ways, are integral parts of Ushuaia and its positioning as a forward-thinking, culturally differentiated Antarctic gateway city. This paper explores this tension through a case study of two settlements in the northwest of the city, including informal settlers' lived experiences and aspirations; representations and processes of urban development, and the views of the formally tenanted population. Ethnographically exploring a topic that has divided Ushuaia for decades and giving a voice to inhabitants of informal settlements adds depth to an otherwise incomplete and top-down understanding of Ushuaia as a tourist town. Informal settlements are an integral part of the city that could, potentially, add value to tourism enterprises and enrich the tourist gaze by providing a less polarised, more inclusive perspective.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the residents of Ushuaia who participated in this research and generously gave of their time, effort, and energy. The authors are grateful to the anonymous reviewers who provided thorough and thoughtful feedback that enabled us to improve the paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The other Antarctic gateway cities are Cape Town, South Africa; Christchurch, New Zealand; Hobart, Australia; and Punta Arenas, Chile.
2 The paper documents field work and research undertaken prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. The medium and long-term impact of this in general, and specifically on Antarctic tourism, is very unclear and is likely to remain so for some time. The paper has been written on the premise of projected expansion of Antarctic tourism, though the authors anticipate that this may now change considerably. Overall, the paper has been reviewed in the light of the pandemic and the conclusions reached are still considered appropriate and feasible.
3 An informal settlement is defined here as having the following characteristics: Irregular land tenure, self-built housing [often non-durable material], low level of infrastructure [for example running water, sewage], residents with low income (Lombard Citation2014 ), and often overcrowded (Inostroza Citation2017).
4 Data from the 2010 census shows that 65.1% of residents in Tierra del Fuego are immigrants, mostly from other Argentine provinces, whereas 34.9% are born in Tierra del Fuego (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos Citation2010).
5 This is more than Argentina’s overall figures for foreign-born residents (4.5%), but less than the figures for the city of Buenos Aires, CF (13.2%).
6 In 2019, a heavily discounted last-minute 10-day trip to the Antarctic Peninsula cost around US$5,000. Trips booked in advance through agents or outside Argentina cost several times this amount.
7 Terms vary depending on country or sometimes even region. For example, in Chile, slums are called campamentos (camps), while slums in Buenos Aires are referred to as villas miseria (roughly, place of misery) – a term that is not used in Ushuaia.
8 Social capital is “made up of social obligations (‘connections’), [and] is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalised in the form of a title of nobility” (Bourdieu Citation1986, 16).
9 Following Bourdieu, economic capital is here understood as capital that is “immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalised in the form of property rights” (Bourdieu Citation1991, 16).
10 Unlike marketing, branding is understood here as a campaign that has as its goal the increase of economic developments, community development, and local identity (Hernandez-Garcia Citation2013, 45).
11 The doctoral fieldwork that this research was a part of was approved by the University of Canterbury’s Human Ethics Committee (HEC 2011/48).
12 Ethnographic research is a branch of anthropology that seeks to understand how people live their lives. Unlike, for example, market research which asks precise questions designed to prevent bias, anthropological researchers visit their case study to observe and listen in a nondirected way. Their goal is to see people’s behaviour on their terms, not through the lens of the researcher. This observational method differs from positivist and post-positivist methods and illuminates the context in which people construct meaning in their lives (Prasad Citation2015). For further discussions of ethnographic fieldwork see, for example, Metcalf (Citation2002) and DeWalt and DeWalt (Citation2002).
13 A gatekeeper is here understood as a contact person or an institution from the field site that the researcher has chosen to do field work in. In qualitative research, gatekeepers act as mediators between the community and the researcher. Their support is crucial for the researcher, as gatekeepers facilitate (or obstruct) access to places, people, and situations.
14 See Herbert (Citation2014) for more information on the fieldwork and complementary research foci of which this study was a part.
15 Long-term inhabitants in legal dwellings, renting or owning their properties.
16 Local newspaper El Diario del Fin del Mundo (daily except weekends) and the regional Diario Prensa (daily except weekends).
17 Indeed, of the people residing in informal settlements, almost half (47%) are from the province of Tierra del Fuego. Twenty-two per cent are from Buenos Aires Province, approximately 6% each from the provinces of Jujuy and Córdoba, and almost 5% from Chile, among others. Of those settlers that were not born in the province of Tierra del Fuego, three quarters have been living in Tierra del Fuego between 10 and 30 years.
18 On the other hand, the display of materialistic wealth just as easily counts against settlers, and the existence of four-wheel drives and TV antennae in informal settlements was frequently used by city dwellers to imply an abuse of resources by the settlers - also see Valdez et al. Citation2010, 107.
19 At the same time, the settlement’s growth was a source of discord with other sectors, especially in advanced stages of cooperation with the municipality. As the president of the neighbourhood association for Sectors 1–3 pointed out in 2018, adding more settlers without authorisation of the government endangers negotiation progress. Clandestine additions to the number of settlers were viewed critically.
20 According to a community organiser in Sector IV, this includes, for example, setting up new dwellings only in clearings or in places where as few trees as possible have to be cut down; using recycled materials for the dwellings; minimising the risk of fire (which would damage the natural environment) by organising and participating in fire awareness and response workshops; car-pooling, and making and marking pathways to minimise foot-traffic damage to the natural environment.