Abstract
Buenos Aires, Argentina is one of the least green cities in the world, with estimates of 1.5 - 6m² of green space per person – far below the World Health Organization’s recommended minimum of 15m². Neoliberal policies continue to fragment and privatize the city’s green spaces, posing serious threats to public health. The remaining parks in Buenos Aires employ physical barriers to preserve the park’s green elements, including metal gates (often painted green), restricted gardens and quads, and signs that prohibit stepping on the grass. These barriers deprive opportunities for sensory engagement, reducing park users’ interactions to passive visual and auditory experiences. Here, 'public' doesn’t mean accessible to all; rather, it refers to spaces that are meticulously controlled and managed by the city to keep the parks’ few remaining fragments of nature safely away from people. The city government's priority for its public parks is to preserve an elite green façade, which it achieves through the physical barriers depicted in this photo essay.
These field photographs invite viewers to reckon with the very concept of ‘public,’ and how its definition may vary across spatial and political boundaries. It features five prominent parks in Buenos Aires visited by an undergraduate from Middlebury College during ten months of ethnographic research in 2023.
Recommended Citation
Sheridan, Michael and Babbott-Bryan, Claire. "The Public Parks Paradox: Look but Don't Touch." Journal of Ecological Anthropology 25, no. 1 (2025): .
Available at: https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/jea/vol25/iss1/2
