‘De Alguna Manera, Llegas,’ A Geographic Information Systems Study of Public Transit Accessibility for Precarious Settlements in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Abstract

Popularly known for tango halls, wide avenues, football stadiums, and Parisian architecture, the urban landscape of Buenos Aires, Argentina is, in fact, increasingly marked by dramatic examples of socioeconomic inequality. Over 1.2 million of its 13 million inhabitants live in informal housing communities, where the provision of essential services is inadequate. Perhaps a reason Buenos Aires is not more commonly associated with images of these types of settlements, especially given their relative size, is that most are what are known locally as asentamientos. Somewhat unique to Buenos Aires, these are informal settlements defined by their locations in the metro area’s suburban periphery, far from its cosmopolitan core. A growing topic of interest to academics and non-profits in Argentina, who have tentatively shown asentamientos to lack access to critical services like electricity, potable water, sewerage, and paved streets, there is much that still needs to be known about them. One service whose provision has not yet been well explored in relation to the asentamientos is public transportation. Unable to afford private automobiles, the low-income residents who typically inhabit Buenos Aires’ asentamientos are entirely reliant on public transportation to access employment, schooling, healthcare, and other urban amenities. If transport services are inadequately or inequitably provided to the asentamientos, as is suspected by local researchers and NGOs, they are at risk of unemployment and other forms of social isolation. Seeking to identify, and therefore circumvent, these consequences, this thesis employs transit schedule data from Google Maps to calculate whether there are significant disparities in transit-facilitated accessibility between Buenos Aires’ asentamientos and its formal neighborhoods. Access is measured from a sample of asentamientos from different parts of the metro area—representing regions at different stages of urbanization—and calculated to a set of quotidian amenities, e.g., central business districts, schools, healthcare, and railway stations. It is ultimately shown that the asentamientos are indeed characterized by longer transit-facilitated travel times to most destinations, with the largest disparities in fully-urbanized parts of the conurbation.