Parallel cities: Buenos Aires’ villas miseria

Buenos Aires is a city with many faces, and its shantytowns, villas de emergencia (emergency villages) – euphemistically also called asentamientos (settlements) or villas miseria (villages of misery) – represent, for the rest of the society, the most scary and impenetrable face of them all. Collecting data, or even knowing the number of its inhabitants, is in this area very difficult. According to the census conducted in 2010, there are in Buenos Aires Capital, without considering its surrounding provinces, about 23 villas and a total of 170,000 residents. Over the last four years the number has increased to 225,000. This however seems to be an approximation, as in 2006 the inhabitants of the 796 villas in the capital and surrounding provinces were calculated to exceed one million.