La Plata: a Cohabitation Code to criminalize the popular economy

23/11/2020 Sara Lorenzini Gender Equality

The municipality of La Plata, capital of the Buenos Aires district, is trying once again to approve a project for an Urban Cohabitation Code (Código de Convivencia Urbana). The problems: it criminalizes the offer of sexual services, peddling and many activities that support the popular forms of economy in the public space. The background is hygienist, racist, mercantilist and meets the processes of gentrification of cities.

It’s already well known that sometimes new laws can generate problems that, far from solving the issues that they were written to tackle, end up worsening the situation. This happens even more when they are thought without taking into consideration the voice nor the participation of the people that will be influenced by them. That is the case for the Urban Cohabitation Code that the mayor of La Plata, Julio Garro, sent to the City Council for the third time for its approval. At the table for the discussion of this new legislation social and human rights organizations were not invited, even though they had been present for the previous presentations of the Code.

Once again the head of Cambiemos tries to criminalize poverty considering problematic the survival strategies that different groups of the popular sectors form to deal with their material and economic needs. The informal economies, which for the majority take place in the public space, are for them the way to obtain the means to support their own lives and their families. In these groups there are often university students that try supporting their studies with different means. The criminalization of these events is a way to block access to the city for some particular people or to make them invisible.

Some of the actors that were identified as problematic were the valets and the car-washers (when prohibiting the sale of parking services on the public road); the street artists (when prohibiting the sale of goods and services in the traffic lights); the sellers of flowers at traffic lights (when prohibiting the sale of services and goods at traffic lights); cardboard vendors (when prohibiting the circulation of animal-powered transport and the illegal collection of garbage); to the street vendors (when prohibiting fairs in the squares and in the sidewalks of the centre); the sexual workers (when prohibiting the offer of sex on public streets); the sellers of streetfood (when prohibiting the elaboration of streetfood; choripanes, chipá, vegan food, hot bread); to the selling of alcohol in publc streets; to the irregular public transport; etc.

This is not new legislation. It is watering down in the new legislation that the large gentrified cities of the world have been producing. A “minor” legislation having the following characteristics:

At the first place, it is a mercantilist legislation, which proposes the valorization of the squared-metre in the city centre. This is why the coexistence codes must be read next to the other ordinances (Urban Planning code) that are being sanctioned. Indeed, the hidden side of securitization is the financial appreciation that allows real estate developers and franchise entrepreneurs to develop millionaire businesses, while at the same time making assets of dubious origin transparent.
Secondly, it is an hygienist legislation: it proposes a cleaning of the city in racist and transphobic terms, so that the “alert neighbors” of the middle classes can use the city according to their own customs. In other words: if there is poverty, it must not be seen, if there is gender diversity, it must neither. The city should be closed and transformed into a postcard for tourists or for those with the economic capacity to consume.

And finally, it is a punitive legislation: it proposes punitive answers (fines, seizure of confiscated material, arrests and disqualifications) as the only way to solve the alleged conflicts. There are no other ways to deal with situations or events that any neighbor could identify as a problem, and so there is no space for dialogues where these problems can be addressed taking into account the point of view of all the actors involved and where they can think about their problem together with the problem of the others.
Nonetheless, this legislation establishes a kind of micro-penalty aimed at managing the flow of goods and people in the city and in particular, in the public spaces.

However, the subjects of the legislation is not the individual but whether the collectives and their strategies, developed to face their material problems and to compose identities (meetings in the squares, graffiti, etc.) or to express their problems or to petition the authorities (public demonstrations, campsites, flyers, etc.). They do not pursue individual actions but rather behaviors identified as producing insecurity or fear, which differentiates from the lifestyles and consumption patterns that other neighbors in the city have.