The “britanization” of Bahía Blanca

State, global capital, railway and local space in multiescale perspective

Abstract

Bahía Blanca City received the imprint of capitalism with a strong impact. This was due to the fact that British railway companies altered its morphology transmuting the primary condition of fortification. In this context, the multiscale perspective helps to envision this urbanization process including “external” factors and actors. The objective of this article is to characterize local mutations from the incorporation of the global scale represented by the British capital. Because of the lack of interest of the institutional levels of Province and Nation, these transformations, initiated around 1883 with the location of railway stations, favored the privatization of urban land at the expense of precarious public spaces that were qualified only towards the local centenary. These statements come from the results obtained from the idea of “britanization”, suggested by the historian Lugones, as a hypothesis that crosses the indicators observed in various historical documents such as maps, chronicles and photographs.