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La grilla y el parque: espacio publico y cultura urbana en Buenos Aires, r887-1936. By ADRIA GORELIK. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1998. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. 455 pp. Paper.
As Diego Armus and Juan Suriano note in a recent review essay, Argentine urban history has been eclectic and sometimes imaginative in approach, but "short on debates" and "mainly focused on nuances." While in the last decade scholars have produced detailed social histories of topics such as popular housing, neighborhood sociability, and political protest in modem Buenos Aires, they have not shaped these piecemeal advances into a overall argument about the city. With La grilla y el parque, Adrian Gorelik has taken a bold step toward a new interpretation. Building on the patchwork of existing studies, Gorelik has put innovative questions to sources ranging from tango lyrics to architectural plans and produced a compelling account of Buenos Aires between 1887 and 1936. In these 50 years, the population of...