Vacant Land Management

Reflections on the Application of Intervention Instruments in La Plata

Abstract

Cities are experiencing an accelerated growth of their surface areas, where vacant land becomes the support on which cities can expand. Thus, processes of dispersed urban expansion are taking shape, generating increasingly costly and disjointed cities, where urban peripheries are configured as spaces where new housing is produced, of reduced sizes, in plots isolated from the urban environment and without infrastructure, and the land market plays a leading role in urban development. Faced with this problem, local governments have different ways of acting. In this context, the objective of this paper is to reflect on the management of vacant land in La Plata (Buenos Aires, Argentina), based on the analysis of the application of intervention instruments by the municipal government, in the context of the current processes of urban sprawl and the major restrictions on access to quality urban land for the population. To this end, the elements of analysis are based on secondary sources (official documents, academic articles on the subject under study, newspaper articles), interviews with key informants, and previous work carried out by the authors themselves