The Social Life of the Mall

The Paseo La Estación, a mall in Buenos Aires, is as much a place of transit as a contact zone, where long-term residents and newcomers, people with and without jobs, homeowners and those without housing encounter each other. In the process, social tensions emerge, especially when classist, migrantizing, and moralizing distinctions become relevant in conflict-laden negotiations of belonging. In an ethnography of the mall, Franziska Reiffen explores how people find opportunities for social, economic, and political participation in precarious conditions, and shows how people create socially meaningful places in cities characterized by diversity, inequality, and mobility.