The Social Life of the Mall: Working and Dwelling in Urban Argentina

Paseo La Estación, a mall in Buenos Aires, is as much a place of transit as a place of encounter, where long-term residents and newcomers, people with and without jobs, homeowners and those without housing meet. 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 a city characterized by diversity, inequality, and mobility.

Franziska Reiffen completed her doctorate in social and cultural anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Her research interests include migration and displacement, work and precarity, and negotiations of belonging in urban spaces.