Buenos Aires Argentina: Residents try to save “Paris” of South America from bulldozers

theguardian.com reported Buenos Aires has not traditionally been concerned about preservation. Only a handful of buildings remain from the colonial years after the city’s founding in 1536 in what is now the old San Telmo tourist district. The Parisian architecture of the early 20th century has also been shrinking because of the property boom that accompanied a renewed spurt of economic growth in the last decade until 2013.

“The ideology has always been: this is America, everything needs to be new,” says Sergio Kiernan, a journalist who writes a weekly column in the daily Página/12 that chronicles the razing of old buildings. “That attitude is still prevalent in sectors of government today.” But recently a combination of specialists such as Anchorena and grassroots groups alarmed at the rapid pace of destruction have become a major headache for developers, as well as for the city’s authorities. Read Article