The right to a home - Public housing in post-World War II Buenos Aires

Between 1946 and 1955, Juan Peron's government built more houses for the most impoverished sectors of Argentina society than ever before. This article explores the articulation of the state housing policy with the experience of the inhabitants who received homes built by the Peronist state. In a sense, the houses were a testing lab for new ways of daily life. Their inhabitants frequently experienced in only a few years a transition that Usually demanded decades. The family model shifted from the traditional family to the nuclear model, maintaining the traditional roles of the male provider and the female dedicated to motherhood and home. Using oral testimony, this analysis highlights the connection between politics and individual experience at a microhistoriographical level, allowing for the contextualization of Peronist public housing policies and analyzing the continuities with their predecessors as well as the way in which they channeled contradictory political ideologies and architectural sensibilities.