Argentina

Administrative Divisions

Main article: Provinces of Argentina

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Argentina is divided into 23 provinces (provincias; singular: provincia), and 1 autonomous city (commonly known as capital federal), marked with an asterisk:

Related Topics:
Province - Autonomous city

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* The current official name for the federal district is "Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires".

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Buenos Aires has been the capital of Argentina since its unification, but there have been projects to move the administrative center elsewhere. During the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín a law was passed ordering the move of the federal capital to Viedma, a city in the Patagonic province of Río Negro. Studies were underway when hyperinflation, in 1989, killed off the project. Though the law was never formally repealed, it has become a mere historical relic, and the project has been forgotten.

Related Topics:
Viedma - Hyperinflation

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Urbanization

About 3 million people live in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, and roughly 11 million in Greater Buenos Aires, making it one of the largest urban conglomerates in the world. Together with their respective metropolitan areas, the second and third largest cities in Argentina, Córdoba and Rosario, each comprise about 1.3 million inhabitants.

Related Topics:
Buenos Aires - Greater Buenos Aires - Metropolitan area - Córdoba - Rosario

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Most European immigrants to Argentina (coming in great waves especially around the First and the Second World Wars) settled in the cities, which offered jobs, education, and other opportunities that enabled newcomers to enter the middle class. Since the 1930s many rural workers have moved to the big cities.

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The 1990s saw many rural towns become ghost towns when train services were abandoned and local products manufactured on a small scale were replaced by massive amounts of imported cheap goods, in part because of the monetary policy which kept the U. S. dollar exchange rate fixed and low. Many slums (villas miseria) sprouted in the outskirts of the largest cities, inhabited by empoverished low-class urban dwellers and migrants from smaller towns in the interior of the country.

Related Topics:
Ghost town - Villas miseria

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Compared to most Latin American countries, and even today, while it is recovering from an economic crisis, Argentina has a very large middle class. Many of these middle class people work in industry, own small businesses, or have government or professional jobs. They live in tall modern apartment buildings or bungalows that have small yards or gardens. Wealthy Argentines and business executives live in mansions and luxurious apartments in the cities or in fashionable suburbs.

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Argentina's urban areas have a European look, reflecting the influence of their European settlers. Many towns and cities are built like Spanish cities around a main square called a plaza. A cathedral and important government buildings often face the plaza. The general layout of the cities is called a damero, that is, a checkerboard, since it is based on a pattern of square blocks, though modern developments sometimes depart from it (for example, the city of La Plata, built at the end of the 19th century, is organized as a checkerboard plus diagonal avenues at fixed intervals).

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In descending order by number of inhabitants, the major cities in Argentina are Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Rosario, Mendoza, Santa Fe, Mar del Plata, La Plata, Tucumán, Salta, and Bahía Blanca.

Related Topics:
Buenos Aires - Córdoba - Rosario - Mendoza - Santa Fe - Mar del Plata - La Plata - Tucumán - Salta - Bahía Blanca

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For a more comprehensive list, see List of cities in Argentina.

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