Census 2022: the boom of the 'country municipalities' and the phenomenon of the 'urban sprawl'

The way in which the city expands in the Conurbano and its surroundings is one of the data that will be known with the

.

Preliminary results shed little light.

What do the population numbers say in terms of urban development?

How could the Covid pandemic influence and what can be expected from the urban settlement in times of remote work?

In terms of demography, one could speak of an

, proposes the economist and expert in geographic data, Juan Ignacio Fulponi, and graphs that this would be like thinking of a satellite image that changes over the years.

The gray areas, which mark the buildings or the urban layout, are expanding with irregular shapes.

What this "stain" shows is "how the construction progressed, not so much on the top but on the sides", points out Fulponi (@jfulponi on Twitter) and details that knowing both its shape and density is key to, for example, defining public transport circulation areas, among other urban planning issues.

What has happened so far?

"The stain is considered expanded in the City of Buenos Aires and the first cordon of the suburbs," details the researcher and professor from the Department of Transportation of the Faculty of Engineering of the UBA, although he points out that the characteristics are very different.

While there is greater density in the City, "one of the problems of the Conurbano is that from a certain moment they began to build outward and very little inward."

Due to the pandemic, many people decided to move to private neighborhoods outside the City of Buenos Aires.

“That generates that the public services in the Conurbano are of a

, because one has to feed a larger area with a population that is not so considerable.

Ideally there would have to be a density similar to that of Capital, but people expanded the stain outwards”, affirms Fulponi.

And he compares: “It's like in the United States, where the suburbs are very inefficient.

They are areas that are only communicated by car”.

What does it say in Census 2022?

The preliminary results of the 2022 Census revealed that the population of the province of

, which implied an increase of 1,941,969 people compared to the 2010 Census, that is, 12.44 percent.

The Conurbano gathers

but its population grew less in proportion: it went from 9,916,715 people in the 2010 Census to 10,865,182 in 2022, which implied a rise of 9.56.

In this sense, many questioned the results of the 2010 survey, considering that districts like La Matanza were overrepresented.

Among the 24 parties, the one that grew the most in the Conurbano was

(32.09%), followed by 

(26.93%), 

(24.16%),

(21.78%),

(20.04%), Tigre (18.97%) and

(18.11%).

Pilar is not only the one that grew the most in percentage, but in total numbers it exceeded the growth of parties like Tigre, which grew by 71,404 inhabitants (Pilar, by 95,995 people).

The country boom in a pandemic

The architect José Rozados, director of the information portal

, recalls that Moreno was one of the fastest growing parties within private neighborhoods, which were a boom in the pandemic.

“The effect that the covid generated in the relocation of the house was incredible.

We could say that it boosted the relocation of housing, thanks to the fact that people wanted to escape from confinement in apartments and that in certain tasks it was no longer essential to live nearby or commute to work every day”, describes Rozados.

And he adds that a phenomenon of market convenience was added to this.

“There were many people selling their property in Capital that he saw that, for example, with what he got for a three-room apartment in Belgrano, he bought a 150-square-meter lot in a private neighborhood in Moreno.

“It was a multiplier effect towards private neighborhoods and countries”, he relates and warns that it was “a short window”, in any case, since as demand increased, prices also increased.

They were not only from Buenos Aires, says Rozados.

There were also Buenos Aires residents who already lived in open neighborhoods and moved to

In this sense, Rozados proposes to think of three runners.

The North, where Tigre continued to consolidate its offer of gated communities, as in Nordelta;

and municipalities further away such as Pilar and Escobar, which "exploded in a pandemic."

Tigre, details the expert in the real estate sector, was already chosen as "a fortress near the city, but

, Escobar began to be a good option."

The interim mayor of Escobar, Carlos Alberto Ramil, explains to

that the growth above the provincial average is due to multiple factors: "Many citizens choose to live in Escobar, due to its proximity to nature, the relationship with the river , due to the accessibility that it has, due to the Pan-American highway and the provincial routes, the industrial growth that is one of the largest in the country, which generates work points and a present State that conditions for this development to be possible”.

In the West corridor, Rozados points to Moreno, the private neighborhoods on the side of Route 25 and the Luján area, while in the South zone, the Canning corridor (municipalities of Ezeiza and Esteban Echeverría) and also to those located on the side of the Buenos Aires-La Plata highway, in Ensenada or Quilmes.

The effect, minimal, in population

The growth of the "urban sprawl" through gated communities hardly explains population growth.

"A cause/effect relationship cannot be established, but that is likely to have had an impact, I would surely say in Pilar, Tigre, Ezeiza and Escobar," Martín Moreno, a

sociologist and researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the UBA, suggests to

For Moreno, with these results not much more can be said yet, because the population data that is known is for the complete districts and not by zones.

Besides, he considers that the establishment of industries and other phenomena should be taken into account. 

For his part,

points out that "

, because it requires a large area to accommodate few people in relative terms". In this way, "it may imply a marginal increase in population". .

Secondly, continues the specialist in geographic data, "the installation of a private neighborhood does not generate an economy of scale with respect to nearby neighborhoods."

To explain this, Fulponi suggests thinking about the opposite example: the creation of a huge ten-story building.

Not only that many people live in this construction on a small portion of land, but when it arrives it is likely that supermarkets, schools and other services will be installed around it.

And these services will be attractive for other developers to do more buildings and for more people to move to the area.

"The private neighborhood is, on the other hand, a structure that has little to do with its environment, which causes damage to urban planning," says Fulponi, listing the need for electricity, water and other services to reach much more dispersed people, which

, because all those people will move by car, among other problems.

The new forms of work and the search for a life in less dense areas and with more nature not only generated a phenomenon of relocation to these types of private neighborhoods, recalls Rozados, and warns that parties like Luján, Lobos or Chascomús have become

many One option.

Or even

and

on the Atlantic Coast.

Sources from the municipality of Moreno assured this newspaper that they consider that "in principle the growth is due to a high birth rate and the number of migrants that Moreno has had, from people from nearby towns, as well as from neighboring countries." 

The results are not yet defined to be able to see the new map.

But specialists as well as municipalities await this new definition of what Greater Buenos Aires is today, and how the urban sprawl advances to the sides.

Together with other figures, such as the birth rate, they are key to planning the future of the country.

MG

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