This paper investigates a moment of shift in urban neoliberal governance strategies under the purview of a new municipal Chief of Government of Buenos Aires at the end of the 2000s: the introduction of a regime of public space that has had implications for the waste management sector (and particularly informal recyclers or cartoneros). I document government attempts to re-represent the city as a modern, hygienic centre that is receptive to investment and tourism, drawing on discursive framings of public space that seek to redefine legitimate users and uses of the city. Such framings are exclusionary of cartoneros and other marginalized urbanites. As with most forms of actually existing neoliberalism, this regime is contradictory and unstable, both containing and provoking challenges to its coherence. This case study of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ in Buenos Aires encourages analytical focus on moments of shift and renewal in urban processes of neoliberalization. In this case the shift marked by the introduction of the regime of public space reveals the priorities and agendas of urban elites as championed by municipal governments, makes visible the paradoxes and contradictions inherent to neoliberal urbanisms, and also exposes openings for resistance, opposition, and renegotiation of urban neoliberal agendas (including protest, discursive reframings of the city and its uses, and the forging of indeterminate alliances).
This paper deals with the multimodal and spatial arrangements of the participants within pre-beginning and opening sequences, i.e. sequences taking place before the actual opening of a social interaction and achieving the conditions for an imminent opening. In face- to-face conversations, these sequences are characterized by intense body activities in space, through which participants achieve their social and spatial convergence and conjunction, and initiate a coordinated common entry in the interaction. In this phase, even before beginning to speak, participants achieve the mutual orientation of their bodies and of their gaze. Pre-conditions for social interaction are visibly and publicly assembled in time, within the progressive establishment of a mutual focus of attention and a common interactional space. In public places and between unknown persons, this mutual arrangement is even more important, emerging progressively from the participants’ transition from moving to standing, and their transformation from unfocused pedestrians to focused would-be- imminent-co-participants. On the basis of a corpus of video recordings, the paper offers an analysis of a collection of pre-beginnings of itinerary descriptions in public space and systematically describes the identification of the emerging interactional partner, the organization of convergent trajectories in space, the exchange of first mutual glances, and the very first words produced in the encounter.
