Concrete Dreams

“Concrete Dreams is a beautifully written ethnography that focuses on how the specific everyday practices of lay investors, real estate analysts, and architects produce divergent forms of value in the volatile political and economic landscape of recent Argentinian history. The ethnographic narratives show exactly how ‘buildings’ emerge as partially connected conceptual and concrete entities that hold value as investments, as objects of design, and as homes. The power of the analysis lies in the combination of a deep understanding of dominant economic modes of valuation with a sensitivity to the fragile relational spaces where alternative possibilities are kept alive.” — Penny Harvey, University of Manchester

“Nicholas D’Avella has managed to take a topic central to the historical sweep of Argentine political economy and written an intimate, engaging portrait of quotidian life amid economic uncertainty. He makes real estate markets and municipal zoning understandable at the macro-scale with which they crash economies, and at the micro-scale that causes people to strap money to their bodies. Ambitious and weighty, subtle and intimate, Concrete Dreams is an exceptional urban ethnography.” — Kregg Hetherington, editor of Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene