Manufactured Ignorance and the Violence of Not‐Counting: The Experience of Censo Popular of Unhoused People in Buenos Aires

Abstract

While the unhoused population continues to increase in the context of a housing crisis in the city of Buenos Aires, the local government fails to produce accurate statistics about it. As a response to this, a coalition of grassroots organisations carried out the Popular Census of Unhoused People (PC) in 2017 and 2019 to challenge the numbers yielded by official surveys and demand appropriate responses from the Government of the City of Buenos Aires (GCBA). This paper works with different meanings of the verb “to count” to explore how the PC enacts a politics of counting focused on making visible and making count the unhoused population. The PC helps us to have a better understanding of the GCBA's concealment of the houselessness problem and the violence associated with it, while it brings into play other knowledges and lived experiences of the city for a different urban politics.