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Villa miseria (), villa de emergencia or simply villa, is the informal term used in Argentina for shanty town slums.
The villas range from small groups of precarious houses to larger, more organized communities with thousands of residents. In rural areas the shacks might be made of mud and wood. There are villas miseria around and within most Argentine cities. They draw people from several backgrounds, often local people who have fallen from an already precarious economic position. In most cases, a villa miseria is populated by the children and grandchildren of the original settlers, who have been unable to improve their situation.
By 2011, there were over 500,000 people living in more than 800 informal settlements around the periphery of Buenos Aires. Research from an NGO called TECHO or 'A roof for my country' (UTPMP) found that of these settlements, 66% had been founded in the last fifteen years and 65% were still growing. Most villas (85%) had no sewerage, and a similar percentage had no access to gas.
The Government's statistics agency (INDEC) announced in 2016 that 8.8 million people, 32.2% of the population, were living in poverty. This was a dramatic leap in numbers from the 4.7% people living in poverty just three years before.
The TECHO organisation estimated that there were more than 1,000 informal settlements in Greater Buenos Aires in 2015, only 10% of which had access to running water and 5% to sewage infrastructure.
Granting deeds on a lease-to-own basis, the fund mostly provides for households in Argentina's lowest income bracket and, thus, has historically had a collection rate of less than five per cent. The fund, one of the most important, is largely underwritten by national fuel and other .
The military junta which ruled Argentina between 1974 and 1983 in the Dirty War attempted to destroy the informal slums by forcibly resettling people, which only succeeded in moving the villas miseria to new locations.
More recently, Mayor of Buenos Aires Horacio Rodriguez Larreta said that he intended to regularize all the informal settlements by 2023.
It dates from the 1930s and in 2017 had around 40,000 inhabitants. The city council planned to renovate the area by 2020, by improving housing, offering the opportunity for people to become home owners and connecting electricity, water and sewage facilities. The $320 million plan, financed by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, aimed to resettle squatters into 1,350 new homes. At least 30% of the residents were concerned that they would not be rehoused.
Inspired by Mundo Villa, another new magazine La Garganta Poderosa ('The Mighty Throat') was set up in 2011.
Argentine painter Antonio Berni dealt with the hardships of living in a villa miseria through his series Juanito Laguna, a slum child, and Ramona Montiel, a prostitute.
César Aira published his novel La Villa in 2001 (released in English translation in 2013 as Shantytown). In it he examines the invisibility of slumdwellers.
Argentine writer Hugo Pezzini comments on the book: "The apparent absurdity of César Aira's novel La Villa provides an instance of resourceful mediation to semantically reorganize a situation of emergency and locate it within its particular rationale. In Argentina, a slum is popularly called villa miseria, or simply la villa. In politically correct language, that is, officially, is called villa de emergencia."
The adjective villera refers to these shantytowns, notably in the name of the popular music style cumbia villera. Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, later Pope Francis, initiated Church support for the villas, leading to priests being referred to as villero priests, and himself as a villero bishop.
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