Dreaming of Sports City: Stadium Construction, Urban Transformation, and Soccer Clubs in Buenos Aires 1955–73

This paper tells the story of the soccer club Boca Júniors’ Ciudad Deportiva, a massive stadium, sports complex, and amusement park built on seven artificial islands spanning forty hectares off the coast in the Río de la Plata. In the early 1960s, the club was able to lobby the federal government to donate the river property, enlist municipal support to help create the islands and be included in the city master plan as a redevelopment zone on the southern coast, and raise a large portion of the project’s costs by selling raffle tickets to an excited public eager to use the facilities. The project’s initial success sheds light on a long history of clubs’ stadiums and infrastructure shaping the urban landscape, yet it also shows how porteños envisioned modernity and took part in consumptive practices and leisure. By the early 70s, rising costs, political infighting at Boca Júniors, and a withdrawal of public and private support doomed the Ciudad Deportiva. This failure illuminates the broader economic and political challenges felt at the local and national levels. 

In explaining how and why the Ciudad Deportiva was able to mobilize such wide support from various levels of government, club members, and ordinary citizens while ending in such spectacular failure, the project offers a window into a wider history of soccer clubs’ spatial impact on the city alongside their shaping of everyday urban life. The story of Boca’s ambitious effort anchors a narrative of soccer clubs’ impact on the physical and social patterns of Buenos Aires throughout much of the twentieth century.