Diferencias innatas y desigualdades socio-espaciales de Calidad de Vida en San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina = Innate differences and socio-spatial inequalities Quality of Life in San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina

The purpose of the article is to show how innate differences such as sex, age and birthplace, are strongly associated with socio-spatial inequalities of Quality of Life (Q&L) in a group of neighborhoods of San Carlos de Bariloche, Northern Patagonia of Argentina, between the 1997 economic crisis and the recovery of the 2005. The main approach to the analysis is based on the Integrated Poverty Method (IPM) that measure both the short-term (income lines) and structural (Unsatisfied Basic Needs, UBN) poverty of the population according to those innate differences of the household’s head. The results of the analysis report general improvements in access to goods and services, due to higher incomes, and the decrease of unemployment rates. Nevertheless, this has been less evident in poorest neighborhoods than in those with absence of poverty and higher levels of employment income and level of education of the household’s head. The interpretation of what has been observed is based on our approach to Q&L studies which recognizes that knowledge or image of the world is the main capacity to generate freedom of decision that allow persons, groups and the society as a whole to function and to be in time and space. This freedom of decision is subject to universal values and principles that tell us what it is right, better and good. On the contrary, what has happened in Bariloche shows that the Q&L is not the same for all, with the creation of real socio-spatial inequalities fields, with encapsulation of groups of people that want it and can get it by the degree of power that they hold, and the simultaneous closure of other social groups in degraded geographies which have been driven to them by the power of others, without little or no freedom at all to confront them.