Greater Buenos Aires (Spanish: Gran Buenos Aires, GBA), also known as the Buenos Aires Metropolitan Area (Spanish: Área Metropolitana de Buenos Aires, AMBA),[3] refers to the urban agglomeration comprising the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires and the adjacent 24 partidos (districts) in the Province of Buenos Aires. Thus, it does not constitute a single administrative unit. The conurbation spreads south, west and north of Buenos Aires city. To the east, the River Plate serves as a natural boundary.
Urban sprawl, especially between 1945 and 1980, created a vast metropolitan area of over 3,800 km² (1,500 mi²)[4] - or 19 times the area of Buenos Aires proper. The 24 suburban partidos (counties) grew more than six-fold in population between the 1947 and 2022 censuses - or nearly 2.5% annually, compared to 1.4% for the nation as a whole.[5][1]
While annual growth for the suburban area slowed to 0.8% between 2010 and 2022, the 14 million inhabitants in the entire 30-county area plus the City of Buenos Aires account for a third of the total population of Argentina and generate nearly half (48%) of the country's GDP.[4]
Population pyramid of Greater Buenos Aires in 2022.
History
The term Gran Buenos Aires ("Greater Buenos Aires") was first officially used in 1948, when Governor of Buenos Aires ProvinceDomingo Mercante signed a bill delineating as such an area covering 14 municipalities surrounding the City of Buenos Aires.[6] The term is also related to other expressions that are not necessarily well-defined: the "Buenos Aires' conurbation" (Conurbano Bonaerense), the "Greater Buenos Aires Agglomeration" (Aglomerado Gran Buenos Aires), and the "Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires" (Área Metropolitana Buenos Aires, AMBA). In colloquial speech, people refer to the "Buenos Aires' conurbation" as the set of municipalities that surround the City of Buenos Aires, and which are mostly populated by working-class or middle-class communities.
Definition
Satellite image of Greater Buenos Aires at night.
The National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (INDEC) has defined Greater Buenos Aires.[7]
There are three main groups within the Buenos Aires conurbation. The first two groups (24 partidos) comprise the traditional conurbation, or the "conurbation proper", while the third group of six partidos is in the process of becoming fully integrated with the rest.
As urbanization continues and the conurbation grows, six additional partially urbanized partidos (totaling 1,062,991 population of as the 2022 census)[1] are now fully connected with the conurbation:
Buzai, G.D. and Marcos, M. (2012). "The social map of Greater Buenos Aires as empirical evidence of urban models". Journal of Latin American Geography. Volume 11 Number 1, pp. 67–78, DOI 10.1353/lag.2012.0012
Keeling, D. (1996). Buenos Aires: Global Dreams, Local Crisis. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
