Environmental and urban organizations in the City of Buenos Aires once again questioned the transfer of public land to private enterprises. Their estimate indicates that during the PRO governments, more than 500 hectares of state land were privatized and that, in just the last decade, an absorbent green area equivalent to 75 Plazas de Mayo was lost. The complaint brings together operations of different types under a single concern: the change of use of spaces intended for common heritage.
The most recent case is located in Parque Ribera Sur, a 50-hectare natural area next to the Riachuelo, at the intersection of Roca and General Paz avenues. On July 17, the Buenos Aires government announced the start of construction of a karting track and handed over the administration to the trust linked to the Racetrack. Carlos Gradin, a member of Colectivo Ribereño, stated that details of the work, environmental impact studies, or the legal framework for the authorization were not disclosed.
The area also has a specific archaeological value. Between Parque Ribera Sur and Autódromo Gálvez is La Noria, considered the oldest archaeological site in the city and associated with Querandí presence between 1160 and 1240. The Colectivo Ribereño requests that public use be preserved and that historical, natural, and archaeological protection measures be adopted before consolidating a transformation whose extent has not yet been publicly explained.
The critical inventory includes the lands of the former AU3 in the Donado-Holmberg corridor, later allocated to real estate developers, and a part of the Olympic Neighborhood of Villa Soldati. It also incorporates the pre-allocation of the operation of a high-end hotel of 9,930 square meters in the Olympic Park and eight hectares of Parque de la Ciudad, within the U 57 Lacarra Equipment area, transferred in 2025 to Access Argentina Sociedad Anónima.
María Eva Koutsovitis, a professor and researcher at the Faculty of Engineering and a member of the La Ciudad Somos Quienes la Habitamos movement, linked those eight hectares with the loss of absorbent soil and added the expansion of underground parking lots in plazas. The regulatory conflict grew in June, when the Legislature approved Ley Hojarasca and repealed more than twenty regulations, including ordinance 46,229, which prohibited privatizing or changing the use of public green spaces.
The dispute also reaches national lands within CABA. In Almagro, neighborhood groups are promoting a microreserve on a property that the State is trying to auction, while large plots have already been allocated to developments of IRSA: 71 hectares of the former Boca Sports City for Ramblas del Plata, the Caballito Railway Yard, and the lands of the former Giol Warehouses. The next front will be to decide whether the protection claims manage to stop new transfers or restore regulatory limits on the change of use of public land.
