Cities
See also: List of cities in Argentina by populationArgentina is highly urbanized, with the ten largest metropolitan areas accounting for half of the population, and fewer than one in ten living in rural areas. About 3 million people live in Buenos Aires proper, and the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area totals around 13 million, making it one of the largest urban areas in the world. The metropolitan areas of Córdoba and Rosario have around 1.3 million inhabitants each, and six other cities (Mendoza, Tucumán, La Plata, Mar del Plata, Salta and Santa Fe) have at least half a million people each.
The population is unequally distributed amongst the provinces, with about 60% living in the Pampa region (21% of the total area), including 15 million people in Buenos Aires Province, and 3 million each in Córdoba Province, Santa Fe Province and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. Seven other provinces each have about one million people: Mendoza, Tucumán, Entre Ríos, Salta, Chaco, Corrientes and Misiones. Tucumán is the most densely populated (with 60 inhabitants/km², the only Argentine province more densely populated than the world average), while the southern province of Santa Cruz has less than 1 inhabitant/km².
Most European immigrants settled in the cities which offered jobs, education and other opportunities enabling them to enter the middle class. Many also settled in the growing small towns along the expanding railway system and since the 1930s many rural workers have moved to the big cities. Urban areas reflect the influence of European immigration, and most of the larger ones feature boulevards and diagonal avenues inspired by the redevelopment of Paris. Argentine cities were originally built in a colonial Spanish grid style, centered around a plaza overlooked by a cathedral and important government buildings. Many still retain this general layout, known as a damero, meaning checkerboard, since it is based on a pattern of square blocks. The city of La Plata, designed at the end of the 19th century by Pedro Benoit, combines the checkerboard layout with added diagonal avenues at fixed intervals, and was the first in South America with electric street illumination.
Read more about this topic: Ethnic Groups In Argentina
Famous quotes containing the word cities:
“Lord, how long?”
—Bible: Hebrew Isaiah, 6:11.
Asking how long will the chastisement of the people last. God replies, “Until the cities be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be utterly desolate, and the Lord have removed man far away, and there be a great forsaking in the midst of the land.”
“Today as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth flourishes in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; while around them cities have changed their masters and their names, collided and smashed, disappeared into nothingness, their peaceful generations have crossed down the ages as fresh and smiling as on the days of battle.”
—Edgar Quinet (1803–1875)
“I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)