Forecasting the Futures of Argentina’s Cities — Through Fiction

What if the best way to imagine the future of a city wasn’t spreadsheets or masterplans… but novels?

That’s the idea behind the Literary Method of Urban Design, a creative approach that uses fiction to explore how real cities might evolve in the decades ahead. Instead of relying on data projections, it taps into the power of stories—those strange places where imagination, emotion, and social truth mix together.

Here, we use three pieces of Argentine literature to envision the futures of Tigre, Buenos Aires, and Mendoza. Each city gets one book, one set of themes, and one speculative leap into the late 21st century.

How the Literary Method Works

It’s simple—but also delightfully weird:

1. Pick a real city.

2. Pick a literary work connected to that city.

3. Use the story’s themes to imagine a future scenario.

4. Illustrate it through scenario art.

The result isn’t a prediction. It’s more like a provocation—a creative thought experiment that reveals the deeper possibilities (and dangers) simmering beneath each city’s present-day reality.

1. Tigre — A City of Wandering Plants

Inspired by Leopoldo Lugones’ Strange Forces

The city of Tigre sits on the watery fringe of the Paraná Delta, close enough to Buenos Aires to feed its commuter trains, but wild enough to feel like the countryside. The city’s gardens, rivers, wetlands and woodlands give it a strangely magical feel even now. But Lugones’ Strange Forces pushes things much further. The book is full of talking apes, mathematical monsters, prophetic toads, and other weird beings born from reckless scientific experimentation.

So what happens when we apply that spirit to Tigre’s future?

The Future Tigre

By the late 21st century, Tigre becomes a global experiment in ecological urbanism gone… slightly wrong.

Scientists fast-track the evolution of Aloe vera plants in hopes of producing super-productive Aloe oil. But the plants become sentient.

They begin to roam the streets. They guard territory. They demand rights.

Humans, overwhelmed, create a new governance system—the Parliament of Many Beings—where residents must debate policy alongside intelligent plants.

At first, it’s charming and cooperative. But eventually, conflicts over sunlight, soil, and water erupt. Some plant species dominate. Others rebel. Humans become just one more faction among many.

Tigre’s future becomes a living negotiation between nature, technology, and the unintended consequences of “playing evolution.”

2. Buenos Aires — A Dystopian Surveillance Capital

Inspired by José Mármol’s Amalia

Buenos Aires is a city built by power. Its grand colonial boulevards, neoclassical facades, and monumental plazas reflect centuries of governors, generals, and presidents showing off their authority.

And Mármol’s Amalia captures the darkest version of that legacy—an era when dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas ruled the city through fear, surveillance, and violent repression.

Now imagine that authoritarian heartbeat echoing forward into the future.

The Future Buenos Aires

In the late 21st century, Buenos Aires becomes a city permanently on the brink of a police state.

Instead of spies in taverns, Rosas-style informants, or secret prisons, the city deploys:

• autonomous surveillance carriages

• omni-present digital monitoring

• facial-recognition corridors

• predictive policing algorithms

• silent enforcers patrolling ghostlike streets

Grand architecture towers over a city subdued.

It’s a Buenos Aires trapped in a feedback loop where every new technology—no matter how well-intended—finds its way into the hands of those who want to control. Here, the future mirrors the past, only with sharper tools.

3. Mendoza — A City Where Humans Become Animals

Inspired by Antonio di Benedetto’s Animal World

Mendoza sits at the foot of the Andes. It’s a city of vineyards, irrigation canals, mountain-bound tourists, and desert edges. But it’s also a place where life feels suspended between nature and culture.

Di Benedetto’s Animal World captures this tension through dreamlike stories where humans drift into animal consciousness—confused, liberated, frightened, or transformed.

So what if Mendoza leans fully into this blending?

The Future Mendoza

By the century’s end, Mendoza abandons the illusion that humans are separate from nature. People embrace their own animality—not metaphorically, but socially and symbolically. The city responds by reshaping itself into a hybrid ecosystem:

• pumas and jaguars travel overhead via suspended pathways

• birds build nests into balconies and civic buildings

• mammals share footbridges with pedestrians

• irrigation channels double as wildlife corridors

• architecture dissolves into vine-wrapped, root-bound, habitat-rich forms

Mendoza becomes a lucid dream of a city—an urban jungle where species mingle freely, and where the line between human and animal no longer holds.

What These Futures Tell Us

Using fiction to imagine cities isn’t about accuracy. It’s about clarity. Each of these stories reveals something buried within the city today:

• Tigre wrestles with the consequences of manipulating nature.

• Buenos Aires wrestles with the return of authoritarian power.

• Mendoza wrestles with its own wildness and animal roots.

These visions aren’t meant to be taken literally. They’re thought experiments—snapshots of what might happen when existing cultural pressures collide with unexpected ecological, political, or technological changes. But fiction has a way of telling us truths we already suspect.

Final Thoughts

Argentina’s cities hold multitudes: ecological wonderlands, political battlegrounds, and dreamlike spaces where identity blurs. The Literary Method of Urban Design doesn’t try to predict their destiny—it invites us to participate in imagining it.

By letting novels guide our thinking, we open up social, ethical, and environmental questions that standard policy models ignore. And in doing so, we rethink the boundaries of what our cities could become.