SHOW THE HISTORICAL CENTRALITY. Strategies for action during the pandemic in Cordoba, Argentina, 2020

Abstract

In Cordoba, Argentina, during the quarantine period in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, official policies
and strategies were implemented that acted on the Historical Centre of the capital city and showed changes
in the value of image and use in relation to that space. The present paper shows, based on the analysis of
these interventions, the use of the pandemic as part of the rhetoric in the action of transformation to generate
certain conditions that configure a network of meanings, images and representations that position discursive
and material strategies in relation to current processes of urban reconfiguration in relation to heritage and
tourism. The analysis is carried out on the basis of a corpus of journalistic notes in local digital media, as well
as official channels of the municipal government. The construction of a new post-pandemic centrality, together
with the discourses that postulate it as desirable/legitimate, configure a place that is proposed to be seen more
than inhabited. Visual and communicative strategies are used that become images to fill in an inescapable way
in which the city, as a global brand, must be presented.