Аргентинские трущобы: Вилья мисерия и жизнь в неформальных поселениях.

Type of shanty town slum in Argentina

Villa miseria (ˈbiʝa miˈseɾja), villa de emergencia or just villa, is the informal term used in Argentina for shanty towns.

The term is a noun phrase made up of the Spanish words villa (village, small town) and miseria (misery, destitution), and was adopted from Bernardo Verbitsky's 1957 novel Villa Miseria también es América (“Villa Miseria is also [a part of] America”). Other terms used are asentamiento ("settlement") and villa de emergencia ("emergency village"), the latter being the original name; and, since recent years, shanty towns also are called euphemistically as barrios populares ("popular neighbourhoods"). In most parts of Argentina, the non modified word villa usually refers to a villa miseria.

These settlements consist of small houses or shacks made of tin, wood and other scrap material. The alleys are not usually paved, and narrow internal passages connect the different parts. The villas miseria have no sewerage. There may be water pipes passing through the settlement. Electric power is sometimes taken directly from the grid using illegal connections, which are perforce accepted by suppliers. The villas range from small groups of precarious houses to larger, more organized communities with thousands of residents. In rural areas, the houses in the villas miseria might be made of mud and wood. There are villas miseria around and within most cities of the country. The villas draw people from several backgrounds, often local people who have fallen from an already precarious economic position. In most cases, a villa miseria is populated by the children and grandchildren of the original settlers, who have been unable to improve their situation. The Government's statistics agency (INDEC) announced in 2016 that 8.8 million people, 32.2% of the population, were living in poverty. This was a dramatic leap in numbers from the 4.7% people living in poverty just three years before. The non profit TECHO estimated there more than 1,000 informal settlements in greater Buenos Aires in 2015. It stated that only 10% of villas had access to running water and 5% to sewage infrastructure. Granting deeds on a lease to own basis, the fund mostly provides for households in Argentina's lowest income bracket and, thus, has historically had a collection rate of less than five per cent. The fund, one of the most important, is largely underwritten by national fuel and other excise taxes.

Villa 31 is a large villa miseria in the Retiro, Buenos Aires area of Buenos Aires, near the local railway station.

Quote box|quote=Prejudice has a lot to do with the coverage of mainstream media. According to the media, there are only thieves and murderers inside a villa. But 90 percent of those who live there are normal people, who work and send their kids to school, like everywhere else. And like everyone else, they want better living conditions.|author= Sebastián Deferrari, print editor of Mundo Villa|source=

Argentine writer Hugo Pezzini comments on the book: "The apparent absurdity of César Aira's novel La Villa provides an instance of resourceful mediation to semantically reorganize a situation of emergency and locate it within its particular rationale. In Argentina, a slum is popularly called 'villa miseria,' or simply 'la villa.' In politically correct language, that is, officially, is called 'villa de emergencia.'" The adjective villera refers to these shantytowns, notably in the name of the popular music style cumbia villera.