NIMBY-free: What our cities can learn from this South American capital

It’s 2am on a balmy Wednesday and I’m on a street named after Argentina’s most famous author – Jorge Luis Borges – fittingly, in a bookstore.

It’s a bookshop with a key difference: it’s located inside Backroom Bar, one of the many dimly-lit cocktail bars in the lively Palermo Soho district of Buenos Aires.

Cafes don’t close in the mid-afternoon in Buenos Aires.Credit: iStock

It’s somewhat fitting I also live on this street – a few doors down from the bookstore-cum-bar with a twist – given the kinship I feel with a fellow writer.

As I sip on a cocktail partially containing the country’s famous Malbec, translated versions of Jane Austen novels surround me, among other books available for purchase which nestle between the dainty bar tables and flickering candles.

Every table is occupied – over there a couple laughing at a shared joke; in the corner, a solo drinker perfectly content with a freshly bought book whilst sipping a large glass of vino tinto. Ambient music plays and, in the seconds between songs, the brass sounds from the backroom of this bar drift into earshot; behind a velvet curtain is a clandestine live-music room where jazz bands play nightly.

Contrast this to Australia, where I lived for 12 years before moving here to become a digital nomad, and things don’t always stack up so well. At 2am on a Wednesday in Sydney is, largely, a ghost-town. You’re hard-pushed to buy a glass of red, let alone a new book. The slightest noise could result in a council complaint or even police visit. Melbourne, whilst more of a late-night city than Sydney, hardly hosts wine-serving bookstores in the wee hours of weekdays.

As I spill out onto the leafy street nicknamed “Borges” by the book-loving locals, giddy on the Malbec-infused cocktail, I spot other mid-week revellers stumbling home, chatting at no-whispered volume, perhaps about their latest read.

One Buenos Aires bookstore – El Ateneo Grand Splendid – is in a huge grandiose former theatre.Credit: Alamy

The city’s noted literary culture is a juxtaposition to Australian cities: recent reports show Australians read less than other countries. Meanwhile, according to some estimates, Buenos Aires has more bookstores per capita than any other major city in the world. One bookstore – El Ateneo Grand Splendid – is in a huge grandiose former theatre; balconies, upper circle and curtain still gloriously intact.

You often see Argentinians reading books at solo tables in coffee shops; Aussies, it seems, are mostly on their phones.

And those coffee shops, by custom, mostly stay open all the way till 8pm, making the 3pm closing times common even in big cities like Sydney and Melbourne look ridiculously sleepy. Argentinians will pack them out between 6pm and 8pm for meriendas – a croissant, cake, empanada or scrambled egg snack, along with a café con leche, to tide them over till dinner time – commonly between 10pm and 11pm.

Buenos Aires has two major LGBTQI cafes - Pride and Maricafe - so the queer community can socialise in spaces not fuelled by alcohol.

They also do coffee shops really well. Whilst our coffee will often taste better, they nail the cafe culture. Buenos Aires has two major LGBTQI cafes – Pride and Maricafe – so the queer community can socialise in spaces not fuelled by alcohol. Both stay open late. No Australian city I know has this.

Being more relaxed about late-night culture is one of the lessons I can share from our southern hemisphere counterpart when I return – happily – to Australia later this year.

I’ve missed Australia sorely. Recently, on a day when the “feels like” temperature hit an unbearable 44 degrees and my aircon conked out from a power surge, the inner-city’s only major public pool – Parque Norte – a sprawling shallow paddling pool, had already closed for the season. It’s, bewilderingly, only open for three months a year. It faces a Holy Land theme park, Tierra Santa, so a giant animatronic Jesus rises from the dead every hour, slowly spins around to judge us all in our skimpy swimmers, then descends back into his tomb. Quirky as this is, I long for the secular lap-pools of big Aussie cities like Sydney, where I lived. Glaring into the murky brown, unsuitable-for-swimming Rio de la Plata River, I also long for its beaches.

There are many reasons not to take lessons from the Argentinians on certain subjects – economic management being one. While we panic if our inflation hits 4 per cent, Argentina last year had the world’s highest, triple digit, inflation. The price of many things has doubled or tripled since I lived here – one of the reasons I’ll soon leave. It has become expensive.

It’s still worth the money for a visit though, and Australians can fly there via a stopover in Santiago de Chile.

Buenos Aires has a late-night culture.Credit: iStock

When people ask why I chose here, I semi-joke it was the words to the song Buenos Aires in the film Evita as sung by Madonna:

“Fill me up with your heat, with your dirt, with your noise, overdo me. Let me dance to your beat, make it loud, let it hurt, run it through me.”

Semi-joking because the lyrics ring true – the city is hot, noisy, dirty (Buenos Aires translates as “good air” which is ironic) – and teeming with life and energy in a way Australia’s cities just aren’t.

Much of that life happens at night. This is a truly nocturnal city. As one of my fellow digital nomads commented: “not much happens before midday.”

But everything good happens after midnight. Kids here are often still awake here at 1am on a Tuesday – I see them in the city’s ice cream parlours.

Somewhere you won’t find kids is on the city’s wildly hedonistic nightlife scene. No clubs open before midnight, and nobody even thinks about entering one before 2am. At 7am, they’ll ask “donde estan las afters?” Hardcore revellers will stay at one of the various afterparties on offer until midday; something that only happens sporadically in more conservative Australian cities.

Argentinians, for reasons unbeknown to me, adore hard, thumping, lyric-free (and melody-free) techno music. I despise it, but I adore watching them go off to it. It makes me feel very alive. And also gives me a migraine. It’s a world away from belting John Farnham at karaoke at 10pm before calling it a night. Oftentimes I feel like I was in Berlin’s notorious Beghain. Other times I dance merengue-style to my much-preferred reggaeton or cumbria, which has more of a tune to enliven the hips.

Everything is so insanely late, I adjust my schedule accordingly. In Australia I’d be up by 6am and in the gym by 6.20am. In Buenos Aires, some gyms and coffee shops don’t open until 9am; shops at 10am. I moved from the world’s most diurnal city to its most night-loving.

They’re refreshingly creative when it comes to nightclubs. One – La Biblioteca – is set in an actual library. One night I attended, FuriaFest, which opened at 1am in a large warehouse with fairground rides (the waltzers; a bucking bronco), an inflatable bungee football pitch (I played two games at about 3am), and a tattoo artist (nearly got one after three drinks) – plus a DJ and huge, busy dancefloor. It feels like Australia’s notoriously restrictive regulations would kill off such a reimagining of the nightclub experience before it got off the ground.

Another night, Durx, has a brickwork tunnel that runs underneath the length of the club where revellers, gay and straight, can be as sexually liberated as they feel, with no bouncers monitoring, judging or expelling, as happens in Australia.

Similarly, the city’s underground train system, the Subte, is free of the Australian-esque regulations that’d prevent the busking you see on trains here. It’s like an underground, underworld live theatre; the modern day unsanitised circus. I’ve seen breakdancers, religious preachers, full bands, electric guitar soloists, elderly tango music singers, stationery sellers and a rap duo who’d invite you to suggest a word which they’d immediately incorporate into their imaginative, improvised fast-paced Spanish verse.

The shabby-chic faded grandeur of a city that was, over a century ago, the capital of one of the world’s richest countries owns its imperfections. It will, indeed, fill you up with its noise: the endless drilling; the defiant protests between the Plaza De Mayo and Congreso (as I write this, locals are bashing pots and pans together on balconies above me to protest alleged police brutality); the 10-lane mega-roads interrupting otherwise pleasant parkland.

Devoid of the NIMBYism that can hold Australian cities back, Buenos Aires shows us the surprises awaiting discovery when the warm Latin spirit is free to thrive.