The Barrio Justo Suárez is a social housing complex exemplary of participatory architecture, built in 1974 to eradicate Villa 7 in Mataderos, one of the southern neighborhoods of the city of Buenos Aires.

The project has its origins in October 1971, when the dictatorship of General Alejandro Lanusse carried out the PEVE, a plan to eradicate emergency villages or precarious settlements. In an unusual case, a Villa 7 Relocation Pilot Plan was prepared in which the participation of the recipients of the future homes in the design process took place for the first time. This was possible as an experiment in the field of social housing design, thanks to the fact that Villa 7 was one of the smallest, occupying only one block. According to the authors of the project themselves, it was a reflection of Lanusse's attempts to “attract the Peronist people”, in contradiction to the repressive policies of the dictatorship that was coming to an end.

Thus, a team from the Municipal Housing Commission (CMV), made up of architects Ana María Azzari, Sara Fortuna, Alberto Compagnucci and Osvaldo Cedrón, worked together with the occupants of Villa 7 for the project of a neighborhood of monoblocks to be built less than one hundred meters away from the precarious settlement where they were located. On a plot of land measuring more than half a hectare, a tower with a ground floor and eleven floors, five elongated monoblocks with a ground floor and two or three floors (a total of 122 homes), a daycare center and a multi-purpose facility were built.

In all homes, the bedrooms were divided using partitions and furniture, seeking greater flexibility for future remodeling. In the original project, the possibility of achieving up to five bedrooms per home was considered, depending on the use of structural modules. In addition, the dining room and living room were unified, integrating them with the kitchen, unlike most social housing designed at the time, thanks to the participation of future users in the design of their homes.

The occupants of Villa 7 not only participated in the architectural design of their new homes, but acted as labor for the construction, after an ad hoc training course, and took charge not only of the prefabricated panels for the facades but also of details such as part of the furniture. Everything was carried out in a workshop "on site", and the work was completed in 1974, when the PEVE Plan had already been replaced by the Alborada Housing Plan, in the hands of the government of Juan Domingo Perón. The same team of architects, in turn, designed the neighboring Plaza de Mataderos and the new housing complex was named Justo Suárez in homage to an Argentine boxing idol born in Mataderos.