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Concrete Jungle: The Planetary Urbanization of the Ecuadorian Amazon
Abstract
This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of a post-neoliberal political project under conditions of planetary urbanization. We conceptualize planetary urbanization in terms of a tendency towards the real subsumption of space to capital on a global scale, through which capital is empowered as an abstract form of domination. We then relate this tendency to the ideology of ‘systemic competitiveness’ that has dominated the post-neoliberal project in Latin America, arguing that it threatens to strengthen the power of capital-as-subject. This relationship is illustrated by the Initiative for the Regional Infra-structural Integration of South America (IIRSA), and its incorporation into the post-neoliberal experiment currently underway in Ecuador. We focus on a series of IIRSA-related projects in the Ecuadorian Amazon, through which the real subsumption of space is disaggregated into three intertwined dimensions: territory, nature, and everyday life. In each case, we show how the ideological structure of post-neoliberalism unwittingly promotes the real subsumption of space and the empowerment of capital. However, the uneven dynamics of planetary urbanization imply that these projects are only succeeding in reproducing existing conditions of formal subsumption on an extended scale. The paper thus develops a materialist understanding of planetary urbanization in order to explain the failure of a political project to achieve its unintended results.
... By using extra-economic coercion, capitalists take over subsistence, production, or shared social wealth [9]. Rural space that has experienced dispossession and expropriation of communal or community land is converted from subsistence farming to an instrument for revenue extraction through the commodification of urban-industrial praxis (see [10][11][12][13]). This process is frequently facilitated and enforced by state capitalist regimes under neoliberal economic policies [8]. ...
... The process of accumulation thus becomes a central point in the analysis of extended urbanization. Empirical studies have shown that accumulation by dispossession is the nature of this accumulation [10,13,24]. Marx [16] pointed out that the early stage of this accumulation occurs through 'primitive accumulation'. ...
... Previous case studies on the mining (oil, metal, mineral), manufacturing, or timber industrial sectors tended to show that the urbanization of capital in extended urbanization space entails the mechanism of community land dispossession to instill an urban-industrial logic [10,13,24,54]. However, Sei Mangkei experienced a different process. ...
The discussion on extended urbanization considers accumulation by dispossession as a key apparatus for instilling urban logic into predominantly rural areas. This paper contends that extended urbanization can also be produced without physical dispossession of community land. This is illustrated by the case study of Sei Mangkei, an emerging palm oil agroindustrial district in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Capitalist industries prefer monetization through contract farming rather than privatization as an instrument to capture the productivity of palm oil smallholder land. The people who serve as smallholders in the palm oil industry are not victims of land appropriation. Moreover, this situation was also triggered by an opportunity for maximizing the socio-economic welfare of smallholders. However, the limited options to access other economic activities when the commodity crisis occurred was a consequence that smallholders were not aware of in the past. Thus, we assert that extended urbanization was (re)produced through the articulation of socio-economic and cultural practices of smallholders on a local-scale with regard to the dynamics of the broader process of global industrialization.
... En la medida en que el sur global desarrolló procesos de modernización industrial y urbanización de gran envergadura -especialmente en economías del Este asiático (ver Hung, 2009;Starosta, 2010;Iñigo Carrera, 2013;Charnock y Starosta, 2016;Hudson, 2016)-, América Latina pasó a ser el principal destino de flujos de inversión destinados a megaproyectos de extracción de recursos naturales. Al revolucionar las formas de vida y la composición biogeofísica de lugares rurales, este fenómeno ha sido considerado parte estructurante del proceso sociometabólico de urbanización planetaria (ver Wilson y Bayón, 2015;Arboleda, 2016). ...
... La Iniciativa para la Integración de la Infraestructura Regional Sudamericana (IIRSA) es un proceso multisectorial lanzado en una cumbre presidencial en 2000 y cuyo propósito es integrar infraestructuras de transporte, energía y comunicaciones. Comprende 500 proyectos de infraestructura distribuidos a lo largo de diez ejes geográficos, y tiene un costo estimado de US$ 75 000 millones(Arboleda, 2016;Wilson y Bayón, 2015). ...
This article addresses the processes of technological modernization that have taken place in Latin America’s mining industry, especially in the context of a new geography of late industrialization whose gravitational center has shifted towards East Asian economies. Through the Marxist critique of ecology, the paper explains the ways in which both human and nonhuman natures have been emptied of their concrete specificity in order to be transformed into the alienated
powers of capital. The intensification in land use that has followed the robotization and computerization of large-scale mining has not only reconfigured the biogeophysical environment into a constitutive moment of the forces of production, but also entailed the systematic transformation of peasantries into dispossessed multitudes that act as mere appendages of technical systems of extraction, or as surplus populations. The reorganization of the mining industry into global supply chains requires rethinking extraction beyond primary commodity production, and interrogating its organic unity with the modern mode of production generally considered.
... Urbanization has triggered the rapid change of landscapes, altering land cover and land-use type. For example, urban sprawl competes with areas that act as carbon sinks and agricultural spaces [1] while compact urbanization leads to the densification and consolidation of detached urban spaces [2]. In some cities such as Abuja and Mumbai, the challenges of rapid urbanization in the last decade led to an uncontrolled expansion of cities and subsequently to the shrinking of conservation areas, listed as heritage [1,3,4]. ...
As urbanization continues to increase, key conservation areas like World Heritage sites are being altered. This transformation is a cause for concern as it threatens the Outstanding Universal Value of these sites. To address this issue, a research question was formulated: How urban is World Heritage? The research focused on identifying and monitoring urbanization in heritage core zones listed on the World Heritage by tracking changes in built-up areas from 1985 to 2015. The findings revealed that urban developments, including housing, transport infrastructure construction, visitor accommodation facilities, and land conversions, have significantly impacted heritage properties. More than a third (37\%, 426) of the cultural heritage properties reported urban development, with the highest occurrences in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Pacific. Furthermore, these regions also displayed the highest rate of change per year between 1985 and 2015. This indicates the urgent need to identify and monitor the urbanization of World Heritage to preserve their OUV amidst increasing urban development.
... Urbanization has triggered the rapid change of landscapes, altering land cover and land-use type. For example, urban sprawl competes with areas that act as carbon sinks and agricultural spaces [1] while compact urbanization leads to the densification and consolidation of detached urban spaces [2]. In some cities, such as Abuja and Mumbai, the challenges of rapid urbanization in the recent decade led to an uncontrolled expansion of cities and subsequently to the shrinking of conservation areas, listed as heritage [1,3,4]. ...
As urbanization accelerates, World Heritage properties, critical conservation areas, face a growing threat of urban densification, jeopardizing their Outstanding Universal Value (OUV). States Parties, the countries that have ratified the World Heritage Convention, are responsible for submitting periodic reports on the state-of-conservation of their World Heritage properties. These reports should explicitly address any instances of urban densification that may be occurring. But do they? This research investigates the relationship between urban densification and reporting practices in World Heritage properties over time and space. Through a spatiotemporal analysis, by analyzing changes in the built-up area within the core zones of cultural World Heritage properties from 1985 to 2015. We found that urban development, including housing, infrastructure, and tourism facilities, has significantly impacted World Heritage properties and an increase in built-up area can be observed especially in properties not reporting on urban threats.
... 1 Such criticisms, it should be noted, underestimate the analytical value of the vision of totality offered by this literature (Goonewardena, 2018), and overlook multiple studies of planetary urbanization in practice (see for example Arboleda, 2016;Kanai, 2014;Schmid & Topalovic, 2023;Wilson & Bay on, 2015). ...
This paper develops a psychogeographical approach to our apocalyptic urban present, based on a journey down a highway on the outskirts of the city of Iquitos in the Peruvian Amazon. The intensity of psychogeographical method brings out elements of the senselessness and violence of planetary urbanization imperceptible at more abstract levels of analysis, while the subjective impact of this spatial unravelling demands a surrealist psychogeography less attuned to the oneiric and marvellous than the chaotic and absurd. These conceptual reflections are interspersed with depictions of my walk along the highway, as fragments of a psychogeography of planetary urban breakdown. Instead of seeking to explain the political ecology of the road, I aim to contribute to an aesthetic of accelerating collapse that can undermine the normalizing ideological function of our sense‐making mechanisms.
... E ste artículo se pregunta cómo se han producido las violencias de la expansión urbana en el Ecuador en la última década de 2010 a 2019, período en el que se produjo un importante salto en las formas de planificación y la intervención por parte del Estado en el marco del ciclo de capital originado a partir de la crisis financiera global de 2008. El boom de las materias primas derivado de la nueva solución espacial de la crisis a nivel internacional generó en América Latina un nuevo ciclo de expansión de la capacidad estatal, complementada con la renegociación de la deuda y de los contratos petroleros por parte de los nuevos gobiernos progresistas como el de Ecuador (Svampa, 2012;WilSon & Bayón, 2015). ...
El boom de las materias primas permitió ingresos inusuales para los estados sudamericanos en la década de 2010. Este proceso motivó una gran capacidad del Estado ecuatoriano para producir las nuevas periferias de la ciudad a través de megaproyectos de renovación urbana y vivienda social, promoviendo la gentrificación de las áreas centrales. Al mismo tiempo, las periferias urbanas cercanas a los centros de acumulación de capital extractivo en las ciudades petroleras, mineras, agroindustriales o turísticas experimentaron procesos de destrucción creativa. Este artículo reflexiona sobre cómo pensar en la conceptualización de la gentrificación desde procesos diferenciados de las nuevas periferias urbanas del Ecuador a través de un ejercicio comparativo inductivo, para poder contribuir a reflexionar cómo contribuir a este debate desde las periferias globales.
... Similarly, Martín Arboleda has focused on the prominent role of extractivism in relation to sustaining crucial sectors of the global economy, particularly by investigating the rearticulation of Latin America's role as a global exporter of raw materials and focusing on mining activities in Chile (Arboleda, 2016;. Other scholars have investigated planetary urbanization from the viewpoint of the Amazon, exploring the arrival of the post-neoliberal project in Ecuador by highlighting capital's tendency to subsume space through the analysis of dimensions such as territory, nature and everyday life (Wilson and Bayón, 2015). Still within the Amazon space but this time focusing on Manaus in Northern Brazil, Juan Miguel Kanai explored the 'peripheries' of planetary urbanization and underlined the way in which infrastructural and sociospatial changes inserted the area into the global geographies of capitalism, enhancing social and economic inequalities (Kanai, 2014). ...
The success of the ‘planetary urbanization’ approach is built upon the work of Henri Lefebvre and his understanding of the achievement of a world that is fully articulated through urban relations. However, scholars inspired by this view have normally considered his work and the Euro‐American space as presumed starting points from which to observe the progression of planetary urban processes. This article proposes an alternative genealogy of planetary urbanization by looking at—both theoretically and empirically—the global ‘periphery’ of Latin America. Specifically, the article explores the early work of the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano at CELAC between 1966 and 1971. Framed within Dependency Theory, Quijano's reflections share strong similarities and consonances with some of the critical insights that Lefebvre would elaborate only a few years later. The article thus aims to ‘postcolonize’ the planetary urbanization approach by shifting its Euro‐American theoretical and empirical centres, opening it up to contributions that—due to geo‐cultural hierarchies—have traditionally been overlooked within the main Anglophone debates. In so doing, the article proposes to engage in a plural dialogue in urban studies that combines planetary urbanization with the postcolonial critique.
... Most studies regarding Ecuadorian Amazon have been focused on the interactions between the Amazon and other geographical areas of the country such as the Highlands region (Sierra), and the connections between the Amazon and planetary processes [65,66]. Although these analyses are essential for explaining the spatial aspects and dynamics of the Amazon, they do not study intra-Amazonian formation. ...
(1) background: Urban representations of the Amazon are urgently needed in order to better understand the complexity of urban processes in this area of the World. So far, limited work that represents Amazonian urban regions has been carried out. (2) methods: Our study area is the Ecuadorian Amazon. We performed a K-means algorithm using six urban indicators: Urban fractal dimension, number of paved streets, urban radiant intensity (luminosity), and distances to the closest new deforested areas, to oil pollution sources, and to mining pollution sources. We also carried out fieldwork to qualitatively validate our geospatial and statistical analyses. (3) results: We generated six Amazonian urban regions representing different urban configurations and processes of major cities, small cities, and emerging urban zones. The Amazonian urban regions generated represent the urban systems of the Ecuadorian Amazon at a general scale, and correspond to the urban realities at a local scale. (4) conclusions: An Amazonian urban region is understood as a set of urban zones that are dispersed and share common urban characteristics such a similar distance to oil pollution sources or similar urban radiant intensity. Our regionalization model represents the complexity of the Amazonian urban systems, and the applied methodology could be transferred to other Amazonian countries.
... According to Lefebvre (1970Lefebvre ( /2014, the various forms of urbanization need to be explained by focusing on what happens to "the forms, functions and urban structures that are transformed by the process of general urbanization". Following this, in order to have validity, the concepts provided by the planetary urbanization literature need to be applied in empirically mapped contexts, as has been done by Arboleda (2015), Kanai (2014), and Wilson and Bayon (2015). ...
This paper discusses how critical urban theory can understand spatial justice in the context of a planetary stage of capitalist urbanization. Empirically, it focuses on urban growth, dispossession, and mandatory resettlement of peri-urban populations triggered by coal mining in Tete, Mozambique. It analyzes how resettlement sites inhabited by the dispossessed-by-mining populations are constituted by the growth of the urbicidal city that explodes into space by subsuming natural resources for its continuous growth, as well as results in urbicide – a deliberate erasure of urban infrastructures and social life. In order to address the question of spatial justice within these resettlement sites, the article focuses on the widely used Lefebvrean notion of the “right to the city”. However, modifying the claim, it argues for the “right against the urbicidal city”, demonstrating how this articulation of spatial justice establishes the “true politics of encounter” in a continuous struggle for spatial justice in the unevenly urban(ized) world.
... It paved the way for Buen Vivir ("good living") politics, being part of the Leftist self-styled progressive Latin American governments. This refers to the establishment of a highly centralized state backed by peak prices for commodities until 2015, but also a political system characterized by notions such as "hyperpresidentialism" (Gudynas 2016), "commodity consensus" (Svampa 2015) and "high modernist" programs (Scott 1998;Japhy and Bayón 2015;Wilson and Bayón 2017), in particular with regard to emblematic infrastructure projects. This model of renationalized resource extraction, aiming at strengthened state control and simultaneous payback through increased social spending and economic inclusion toward selected groups (typically aligned with the government), has been termed the "compensatory State" (Gudynas 2016). ...
Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in socially and ecologically vulnerable coastal areas of Ecuador and Pakistan, we focus on Chinese-funded investment projects to analyze how SDGs are susceptible to be instrumentalized in the context of exploitative economic dependencies, as well as national development agendas. In our case studies, forced displacement of vulnerable inhabitants during the post-earthquake recovery in coastal Ecuador and displacement of small-scale fishers in coastal Pakistan are justified by SDG implementation. We identify a techno-managerial approach to SDGs in order to discuss its effects in terms of endangering ecosystems and human freedoms, increased social vulnerability and dependence on wage labour. Despite contextual differences, both case studies reveal a similar pattern of intervention under the pretext of SDGs where human freedoms and capabilities are severely undermined by large-scale projects of territorial and social securitization.
... In the period between 2001 and 2012, 74 new urban settlements, with each being home to approximately 2,000-20,000 inhabitants, appeared on Bolivia's map (INE 2014). Similarly, in 2011 President Correa announced the Millennium Cities programme, which promoted the construction of new towns near newly emerging oilfields or other resource-extraction centres (for a critical discussion see Wilson and Bayón 2015). ...
... It paved the way for Buen Vivir, or "good living" politics framed as "postneoliberal" [23,24], being part of the Leftist "pink tide" of self-styled progressive Latin American governments. This refers to the reversal of a decade-long decentralization strategy backed by peak prices for commodities, which lasted until 2015; in other words, a political system characterized by notions such as "hyperpresidentialism" [25], "commodity consensus" [26] and high modernist programs [27][28][29], particularly with regard to emblematic infrastructure projects. This model, aimed at strengthened state control and simultaneous pay-back through increased social spending and economic inclusion toward selected groups (typically aligned with the government), has been called "compensatory state" [25]. ...
... En ese sentido, la territorialidad de las cadenas productivas es compleja tanto en su totalidad como también en su especificidad. Como recientes trabajos han mostrado en el contexto del super-ciclo de los commodities en América Latina (Arboleda, 2016;Bonilla, Maldonado, Silveira, & Bayón, 2016;Bustos-Gallardo, 2017;Wilson & Bayón, 2015), pese a que el capital es global en su forma, necesita homogenizar y disciplinar los espacios en donde se realizan las diferentes actividades asociadas a las cadenas de producción. ...
... En ese sentido, la territorialidad de las cadenas productivas es compleja tanto en su totalidad como también en su especificidad. Como recientes trabajos han mostrado en el contexto del super-ciclo de los commodities en América Latina (Arboleda, 2016;Bonilla, Maldonado, Silveira, & Bayón, 2016;Bustos-Gallardo, 2017;Wilson & Bayón, 2015), pese a que el capital es global en su forma, necesita homogenizar y disciplinar los espacios en donde se realizan las diferentes actividades asociadas a las cadenas de producción. ...
Resumen
Este artículo aborda las territorialidades asociadas a la extracción gas natural en Perú y Bolivia, las que son definidas como las prácticas y estrategias que diferentes grupos sociales adoptan para ejercer control espacial con la finalidad de modificar, rechazar u obtener beneficios de la cadena productiva del gas natural. Conceptualmente se propone una definición de territorialidades basada en las respuestas que diferentes grupos sociales tienen frente al anclaje espacial de las cadenas productivas. Estas respuestas estructuran una compleja red de territorios articulada por la cadena productiva, la que, si bien es global en su forma, se encuentra enraizada en diversas estructuras políticas y sociales, las que definen las diferentes territorialidades. Específicamente son analizadas las territorialidades a nivel nacional y subnacional, tanto en Perú y Bolivia en perspectiva comparada, mediante una revisión de diferentes fuentes secundarias. Los resultados dan cuenta que si bien las orientaciones y estrategias de cada uno de estos niveles en ambos países son diversas, los aspectos más críticos son el acceso y control a la renta gasífera y la integración energética. Se concluye planteando que la relevancia de estas territorialidades recae en evaluar cómo pueden ofrecer alternativas de desarrollo para los diferentes territorios.
Abstract
This article analyzes territorialities related to natural gas extraction in Peru and Bolivia. Territorialities are defined as practices and strategies which different social groups take for controlling places because they expect to modify, refuse or reach benefits of the natural gas productive network. Such definition is grounded on the answers of those groups which are triggered by the territorial embeddedness of productive networks. Those answers define a complex network of interlinked territories that is global in his form but based on a variegated scheme of political and social structures. Specifically, this work analyzes national and sub-national territorialities in Peru and Bolivia through a comparative perspective by means of different secondary sources. Those cases show that the different orientations and strategies which different social groups take at different levels are heterogeneous. However, the main poses of those groups are to increase control over natural gas rent and promote energetic integration. Finally, the main conclusions is that is critical to understand in which extent those territorialities might be a chance for development.
... Drawing on not just an engaged pluralism, but decolonial, relational, and radically interdependent pluriversal ontologies, it is clear that we can barely think about this kind of extended urbanization without thinking about (neo)colonial gendered, racialized, and sexualized processes that have shaped the vulnerabilities of Caribbean people to climate change (see e.g. Kipfer, 2014Kipfer, , 2017Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2013;Wilson and Bay on, 2015). ...
The devastating impacts of Hurricanes Irma and Maria across the Caribbean (especially in Barbuda, Dominica, Puerto Rico, St Martin/St Maarten, and parts of the British and US Virgin Islands) are haunting harbingers of a world of climate disaster, halting recovery, and impossible futures. Being at the leading edge of the global capitalist exploitation of people and other living and non-living beings in a world-spanning system of vast inequity and severe injustice, Caribbean thinkers, writers, poets, philosophers, activists, and artists have long lived with, dwelt upon, and offered answers to the problem of being human after Man, as Sylvia Wynter puts it. This reflection on island futuring and defuturing offers a critical analysis of Caribbean “disaster recovery” and “climate adaptation” based on an understanding of the disjuncture between three uneven spatio-temporal realities: (1) the decelerating “islanding effects” of debt, foreign aid, and austerity; (2) the accelerating mobilities of the “offshore” and extended operational landscapes of “planetary urbanization”; and (3) the durational im/mobilities of Amerindian survival, Maroon escape, and Black/Indigenous cultural endurance of alternative ontologies.
... This is particularly evident in the government's involvement in the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), a regional development programme involving all twelve South American countries, funded by partner governments and regional development organisations such as the Union of South American Nations and the Inter-American Development Bank. As highlighted by Brenner (2013) and Wilson and Bayón (2015), IIRSA represents a paradigmatic case of planetary urbanisation as its core aim is to overcome national boundaries and to open inter-oceanic corridors for global trade through the construction of ports, airports, bridges, tunnels, roads, railways, hydroelectric plants and electricity networks. Out of the 583 regional infrastructure projects associated with IIRSA, 323 are wholly or partly located in Bolivia. ...
This chapter draws attention to processes that have, in recent decades, contributed to the almost complete urbanisation of previously isolated, rural indigenous peoples. Indigenous urbanisation trends are illustrated through the case study of Bolivia. Here, indigenous peoples inhabit diverse territories of concentrated and extended urbanisation where they are often affected by patterns of social exclusion and ethno-racial discrimination. Urban indigenous peoples are, however, by no means passive victims of exclusion and discrimination but, in Bolivia at least, they are active agents of political change who contest for specific rights within the urban environments in which they live. To analyse complex indigenous urbanisation processes and associated everyday urban indigenous politics, this chapter deploys a pluralist perspective and combines planetary urbanisation theory—which allows for an understanding of patterns of socio-capitalist restructuring of indigenous territories and associated anti-capitalist urban indigenous resistance—with postcolonial approaches—which allow understanding ongoing tendencies of ethno-spatial segregation and associated decolonial indigenous responses. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to lessons from this case study for future theoretically informed and empirically grounded research on indigenous urbanisation in Bolivia and elsewhere.
... 6. In what ways are the geographies of extended urbanization we have begun to demarcate in our work-related, for instance, to the tendential enclosure, industrialization and infrastructuralization of erstwhile agricultural and extractive hinterlands, emergent landscapes of tourism, logistics and waste management, and new regimes of technoenvironmental management-forged through gendered, sexualized, racialized, biopolitical, and neocolonial power relations, and associated projects of normalization (Arboleda, 2015a(Arboleda, , 2015bWilson and Bayo´n, 2015)? How might more explicitly feminist, queer, critical race-theoretical, decolonial, and postcolonial approaches to such dynamics inform, extend, and transform conceptualizations and investigations of extended urbanization (Cowen, 2014;Kipfer, 2014Kipfer, , 2017Kipfer and Goonewardena, 2013)? ...
This essay reflects on recent debates around planetary urbanization, many of which have been articulated through dismissive caricatures of the core epistemological orientations, conceptual proposals, methodological tactics, and substantive arguments that underpin this emergent approach to the urban question. Following consideration of some of the most prevalent misrepresentations of this work within this special issue, I build upon Barnes and Sheppard’s (2010) concept of “engaged pluralism” to suggest more productive possibilities for dialogue among critical urban researchers whose agendas are too often viewed as incommensurable or antagonistic rather than as interconnected and, potentially, allied. The essay concludes by outlining nine research questions whose more sustained exploration could more productively connect studies of planetary urbanization to several fruitful lines of inquiry that have been explored within postcolonial, feminist and queer-theoretical strands of urban studies. While questions of positionality necessarily lie at the heart of any critical approach to urban theory and research, so too does the search for intellectual and political common ground that might help orient, animate and advance the shared, if constitutively heterodox, project(s) of critical urban studies.
... In 2006, he secured the concession of the port to Hutchinson Port Holdings, the world's leading port operator, in a deal that committed Hutchinson to invest $US523 million in the port over a 30-year period (Business News Americas, 2007). He also promoted the project to the Ecuadorian Minister of Economy and Finance, Rafael Correa, who then incorporated it into his 2006 presidential election campaign, in which he pledged to end neoliberalism, and to implement a 'transformation of the productive matrix,' which would deliver the Amazonian region of the country from the socially and ecologically catastrophic consequences of the oil industry (Wilson and Bayo´n, 2015). Manta-Manaus was a key component of this 'post-neoliberal' development strategy, and Correa promised to complete the corridor by 2011 (Medalla, 2006). ...
This paper explores the entanglement of dreams and reality in the production of economic infrastructures. It focuses on the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor, which is currently being constructed between the Pacific coast of Ecuador and the Atlantic coast of Brazil, with the aim of integrating the Amazon into global production networks. Drawing on extensive field research conducted in Ecuador, we develop a fantastical materialism, as a theoretical and methodological approach to the intertwining of fantasy and materiality through which the spaces of capital are conceived, constructed, and brought to ruin. Manta-Manaus is revealed not only as a technocratic accumulation strategy, but also as a seductive dream of planetary integration and geographical freedom. This dream has become ensnarled in the material dynamics of uneven geographical development, and its infrastructures have been repurposed for the expansion of the oil frontier. The Real of Capital thus advances through the creative destruction of its own fantasies.
Anti‐extractivist critique still positions Indigenous people as protagonists of counter‐modern political sentiment, whether as opponents of modernity's processes of productive rationalization and economic integration, or as embodying ontologies that reject modernity's conceptual separation of humanity from natural resources. Indigenous anti‐extractivism is thus said to represent a rupture of modern politics in that it exceeds politics as we know it. Yet the calculus of modern politics remains central to Indigenous responses to resource extraction, even in social contexts where non‐modern ontological suppositions are widely adhered to. This is illustrated through an ethnography of Indigenous mining in the southern Ecuadorean Amazon and national‐level electoral data showing the sweeping support of Indigenous people for former leftist President Rafael Correa's ‘neo‐extractivist’ programme. This persistent modernity of Indigenous resource politics exposes the fallacy of projecting counter‐modern sentiments onto Indigenous peoples.
Against the backdrop of contemporary debates on the transcendence of city-centric epistemologies in urban theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework for exploring the connections between processes of planetary urbanization and the political ecologies of emergent infectious disease. Following a brief overview of research on cities and the coronavirus pandemic, we elaborate a critical interrogation and heterodox synthesis of two distinct lines of investigation—(1) research by Roger Keil and his collaborators on the embeddedness of emergent infectious diseases within processes of extended urbanization and (2) work by radical epidemiologist Rob Wallace and his colleagues, which productively situates emergent infectious diseases in relation to the geographies and political ecologies of agribusiness under neoliberalizing capitalism. We direct attention to the ways in which processes of planetary urbanization are remaking the human and nonhuman geographies of non-city spaces, causing infectious pathogens to be unmoored from previously localized ecosystems and catapulted into broader territories of circulation. This line of analysis requires rigorous application of dialectical methods that can illuminate the internal relations through which cities dynamically co-evolve and co-transform with the non-city spaces, more-than-human territories, and multispecies political ecologies that support their metabolic operations, including at the microbiological scale of novel pathogens. The elaboration of such an approach yields an interpretation of the urbanization/emergent infectious disease nexus as a medium and expression of the agro-ecological crisis tendencies of neoliberal capitalism. A concluding section outlines three emergent arenas of agro-industrial transformation in which processes of extended urbanization have created new spatial configurations and infrastructural pathways for the production and proliferation of emergent infectious diseases.
Planetary Mine rethinks the politics and territoriality of resource extraction, especially as the mining industry becomes reorganized in the form of logistical networks, and East Asian economies emerge as the new pivot of the capitalist world-system. Through an exploration of the ways in which mines in the Atacama Desert of Chile—the driest in the world—have become intermingled with an expanding constellation of megacities, ports, banks, and factories across East Asia, the book rethinks uneven geographical development in the era of supply chain capitalism. Arguing that extraction entails much more than the mere spatiality of mine shafts and pits, Planetary Mine points towards the expanding webs of infrastructure, of labor, of finance, and of struggle, that drive resource-based industries in the twenty-first century.
This chapter explores the emancipatory and utopian dimensions of planetary urbanization, through the case the Manta-Manaus multimodal transport corridor in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It traces the ways in which utopian fantasies of postmodern hyperspace and rational spatial order have been undermined by the chaotic forces they conceal and confronted with the materialization of a Real utopia, in the form of an autonomous urban project launched by an indigenous community faced with imminent dispossession. The dialectics of this struggle embody the possibilities, limitations and antagonisms of utopian urban projects under conditions of planetary urbanization.
The question of urbanisation ‘beyond the city’ has generated a lively debate in the fields of urban studies and geography in recent years. This paper brings a key concept from this discussion –‘extended urbanisation’– in conversation with distinct yet related concepts from critical agrarian studies. We briefly review the ‘classic’ agrarian question in order to situate contemporary agrarian questions within the historical geographies of capitalist restructuring since the late-nineteenth century. We then examine a selection of contemporary agrarian scholarship attuned to the interconnectedness of agrarian and urban sociospatial relations to argue that the concept of extended urbanisation and urban studies more generally have much to gain from a closer engagement with this work. To this end, we identify three openings for further analysis: (1) ‘global depeasantisation’ and ‘deruralisation’ as the labour dimensions of extended urbanisation; (2) the co-existence of banal ‘operational landscapes’ with landscapes of high-intensity extraction and agro-industrialisation; and (3) relational periodisations of urbanisation that incorporate successive world-historical ‘food regimes’ and their associated commodity frontiers in order to unearth geohistories of extended urbanisation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. We conclude by rearticulating the ‘right to the city’ in terms of a broader ‘right to space’ as a means of re-centring ongoing struggles against capitalist urbanisation in spaces beyond the city.
Contemporary global lightscapes are becoming increasingly complex and varied, creating an unusual geography of technological development and diffusion that defies many easy narratives of global interconnectivity. Specifically, new LED lighting technologies are being created through rural experimentation in both Global North and Global South. This makes lighting, and darkness, an interesting lens through which to intervene in debates on the relationship between city, countryside, and planet, specifically addressing the theoretical developments of comparative urbanism and planetary urbanisation. Heading calls to develop conceptual material from both Global North and Global South, we use case studies from Bihar (India) and the North Pennines ( UK ) to argue that the changing lighting technologies and practices show how “ordinary countrysides” are contributing to new planetary ways of living. We argue that while there are differences in how darkness and the implementation of artificial lighting are perceived in these sites, there are similarities that reveal an ongoing rural form of planetary living, outside the claims of urbanisation. Particularly, rural lives are marked by a closer connection to the planet, as expressed through experiences of rural darkness. Furthermore, in both sites the tenuous grasp on infrastructure and state services seems to reveal a shared rural experience. These findings suggest shared rural experiences of globalisation, but that the socio‐spatial contexts of places remain important in understanding their location within global systems. Furthermore, we join recent calls to suggest that further exploration of the difference between “global” and “planetary” might add nuance to theoretical trends in urban studies, rural studies, and geography.
The notion of planetary urbanization has recently mobilized different strands in the field of urban studies and has generated extensive debates. This emerging research agenda aims to revise inherited concepts and produce a new vocabulary of urbanization through the construction of an ex-centric perspective that dislocates the focus of analysis from its conventional center: the city. The idea of extended urbanization is thus an imperative concept for it operationalizes this theoretical decentering and permits the exploration of urban questions beyond city-centrism, while encompassing urban agglomerations. This article discusses the conception of extended urbanization. We examine its vital insertion into the contemporary agenda of planetary urbanization and present its original formulation in and from Brazil, developed by Roberto Monte-Mór in the 1980s. In order to foster a productive dialogue between these formulations, we discuss the contradictions embedded within the process of extended urbanization and highlight Monte-Mór’s main theoretical and empirical contributions – particularly regarding urban politics and extended citizenship in the Brazilian Amazon. We contend that extended urbanization as formulated in and from Brazil offers important developments and goes far beyond a mere interesting empirical case in and from Brazil. Instead, it illuminates contemporary questions regarding planetary urbanization.
This article addresses the processes of technological modernization that have taken place in Latin America’s mining industry, especially in the context of a new geography of late industrialization whose gravitational center has shifted towards East Asian economies. Through the Marxist critique of ecology, the paper explains the ways in which both human and nonhuman natures have been emptied of their concrete specificity in order to be transformed into the alienated powers of capital. The intensification in land use that has followed the robotization and computerization of large-scale mining has not only reconfigured the biogeophysical environment into a constitutive moment of the forces of production, but also entailed the systematic transformation of peasantries into dispossessed multitudes that act as mere appendages of technical systems of extraction, or as surplus populations. The reorganization of the mining industry into global supply chains requires rethinking extraction beyond primary commodity production, and interrogating its organic unity with the modern mode of production generally considered.
In April 2017, Ecuador halted the continental drift to the conservative right in Latin America by electing leftist Lenín Moreno to the Presidency. Attention has turned, therefore, to the legacy of outgoing President Rafael Correa’s decade in power. To that end, this paper examines one of Correa’s signature programmes, ‘Buen Vivir’ (Living Well), a strategic plan for development underscored by the indigenous Kichwa cosmology of ‘sumak kawsay’. Sumak kawsay is a notion that has been co-opted into policy mechanisms in an attempt to both challenge neoliberal modes of governance, and to disrupt the ontological bifurcation of nature and society. Given the emphasis placed on ecological sensibility in sumak kawsay and Buen Vivir, critics have been quick to highlight the contradictory relations between Ecuador’s mode of environmental governance and its extractivist agenda. Such critiques are as staid as they are well rehearsed. Acknowledging the precarious composition of sumak kawsay, the paper questions the extent to which the ethos of experimentalism in politics can be sustained, eliding stymied technocratic forms of the political. It turns, therefore, to Baruch Spinoza’s treatise on adequate and inadequate ideas. In so doing, the paper examines how one can critique an idea without perpetuating a moral economy in judgment. Consequently, the paper considers the way in which Spinoza’s thought can be charged to recuperate imperilled political ideas.
¿Quién dijo que en la selva ecuatoriana no hay elefantes? Los hay. Y son enormes (y costosos). Dos investigadores: Japhy Wilson y Manuel Bayón fueron a buscarlos. Y descubrieron que están cobijados por las “fantasías utópicas” y por un modelo de conquista de la Amazonía que, desde tiempos del caucho, se reproduce.
En su intrépida expedición, los autores de este libro, desde su mirada crítica, develan sus hallazgos y los comparten con los lectores: un personaje digno de una nueva versión de Fitzcarraldo; dos ciudades fantasma bautizadas como Ciudades del Milenio, a la que les empieza a crecer el monte y que seguramente en poco tiempo más serán tragadas por la selva; un centro de estudios de nombre shuar que va del bio-socialismo a la bio-tecnología; un puerto para cubrir la ruta Manta-Manaos en el que permanecen inmóviles las barcazas que, en el primer viaje, quedaron varadas en los bancos de arena que forman el curso del río Napo.
Estos elefantes son blancos, visten de neocolonialismo y traen consigo el despojo de territorio. Tras los elefantes van un emperador y una Revolución, desnudos, con un gran proyecto: extraer los recursos no renovables y, a cambio, compensar y urbanizar a unas comunidades indígenas. Los indígenas, por su parte, haciendo uso de su derecho a la resistencia, ríen al verlos pasar, mientras beben un enorme tazón de chicha. Ríen, porque la historia de constantes conquistas se repite.
This paper explores the ideology and materiality of ‘bio-socialism’, through which the Ecuadorian government is attempting to catalyse a ‘post-neoliberal’ transition from the ‘finite resources’ of Amazonian oil reserves to the ‘infinite resources’ of biodiversity and scientific knowledge. This experiment is embodied in Ikiam, a public university under construction in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on extensive field research, we argue that, despite its radical intentions, bio-socialism is functioning as a strategy for the real subsumption of nature to capital, which is being operationalized in Ikiam in ways that reproduce the neoliberal knowledge economy. However, the contradictions of this process imply that, in practice, Ikiam is only intensifying established patterns of the formal subsumption of nature, by commodifying the genetic wealth and indigenous knowledge of the Amazon, and legitimating the expansion of the oil and mineral frontiers. The case of bio-socialism demonstrates the paradoxical nature of actually-existing post-neoliberalism, and illustrates the tendency for utopian ideologies to reproduce the material conditions they are seeking to escape.
Os trabalhos contemporâneos de Neil Brenner e Christian Schmid permitiram que a urbanização planetária (re)emergisse como uma das grandes narrativas no campo dos estudos urbanos. Neste trabalho, apresentamos a crítica desses autores ao “citadismo” metodológico nos estudos urbanos e ao discurso da era urbana, bem como suas teses em urbanização, que pretendem caminhar rumo a uma nova epistemologia do urbano. Finalmente, tomando como referência as elaborações de Roberto Monte-Mór acerca do urbano e da urbanização extensiva – também fundadas na hipótese lefebvriana de urbanização completa da sociedade –, expomos pontos de diálogo e de tensão entre essas teorizações, culminando na crítica da concepção contemporânea da urbanização planetária.
Through a materialist reading of the aesthetic, this paper explores Leviathan, a project of visual anthropology produced by Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, in order to reflect on the urbanization of nature as it is advanced by the more-than-human scripture of power objectified in the technologized, capital-intensive spaces of transnational fishing. With its idiosyncratic and technically elaborate mode of representation, Leviathan realizes a visual testament to the forms of disfigurement, exploitation and brutalization of human and nonhuman natures that have ensued from the real subsumption of planetary space to capital. Building upon a strand of critical theory that has advanced Marx’s original, yet partially developed insights on ‘capital as alienated subject’, we contend that one of Leviathan’s most salient artistic accomplishments has been to provide a vivid portrayal of how circuits of abstraction come to life as they take possession of human bodies and instruments of production. As a monster tale of global capitalism, Leviathan showcases the purposeful, impersonal, and quasi-organic features of the ‘automatic subject’ that has come to rule over the materiality of social life.
The planetary urbanization of capital entails the collapse of all traditional morphological distinctions into a seething morass of implosion–explosion that recalls the creative–destructive fury of a black hole. As an invisible presence–absence only identifiable by its spatiotemporal effects, the black hole resembles both the Lacanian Real and Marx’s value-theoretical understanding of capital. Utopian fantasies of postmodern hyperspace and rational spatial order function to fill in the void of the Real of Capital, but are ultimately undermined by the chaotic forces that they conceal. At the event horizon of black hole capitalism, where the crushing agglomeration of capital threatens to obliterate all social life, the seemingly impossible construction of Real utopias becomes an urgent necessity. The dynamics of this process are illustrated by the case of the Manta–Manaus multimodal transport corridor, which reveals the possibilities, limitations and antagonisms of utopian urban projects under conditions of black hole capitalism.
This paper explores the relationship between ground rent, production and knowledge in Ecuador’s neo-structuralist, state-led project to transform the productive matrix. Based upon insights from the Marxian approach to the critique of political economy, we interrogate how neo-structuralism has conceptualised the relationship between ‘natural resource income’ and ‘knowledge-based’ economic development. The paper argues that a rent-theoretical perspective, which takes seriously the regional unfolding of uneven geographical development in Latin America, can highlight the limits of a national development plan conceived according to the logic of Schumpeterian efficiency. In doing so, the paper identifies the contradictory relationship between natural resource exports, state-led ‘knowledge’-based development and capital accumulation. On this basis the paper offers a historically and empirically informed critical analysis of selective import substitution industrialisation and vanguard science and technology strategies designed to transition Ecuador away from primary resource dependence.
This article argues that the contradictory character of Ecuador's current development project is made evident through a focus on energy resource management from a feminist ecological perspective. The hydrocarbon exploitation fundamental to these projects transforms women's roles in social reproduction and production, their relationship with nature, and their dependence on state-institutionalized energy regimes. We examine changes in women's territorially based work of care at sites in Ecuador's petroleum circuit. An ethnographic focus on the transformation of women's daily lives at sites of petroleum exploration, exploitation, and processing in Ecuador reveals an often overlooked dimension of the socioenvironmental conflicts produced by the intensification of national economic insertion into the global energy market. This article thus examines the intersection of state development policies and the gendered construction of subjects of development. The exploitation of natural resources transforms the meanings and values of nature and development, of women's work of care, and of the participation of these in different energy regimes.
This article follows Weber's suggestion to study how different types of domination are combined historically. It analyzes the synergies and tensions between charisma and technocracy under Rafael Correa, showing how Correa presents himself as the professor and the redeemer of the nation in his weekly television shows. Post-neoliberal experts are located at the top of his government. They share Correa's notion that they represent the interests of the nation as a whole and not particular groups. The article illustrates the tensions between charisma and technocracy by describing a police insurrection in which charisma overtook rational and strategic reasoning, showing that even though charisma and technocracy can be compatible, charisma is unstable and might jeopardize the rule of experts.
Through an exploration of the political economy of the current commodity boom in Latin America, and on the basis of recent appropriations of Henri Lefebvre's notion of planetary urbanization, this article proposes viewing spaces of resource extraction resulting from an escalating international demand for raw materials as particular morphological expressions of market-driven processes of urbanization. Furthermore, the article draws on Lefebvre to argue that such burgeoning spaces of urbanization are the result of a contradictory tension between spatial homogenization?in the form of multiscalar governance frameworks and infrastructural programs?and territorial fragmentation?in the form of fixed capital allocations and state-led spatial segregation. When considered jointly, these contradictory movements allow us to grasp fully the extent of the problematic explosion of spaces that, according to Lefebvre, characterizes capitalist urbanization. The article concludes by reflecting on the emancipatory promise that underlies the planetary extension of the urban form because, with the projection of material infrastructures required for resource extraction?especially information technologies?across the rural realm, local communities have been able to shed their isolated state and emerge as fully fledged political actors.
The urban has become a keyword of early twenty-first-century economic, political, and cultural discourse. But as its resonance has intensified in social science and in the public sphere, the conceptual and cartographic specificity of the urban has been severely blunted. Is there any future for a distinct field of urban theory in a world in which urbanization has been generalized onto a planetary scale? This article reflects on this state of affairs and outlines a series of theses intended to reinvigorate the theoretical framework of urban studies in relation to emergent forms of urbanization. Several conceptual distinctions — between categories of practice and categories of analysis, nominal essences and constitutive essences, and concentrated and extended urbanization — are proposed to inform possible future mappings of the planetary urban condition.
New forms of urbanization are unfolding around the world that challenge inherited conceptions of the urban as a fixed, bounded and universally generalizable settlement type. Meanwhile, debates on the urban question continue to proliferate and intensify within the social sciences, the planning and design disciplines, and in everyday political struggles. Against this background, this paper revisits the question of the epistemology of the urban: through what categories, methods and cartographies should urban life be understood? After surveying some of the major contemporary mainstream and critical responses to this question, we argue for a radical rethinking of inherited epistemological assumptions regarding the urban and urbanization. Building upon reflexive approaches to critical social theory and our own ongoing research on planetary urbanization, we present a new epistemology of the urban in a series of seven theses. This epistemological framework is intended to clarify the intellectual and political stakes of contemporary debates on the urban question and to offer an analytical basis for deciphering the rapidly changing geographies of urbanization and urban struggle under early 21st-century capitalism. Our arguments are intended to ignite and advance further debate on the epistemological foundations for critical urban theory and practice today.
Este artículo sigue las sugerencias de Weber de estudiar cómo diferentes tipos de dominación se combinan en experiencias históricas concretas. Se analizan las sinergias tensiones entre el liderazgo carismático de Rafael Correa y criterios tecnocráticos. A diferencia de líderes neopopulistas que encargaron sus políticas económicas a expertos neoliberales, Correa combina en su personaal experto con el político carismático. En su oratoria y en sus programas de televisión y radio semanales Correa compagina tecnocracia y carisma y se presenta como el profesor y redentor de la nación. Expertos posneoliberales están en las posiciones más importantes del régimen. Comparten con Correa la idea de estar liderando un ciclo de cambios profundos, de encarnar los intereses de toda la sociedad y no de sectores particulares, y la misión de llevar a cabo la refundación de la nación. Las tensiones entre criterios tecnocráticos y carisma se evidenciaron en la crisis política causada por una rebelión policial en la que los criterios carismáticos opacaron consideraciones racionales y estratégicas. Si bien el carisma y la tecnocracia pueden convivir en el discurso, el carisma es inestable y subvierte los intentos de gobernar a través del conocimiento de los expertos. This article follows Weber's suggestion to study how different types of domination are combined historically. It analyzes the synergies and tensions between charisma and technocracy under Rafael Correa, showing how Correa presents himself as the professor and the redeemer of the nation in his weekly television shows. Postneoliberal experts are located at the top of his government. They share Correa's notion that they represent the interests of the nation as a whole and not particular groups. The article illustrates the tensions between charisma and technocracy by describing a police insurrection in which charisma overtook rational and strategic reasoning, showing that even though charisma and technocracy can be compatible, charisma is unstable and might jeopardize the rule of experts.
Foreboding declarations about contemporary urban trends pervade early twenty-first century academic, political and journalistic discourse. Among the most widely recited is the claim that we now live in an ‘urban age’ because, for the first time in human history, more than half the world's population today purportedly lives within cities. Across otherwise diverse discursive, ideological and locational contexts, the urban age thesis has become a form of doxic common sense around which questions regarding the contemporary global urban condition are framed. This article argues that, despite its long history and its increasingly widespread influence, the urban age thesis is a flawed basis on which to conceptualize world urbanization patterns: it is empirically untenable (a statistical artifact) and theoretically incoherent (a chaotic conception). This critique is framed against the background of postwar attempts to measure the world's urban population, the main methodological and theoretical conundrums of which remain fundamentally unresolved in early twenty-first century urban age discourse. The article concludes by outlining a series of methodological perspectives for an alternative understanding of the contemporary global urban condition.
This paper examines the formal features, the political rationale, distinctiveness, potential, and difficulties of post-liberal regionalism, with a particular focus on the case of UNASUR. Through this organization, traditional unionism and aspirations of Latin American regional integration are redefined in a South American geographic and ideational framework. Through this strategy South America became a political and economic construct in order to respond to globalization challenges and to achieve its members’ goals in development, regional autonomy (particularly in regards to the US), international influence and at the same time domestic governance of the involved countries. Nevertheless, the limits of this project’s future are being defined by nationalism, traditional visions of sovereignty and by a regional construction that involve significant institutional limitations, which are product of its intergovernmental logic, internal asymmetries and ambivalent Brazilian leadership.
Existing literature suggests that food, fiber, and raw material sectors differ from manufacturing in significant ways. However, there is no analytical basis for engaging the particular challenges of nature-centered production, and thus the distinct ways that industrialization proceeds in extractive and cultivation-based industries. This article presents a framework for analyzing the difference that nature makes in these industries. Nature is seen as a set of obstacles, opportunities, and surprises that firms confront in their attempts to subordinate biophysical properties and processes to industrial production. Drawing an analogy from Marxian labor theory, we contrast the formal and real subsumption of nature to highlight the distinct ways in which biological systems - in marked contrast to extractive sectors - are industrialized and may be made to operate as productive forces in and of themselves. These concepts differentiate analytically between biologically based and nonbiologically based industries, building on theoretical and historical distinctions between extraction and cultivation.
The protests led by indigenous groups early in 2001 reflected the continuing problems of the Ecuadorian state. Although this tradition of constant protest is problematic for democracy, it may eventually be more helpful than harmful.
‘Competitiveness’ has become a transnational policy buzzword in a globalized world and this invites us to examine critically ‘competitiveness’ discourses and their manifestations in the policy-consultancy circuit. This article adopts a ‘cultural political economy’ approach to the rise to hegemonic ‘knowledge brand’ status since the mid-1990s of the influential account of Michael E. Porter and his Harvard Business School associates. This account of competitiveness has since been recontextualized from the national to the urban, regional and global scales. The article interweaves theoretical and empirical arguments in five steps. Firstly, it outlines the bases of cultural political economy as a discursive as well as material account of the remaking and reproduction of social relations. Secondly, it presents three stages in the development of ‘competitiveness’ discourses from theoretical paradigm to knowledge brand. Thirdly, it explores how this knowledge brand has been recontextualized through knowledge apparatuses, such as indices and metaphors, as well as through related technologies of power at the global level and the regional-national scale of East Asia. Fourthly, and conversely, it shows how this hegemonic logic of competitiveness is being challenged and negotiated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Fifthly, it offers some concluding comments on knowledge brands and on how cultural political economy can contribute to a critical understanding of policy-making.
The recent political, economic and social histories of Bolivia and Ecuador point to a broader, post-neoliberal trend emerging in Latin America. Presidents Evo Morales and Rafael Correa have closely followed the basic model of twenty-first-century socialism as an alternative to free market capitalism. In theory, both leaders have successfully re-founded their countries with new constitutions that encompass the interests of all sectors of society. In practice, however, we argue that a volatile economic climate, poorly implemented reforms, increased opposition, and low political tolerance all indicate limitations to the viability of twenty-first-century socialism as a post-neoliberal development model.
It is possible to identify a subterranean tradition within Marxism—one in which dialectical thought is harnessed not only to expose the necessarily exploitative and inherently crisis-prone character of capitalism as an actual system of social organisation, but also to critique the very categories that constitute capitalism as a conceptual system. This paper argues that Henri Lefebvre's work can be included within this tradition of “open Marxism”. In demonstrating how Lefebvre's work on everyday life, the production of space and the state derives from his open approach, the paper flags a potential problem of antinomy in an emergent new state spatialities literature that draws upon Lefebvre to supplement its structuralist–regulationist (“closed”) Marxist foundations. A Lefebvre-inspired challenge is therefore established: that is, to develop a critique of space which does not substitute an open theory of the space of political economy with a closed theory of the political economy of the regulation of space.
Catherine Walsh looks at how we can understand the emergence in the Andes Region and Ecuador of buen vivir, living well or collective well being, as the guiding principle for a new regimen of development. She asks if this really is a shift to new social and sustainable forms of development and what the experiment in the Andes suggests for today's rethinking of development institutions.
Central concepts of contemporary life such as politics, civilization, and citizenship derive from the city's form and social organization. The city expresses the socio-spatial division of labor, and Henri Lefebvre proposes to view its transformation within a continuum from the political city to the urban, whereby it completes its domination over the countryside. The city's transformation into the urban takes place when industry brings production (and the proletariat) into that space of power. The city, locus of surplus, power, and the fiesta, a privileged scenario for social reproduction, was subordinated to the industrial logic and underwent a dual process: its centrality imploded, and its outskirts exploded on surrounding areas through the urban fabric, bearing with it the seeds of the polis and civitas. The urban praxis, formerly restricted to the city, re-politicized social space as a whole. In Brazil, the urban has its origins in the military governments' centralizing and integrating policies, following Vargas's expansionism and Kubitschek's developmental interiorization (or occupation of the hinterlands). Today, urban-industrial processes impose themselves over virtually all social space, in contemporary extended urbanization.
People around the world are confused and concerned. Is it a sign of strength or of weakness that the US has suddenly shifted from a politics of consensus to one of coercion on the world stage? What was really at stake in the war on Iraq? Was it all about oil and, if not, what else was involved? What role has a sagging economy played in pushing the US into foreign adventurism? What exactly is the relationship between US militarism abroad and domestic politics? These are the questions taken up in this compelling and original book. In this closely argued and clearly written book, David Harvey, one of the leading social theorists of his generation, builds a conceptual framework to expose the underlying forces at work behind these momentous shifts in US policies and politics. The compulsions behind the projection of US power on the world as a "new imperialism" are here, for the first time, laid bare for all to see.
Jeffrey Sachs is a man with many faces. A celebrated economist and special advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, he is also no stranger to the world of celebrity, accompanying Bono, Madonna and Angelina Jolie on high-profile trips to Africa. Once notorious as the progenitor of a brutal form of free market engineering called "shock therapy," Sachs now positions himself as a voice of progressivism, condemning the "1 per cent" and promoting his solution to extreme poverty through the Millennium Villages Project.
Appearances can be deceiving. Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid is the story of an evangelical development expert who poses as saviour of the Third World while opening vulnerable nations to economic exploitation. Based on documentary research and on-the-ground investigation, Jeffrey Sachs exposes Mr. Aid as no more than a new, more human face of Dr. Shock.
In Uneven Development, a classic in its field, Neil Smith offers the first full theory of uneven geographical development, entwining theories of space and nature with a critique of capitalist development. Featuring pathbreaking analyses of the production of nature and the politics of scale, Smith's work anticipated many of the uneven contours that now mark neoliberal globalization. This third edition features an afterword updating the analysis for the present day. © 2008 by The University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved.
In this paper I argue that global urbanism produces peripherality in ways that cannot be adequately problematized without taking into account its actual extent and geographically uneven development. Therefore, planetary urbanization needs to engage scholarly traditions attuned to regional urbanization if the discourse is to move past limitations in the urban globalization canon and its narrow focus on cities. To that end, I examine research on extensive urbanization in the Amazon region. Illustrative case studies show how attempts to globalize Manaus precipitated territorial restructuring and sociospatial change far beyond the city's boundaries. Manaus is now a more unequal city. Selective metropolitan expansion to the Rio Negro's south bank has led to the simultaneous upgrading and peripheralization of Iranduba. Yet, the building of a city-centric regional network of roadways also shaped Roraima State's transformation from isolated borderland to bypassed periphery. Moreover, financial and symbolic appropriations of standing rainforests by metropolitan conservationism marginalize remote communities even in the absence of exploitative deforestation and resource extraction. Final remarks emphasize the need for further research on the hybrid (urban-rural) conditions and functional articulations of distant-yet-impacted peripheries. Such efforts may broaden the political horizons of planetary urbanization by informing extensive contestations of entrepreneurial urbanism.
In Le Droit à la Ville (1968), Lefebvre projects the urban trajectory of his day into the sci-fi imaginary of Isaac Asimov's remarkable Foundation series, recognizing the germ of ‘Trantor’ in our midst, the planet of 40 billion inhabitants where urbanization has reached its absolute maximum; all 75 million square miles of Trantor's land surface are a single city. In La Révolution Urbaine (1970), Lefebvre had already begun hinting at a new reality, not only an urban society, but of planetary urbanization. Today, four decades on, Asimov's extraterrestrial universe seems closer to home than ever, and closer to Lefebvre's own terrestrial prognostications: planetary urbanization is creating a whole new spatial world (dis)order. But how shall we reclaim the shapeless, formless and boundless metropolis as a theoretical object and political object of the progressive struggle? If the arena of politics has no discernible form, what would be the form of these politics? What, exactly, are urban politics? This article tries to rethink theoretically the urban question and the question of urban politics in our era of planetary urbanization, working through the political role of the urban in the light of recent ‘Occupy’ mobilizations.
The “territorial turn” in Latin America describes the trend towards state recognition of community property rights. This partial recognition of indigenous peoples’ and Afro-descendants’ demands for territory has become a focal point for expanding neoliberal approaches to governance through the extension of new property rights regimes. This partial recognition of social movements’ demands has resulted in widespread efforts to rethink territory by social movements and scholars alike in order to better understand the conceptual work that the term does, its historical constitution, and its relevance to struggles for social justice. Those debates provide a grounded critique of territory, drawing attention to the calculative techniques used to bring it into being and their role in marginalizing other understandings of space and rights with far-reaching implications for processes of subject formation. This review uses those debates to argue for a reconsideration of territory as process, highlighting the ways in which governing works through the term and how it constrains approaches to social justice.
The article proposes a reinterpretation of Henri Lefebvre's concept of abstract space, emphasizing the significance of the ‘violence of abstraction’ within the concept itself, and within the concrete process of the capitalist production of space. This interpretation of abstract space is developed through the case of the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP) as an ‘actually existing’ abstract space. Launched in 2001 and abandoned in 2008, the PPP was a regional development programme for southern Mexico and Central America, which aimed to transform this region from a peripheral zone of peasant agriculture and social unrest into a modernized node of the global economy through the construction of infrastructure networks and the restructuring of economic activity. Focusing on southern Mexico, I explore the symbolic, structural and direct forms of violence embodied in the PPP: its abstraction from the lived spaces of the region; its incorporation of the region into global circuits of capital; and its repression of a network of place‐based resistances.
Ecuador is a prominent example of a Latin American country that has elected a left‐wing president who aims to create a post‐neoliberal development strategy. Many of the policies pursued by President Rafael Correa have focused on changing the relationship between nature and society. The new constitution of 2008, which grants rights to nature, adapts a new development model based on indigenous cosmology and strengthens the power and regulatory remit of the state over the economy and society, is an important statement of intent in this regard. The Yasuní‐ITT (Ishpingo‐Tambococha‐Tiputini) initiative to leave oil underground in exchange for international financial contributions is the most significant manifestation of this intent in actual policy. Analysis of two emblematic changes reveals that the creation of a post‐neoliberal development strategy has so far produced partial and uneven results. While nature and natural resources have come under stricter control by the state, this has not significantly diminished their commercialisation.
Ecuador's energy policy faces a complex variety of political and economic objectives that are difficult to reconcile in a consistent manner. Ecuador is a small oil producer and exporter with significant renewable (mainly hydropower) resources, hosting some of the richest biodiversity areas in the world, part of which are inhabited by so far indigenous un-contacted people. Being a developing country, tensions arise between conservation aims and development imperatives, as well as between resource nationalism and much-needed foreign financing. However, the really limiting factor for the country's energy development seems to be its constraints in financing the government's development and redistributive policies. Resorting to Chinese loans-for-oil may be part of the solution in the short term, but it does not substitute for a more consistent energy policy. Ecuador's case illustrates the dilemmas of energy policy in natural resource-rich developing countries when confronted with diverging political economy, social, environmental and macro-financial goals.
In this interview, Moishe Postone, author of Time, Labor, and Social Domination, discusses the Marxian critical theory of capitalism against the background of the author's intellectual biography and central historical developments of recent decades. The interview focuses on his reinterpretation of Karl Marx's critical theory, especially on the notion of the historical specificity of the categories that purportedly grasp capitalism and its historical dynamic. It also engages the author's understandings of Georg Lukács, the Frankfurt School, and poststructuralism, while addressing issues of capitalism's historical transformations, its possible abolition, and the reconstitution of progressive politics.
Introduction: Post-Neoliberalism in the Americas, An Introduction L.Macdonald & A.Ruckert PART I: CONCEPTUAL AND THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO POST-NEOLIBERALISM The Contradictions of Neoliberalism in Latin America: From Structural Adjustment to 'Empowering the Poor' M.Taylor Post-Neoliberalism and the New Left in the Americas: The Pathways of Economic and Trade Policies P.Heidrich & D.Tussie Struggling between Autonomy and Institutional Transformations: Social Movements in Latin America and the Move towards Post-Neoliberalism U.Brand & N.Sekler Post-Neoliberalism and the Emergence of Human Rights Politics in International Finance E.Friesen PART II: POST-NEOLIBERALISM IN LATIN AMERICA Hugo Chavez and the Search for Post-Neoliberal Policy Alternatives in Venezuela J.Meltzer From Naked Barbarism to Barbarism with Benefits: Neoliberal Capitalism, Natural Gas Policy and the Evo Morales Government in Bolivia J.R.Webber Is There a Post-Neoliberal Policy towards Foreign Direct Investment in Argentina and Chile? P.Alexander Haslam The World Bank and the Poverty Reduction Strategy of Nicaragua: Towards a Post-Neoliberal World Development Order? A.Ruckert The 'Re-branding' of Neoliberalism: Competing Hegemonies and Systemic Dilemmas Impacting Educational Development in Heavily-Indebted Latin American States A.Davidson-Harden PART III: TRANSFORMATIONS OF NEOLIBERALISM IN THE AMERICAS Neoliberalism and the Micropolitics of Domination in the United States M.Hawkesworth Poverty Policy and Politics in Canada and Mexico: 'Inclusive' Liberalism? R.Mahon & L.Macdonald The Shaping of Motherhood through Social Investment in Children: Examples from Canada and Mexico L.Luccisano & G.Wall Neoliberalism's Agnosticism: Domestic and Immigration Policies and the Model Family in Canada and the United States L.Harder Colombia's Neoliberal Regime of Governance: Securitization by Dispossession C.Rojas Afterword: Post-Neoliberal Politics and Pathways L.Macdonald & A.Ruckert Bibliography
Latin American development is being rapidly transformed, with popularly elected governments embarking on reversals of neoliberalism informed by autochthonous notions of human wellbeing. Through a detailed examination of the origins and application of one development model, this article examines the constraints on and limits to postneoliberal development in terms of state-civil society relations and as a form of postcolonial governmentality. Interpreting Ecuadorian sumak kawsay (living well in English) in relation to embedded political cultures, specific opportunity structures, and the dynamic between contentious and electoral politics highlights the extent of room for manoeuvre in rethinking development. As a form of governmentality and pastoral power, Ecuadorian ‘postneoliberalism’ incorporates a constitutional commitment to social rights, collective citizens and the rights of nature. The paper also reveals the difficulty of making a definitive break from neoliberalism, which remains pervasive in practice, conceptualisations and state formations. Moreover, although various forms of anti-colonial ‘border thinking’ were proposed by social movement’s contentious politics, the paper argues that sumak kawsay works to sustain postcolonial conditions of development.
The New Economic Geography (NEG) incorporates social space into neoclassical models, and claims to provide an explanation of uneven development within the parameters of economic orthodoxy. It is among the most influential recent innovations in mainstream economics – Paul Krugman was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to the NEG, and it provided the theoretical inspiration for the World Bank's 2009 World Development Report. Drawing on the work of David Harvey and Henri Lefebvre, this article interprets the NEG as a colonising project in both its theoretical claims and its practical applications. Theoretically, the NEG colonises the disciplinary terrain of economic geography while replacing its substantive content with the abstractions of neoclassical economics. In practical terms, the NEG has been instrumental in the World Bank's ‘new spatial approach to development’, which aims to fully colonise peripheral regions of the global economy through constructing the spatial infrastructures necessary for globalised production and exchange. The social contradictions implicit in this project are revealed in the case of the Plan Puebla Panamá, a regional development programme for southern Mexico and Central America, based on the NEG, and identified by the World Bank as a prototype for its spatial approach to development. The article thus provides a critique of the NEG as a theoretical approach and as a policy tool, demonstrating the increasing significance of the production of space within the neoliberal project, and cautioning against the transformation of socio-spatial reality in the image of technocratic abstractions.
The way we see our cities affects the policies and actions we undertake. Is our way of seeing dominated and limited by an obsession with ‘the city’ as a thing, one that marginalizes our sense of urbanization as a process? What is the nature of an understanding of urbanization that can contribute to emancipatory politics?
This article offers a critical assessment of the first postneoliberalism development framework that emerged in Latin America after 1990. The ability of neostructuralism to present an attractive narrative about a twenty-first-century “modernity with solidarity” is based on abandoning key tenets of ECLAC's structuralism and the thinking of Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado; namely, a focus on the distribution and appropriation of economic surplus and a framing of Latin American development problems in a world capitalist system. This article argues that Latin American neostructuralism's discursive strengths, as well as its analytical weaknesses, stem from the marginalization of power relations from key dimensions of the region's political economy. Since 2000, neostructuralism has exacerbated its descriptive, short-term perspective, further dulling its analytical edge, by focusing on policies that promote social cohesion and state intervention in the cultural and the socioemotional realm.
In 1935, after the death of dictator General Juan Vicente Gómez, Venezuela consolidated its position as the world's major oil exporter and began to establish what today is South America's longest-lasting democratic regime. Endowed with the power of state oil wealth, successive presidents appeared as transcendent figures who could magically transform Venezuela into a modern nation. During the 1974-78 oil boom, dazzling development projects promised finally to effect this transformation. Yet now the state must struggle to appease its foreign creditors, counter a declining economy, and contain a discontented citizenry. In critical dialogue with contemporary social theory, Fernando Coronil examines key transformations in Venezuela's polity, culture, and economy, recasting theories of development and highlighting the relevance of these processes for other postcolonial nations. The result is a timely and compelling historical ethnography of political power at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary reflections on modernity and the state.
Copyright Paul Cammack 2006. This paper outlines the politics of global competitiveness and the 'convergence club' model through which it is propagated, with particular reference to the role of the OECD, the EU (and the Open Method of Coordination), and the World Bank.
Capital Volume One New York: Random House Medalla
- Karl Marx
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The Travails of ALBA
The Economist (2014). "The Travails of ALBA"
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