Towards an Amazonian Urbanism: Collective Infrastructures of Care

Abstract

In the everchanging and mobile territory of the Amazon rainforest, the imposition of a rural-urban divide results in the unsustainability of settlements that appeared as sites of extraction at the turn of the twentieth century. Accelerated changes and transformations in urbanisation patterns and in climatic conditions call for the necessity to explore alternative city-making models that are better able to adapt to and promote multiple ways of being and of interdependence between humans and nature. The lifestyles and worldvisions of Amazonian urbanites already speak of the possibilities of reimagining what Christine Padoch calls ‘urban forests and rural cities.’ Through collective experimentation, we depict how the co-production of collective infrastructures of care could allow strengthening the relational socio-natural practices needed for a reconfiguration of Amazonian urbanism.