2017/03/21 by Alejandra Espinosa Andrade
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Anthropological Studies and Insights #Global trade, sustainability, and social impact #Mining and Resource Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/09502386.2017.1303430
openalex publication_date 2017/03/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This article explores spatial and cultural transformations that are taking place in the Ecuadorian Amazon region under an extractivist development model. Taking as a case study the Millennium Communities project Playas de Cuyabeno, it analyses from a critical perspective the origins and configurations of a space and architecture of extractivism in the Amazon forest. Discursively, the Ecuadorian legal framework and authorities claim to be distant from neoliberal tendencies and to promote the conservation of nature and the achieving of Buen Vivir (‘Good Living’). In practice, however, they are triggering and imposing an ideal of urbanity and a future city that serves political purposes and happily coexists with oil extraction. Even if Playas de Cuyabeno also reflects the elusive spirit of cultural practice and its capacity to escape homogeneity by creating new forms of inhabiting the designed spaces, it most insistently marks the complicity between the authorities’ rhetoric of modernity/progress and their intention to discipline the space and the subjects living in it.