Professor Felipe Correa

Caitlin Morrissey 

I was absolutely thrilled to learn that you’re also doing some work on Amazonian Cities, and this will be the first feature of a group of cities that we’re including in the podcast. The first question to ask you is, what is an Amazonian City to you? And what makes a city an Amazonian City? What are the qualities of an Amazonian City? Acknowledging, of course, that there are tens of cities that we’re discussing when we discuss them.

Felipe Correa 

Yeah, I think that that’s one of those fascinating questions that is almost impossible to answer, but we’re still going to give it a try and see where that answer takes us. Look, one of the great things about the Amazon rainforest and its cities is that it actually accommodates quite a multiplicity of urban realities all the way from sort of large urban centres like Manaus to very small, sort of riverine settlements that rely on seasonal fishing, right? And what I think all of these have in common is that they share in one way or another, they have to engage with the canopy, the hydrology and the soils of the region, and what makes for me an Amazon City is an urban ensemble that, in one way or another, needs to engage with this complex ecology of soils, forests and rivers.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much for saying that. And I just want to quickly follow up because I know that you’re doing work in this region and when you are analysing, when you’re sort of making sense of these enormously plural urban environments within the Amazon rainforest and basin, do you feel that you need to take a different lens to the urban in these spaces compared to the work that you do in other Latin American and North American cities? Is the urban quality of these cities rather different? And is there any way of understanding that, or is the urban quality common and the environments themselves are different?

Felipe Correa 

I think it’s actually a great question. I think it’s a great question and I think it’s a question that’s at the crux of our projects, and what we can discuss here, which is that cities in the Amazon region because of the relationship to the environment in which they sit, are very different, but in many ways, the aspirations of its citizens are not. So we might say, oh, because you’re in the middle of the Amazon, cities have to respond to a series of parameters that are much more connected to the delicate nature of its ecology. But somebody that lives in the great city of Manaus might decide that no, what they want is a suburban house and two cars, just like many people want in any other parts of the world. And part of what our work is doing is looking at these cities and trying to reconcile the dynamics of cities in the region with the civic aspiration, the rightful civic aspiration of many of its citizens. How do you reconcile these two things? So I think your point, the answer to your question is both. In many ways, we need to understand how these cities work in their larger sort of and more complex environment, but also how within that context, we can actually also provide urban experiences that don’t deprive people of what they want. And I think that this for me, raises a very important aspect of our work, which is that throughout the history of the Amazon, I think that there’s been incredible writers: Lanthrap, the Brazilian sort of geographer Bertha Becker, who really was quite-- both of them were quite prolific in arguing that the Amazon has always been urban, that as an ecology, it’s been able to accommodate very, sort of significant-- not very, but significantly large groups of people. Simply because it has accommodated these people, the way that seeds have been moved, the way that sort of certain environments have been altered, that the forest is also a constructed environment that it has been significantly altered by settlers. And what this allows us to do is to think that urban and regional interventions can actually improve the region for the better. Now, what I think is extremely important to understand is the scale of these settlements. And the big change in scale, by the way, does not happen in sort of the 1600s and 1700s during the colonial period which many people attribute to. The huge change in scale happens in the second half of the 20th Century, primarily through Brazil and Spanish America building roads that would integrate the Amazon region into the economic cycles of their nations. A period in which this region was actually seen as backwards, economically stagnant, unproductive, and that governments had to put the region to work to make it economically viable. And I think a lot of our work acknowledges that really the history that truly matters in the evolution of cities in this region is that of the 20th Century, and primarily from the second half of the 20th Century onward.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you, and we spoke just as I was asking you the first question about what is an Amazon City, and recognising this is an incredibly difficult question to sort of pin down one answer to. And you mentioned that there are certain commonalities, and one of the commonalities is the way that these cities sort of engage with and react to and respond to and also influence the environment that they’re part of. The second question that we have is asking also about differences between these cities, and if there are ways to sort of conceptualise what those might be. Thinking about, for instance you’ve mentioned scale, but perhaps, how the proximity to the river or the proximity to the rainforest or being in the peripheries of this basin and this bioregion, shapes urbanisation as perhaps one starting point. But how else do you sort of see some of the differences between these cities or the cities that you have looked at so far?

Felipe Correa 

I think that there are many aspects that might create differentiation, right? For me, one of them has to do with access to water and access to the river, and that access is generally measured in relationship to infrastructure that allows you to engage with these hydrological systems. I mean, you have to realise that a river like the Amazon or the Black River has shifts in water level that might range between 15 to 20 metres by season. So how do you mediate those conditions? One, the investment in waterfront utilitarian infrastructure. So if I’m a city that actually has good port infrastructure, then I’m economically more viable than a city that might be right along the waterfront but has absolutely no way to get into a boat. The other aspect that becomes crucial, for example, in terms of access to resources, is the size of the engine of your boat. What is the size of the engine of your boat can be the difference between a four-day trip or a four-hour trip. So access to a mobility infrastructure in many parts of the Amazon is less related, even though a lot of roads have been built, might be less related to road infrastructure and much more related to boat infrastructure and the scale of those boats within the network.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Yeah, that’s so fascinating to hear. And I suppose that this perhaps shapes the relations between the cities as well, because cities-- and understanding how they sort of network between one another, that there are probably stronger relations between the cities that have faster access by boat to one another, compared to cities where there are longer distances to travel and perhaps more difficult journeys to make. And I guess that’s true of everywhere. But would you also see that in the Amazon Cities as well? Perhaps a caveat to that is that technology in the 2020s has evolved so much that perhaps some of those physical journeys, matter less, as you understand the cities relating to one another?

Felipe Correa 

I would actually argue that, yes, technology has facilitated some changes, but technology is not distributed globally, equally, right? And who has access to that technology shapes-- who has access to that technology, shapes what those sort of groups can or cannot do. And for example, cell phone infrastructure in the context of the Amazon rainforest is much more difficult to have access to because you cannot have towers every X number of metres, right, or even every X number of kilometres. How does most communication happen? Through a radio. Still, radio is extremely important, which means that whoever manages the radio has a lot of political power, right? Because information is power. So you actually have a series of fascinating dynamics of how information is communicated, what messages are passed through, through radio networks that are still very prominent, especially in more remote areas of the Amazon.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Yeah, that makes an incredible amount of sense. And thanks for making that connection as well between technology and power and the way that that’s distributed and deployed.

And so part of the conversation that we’ve had today has been about the urbanisation of Mexico City, and we’ve spoken before about São Paulo and Portuguese influenced urbanisation. We’ve spoken about urbanisation in Spanish Americas. How do you understand the urbanisation of Amazon Cities? You said there that the 20th Century has been pivotal in understanding the urbanisation of the Amazon rainforest. What are the sort of forces and impulses and drivers of urbanisation in the Amazon City, and how do they differ to those that have shaped the broader region that this rainforest sits within?

Felipe Correa 

I mean, in summary-- also, this is a question that we could do an entire podcast here, about this question. But I think one of the great things about this podcast is, you know, being able to summarise effectively, certain key points.

So the point that I would make, what I actually think has shaped the urbanisation of the Amazon rainforest is a mindset primarily conceived along the economic centres along the coast of the South American continent that saw the interior as a resource rich geography that could then be connected with global markets. And there’s an incredible project that was never built, but that I think exemplifies this mindset which is called the Grand South American Canal. And this is a project originally conceived by the great Prussian botanist and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, but championed by many national governments and even the United States in the late 19th and early 20th Century, all the way to the middle of the 20th Century, that looked at linking the Orinoco, the Amazon and the Paraná River into one central canal that was sort of colloquially named as the South American Great Lakes. This was such an important project that even the Hudson Institute developed a project for this in the 1950s. I actually have the drawings that are published in a couple of articles that I recently published. And in the 1950s, this project from the Hudson Institute created diplomatic panic. The Hudson Institute was primarily an institute that looked at questions of nuclear power in the Cold War. So the moment that they developed this project, Brazil felt very threatened. Spanish America, primarily Fernando Belaúnde, the President of Peru, which sort of proposed the main marginal highway along the jungle, was much more pro this project and pro-US involvement. But to make a long story short, what this project did was make the South American nations that are involved with the Amazon realise that if they don’t take control of this region, maybe an international protectorate might take over. And I think it is these incidents and this global interest in the region what actually spearheaded economic development, primarily through the lens-- through an economic lens of resource extraction, that spearheaded large-scale urbanisation in the region. There were already many consolidated cities, Iquitos, Manaus. They were all sort of incredible part of, sort of participants in the rubber boom. But the larger sort of notion of building roads to take the land and extract the resources, for me, is a 20th Century project, and this is really what has caused the urban and environmental disaster that we today witness in the region.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Yeah, it’s so fascinating to hear you describe the infrastructure born out of panic to sort of claim, and I suppose, be seen to be doing something in the region so that the global powers sort of step away, or you have enough of a sort of claim over that geography, and that idea of the resource waiting to be sort of taken and extracted.

Felipe Correa 

Yeah. I mean, on the one hand there was that. On the other hand, there was a certain notion, which is a very modern notion, that schemas had to be put in place to put nature to work. And we saw it in the TVA in the United States. We saw it in many sort of national development projects in India and the evolution throughout the 19th and 20th Century of the great Ganges Canal, and I think we saw it within the Amazon. And I think today, the larger challenge is to replace this mindset of economic development with one that accommodates economic development through the lens of environmental stewardship.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Oh, great, that you said that because I was just about to ask you the final question, if there’s anything else that you wanted to say about this idea of supporting both human flourishing and environmental reform and protection and flourishing in the Amazon as well? And you mentioned that there’s a mindset shift that needs to happen to support some of that, but it’s just an invitation, I suppose, to ask if there’s anything else that you wanted to say about that question of balancing what is now an urban region with the rainforest and the bioregion of the basin too?

Felipe Correa 

Yeah, I think, look, this is an extremely, extremely complex question that I think we need to like, we need to tackle from different vantage points. The first one that I would argue is extremely important is not separating the Amazon rainforest from the Andes mountain ranges. Most of the water that actually comes into the Amazon and allows the Amazon to survive is coming from the mountain peaks of the Andes. The snow melts, comes down through rivers, floods the Amazon. That water then sort of creates enough humidity to establish atmospheric rivers that produce the cycles of rain in the region and so on. So I think, one, it is very important that going back to the way that Alexander von Humboldt envisioned the region, we understand it in section and not in plan, that we understand that it’s a tiered ecology that goes from mountain to basin. Having said that, I think we then need to understand that cities in this region are not going to go away. Nor is anybody going to be able to force people in this region to live in a particular way because they live in an environmentally delicate ecology. So the question for me is, how do we actually develop strategies for cities to be able to have an economy? And this might have to do more with moving certain cities to a service economy, rather than a resource intensive economy, etc, to be able to live in this geography but not rely entirely economically from resources of the region. And I think that establishing that balance is key. Easily said than done, but I think that that is a first point of departure.