Space and architecture of extractivism in the Ecuadorian Amazon region

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Extractivism
• space
• architecture
• Buen Vivir
• Amazon region
• Millennium Communities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Alejandra Espinosa Andrade studied social psychology in the Diego Portales University (Chile) and obtained a Master Degree in Political Science in the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO Ecuador). She has worked as a researcher and lecturer of topics related with human rights, participative methodologies, social movements, project management and territorial planning in national and international organizations (UNICEF, UNHCR, FLACSO Ecuador). Currently she is working in her Ph.D. at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). In her research she analyses, from a critical and multidisciplinary perspective, governmental urban projects and its relation with Ecuadorian cultural identity. Her Ph.D. Research is financed by the Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation of Ecuador.

Notes

1. Name given in the region to people that have lived there for decades but come from other provinces of Ecuador.

2. The Kichwa Sarayaku-case presented to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights exemplifies the antagonistic relation between some of the communities and the government and oil companies (see Inter-American Court of Human Rights, 2012).

3. See, for example, the Chevron case and reports published by organizations such as Observatorio de derechos colectivos del Ecuador CDES (http://www.observatorio.cdes.org.ec/), Oil Watch (http://www.oilwatch.org/), the Fundación Regional de Asesoría en Derechos Humanos – INREDH (www.inredh.org), Acción Ecológica (www.accionecologica.org), and the United Nations Human Rights Council, among others. Significantly, the Ecuadorian State has also targeted some indigenous groups and environmental organizations opposed to its mining, oil and water policies by accusing them of terrorism. See, for example, the cases of Carlos Pérez Guartambel and Javier Ramírez, who were accused by the Ecuadorian government of being terrorists in 2010 and 2014, respectively, when participating in activities against water policies and mining exploitation (Articles El Comercio, 10 June 2014 and El Mercurio, 22 January 2013).

4. For more information about the Yasuni ITT initiative see: Ministry of Environment (2010).

5. For more information about the critics against the closure of this initiative see the information collected by the group Yasunidos, a group of the civil society created to protect the Yasuní forest and the governmental initiative. http://sitio.yasunidos.org/es/yasunidos/crononologia-de-hechos.html

6. Each house comprises 96.04 sqm and has three rooms: a kitchen, a living room and a bathroom. The latter is situated in the empty space below the main floor. The houses, including basic furniture and household appliances, were given for free to the inhabitants of the communities (Araujo 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This work is part of the author’s Ph.D. research supported by the Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation of Ecuador.