Extended urbanization in and from Brazil

Abstract

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.

Transforming rural light and dark under planetary urbanisation: Comparing ordinary countrysides in India and the UK

“…Insofar as planetary urbanisation is a synonym for the global spread of capitalism and modernity – for example, as in Wilson and Bayón's (, p. 3) “we begin by setting out our understanding of planetary urbanization in terms of the real subsumption of space to capital” then we can endorse much of the argument being made. However, we also struggle to equate this growing influence of capital with the notion of a “countryside” manifestation of an underlying “urban fabric” (Brenner & Schmidt, , p. 167), noting that planetary urbanists have also continued to explore and unpack what this notion might mean in diverse ways (see, for example, Castriota & Tonucci, ). What does seem clear is that the ordinary countryside is now an infrastructural one.…”

“…The apparent gap between “comparative” or “postcolonial” urbanists and planetary urbanisation has driven conceptual debates in urban studies and urban geography since the mid‐2010s, though we agree with recent work that has argued that the differences raised in these debates are not between two, irreconcilable camps (Brenner, ; Loftus, ). Indeed the framework of planetary urbanisation should encourage cross‐national comparisons of both city and countryside life, insofar as it suggests that they are subject to similar processes of “extended urbanization” (Castriota & Tonucci, ). What is important here is that planetary urbanisation does not claim that the countryside disappears, or that it becomes homogenised, but that it is transformed by urban as opposed to rural logics (Keil, ).…”

“…To study ordinary countrysides is to prioritise neither global connections nor local difference, but to see the ways in which the specific stories of rural places inform our understanding of a global, infrastructural countryside. Studies of the countryside in planetary urbanisation have tended towards questions of resources, treating it as a sort of enhanced urban hinterland through which communication networks cross and onto which environmental degradation is done (see for example Meili, ), although work drawing from Monte‐Mar's concept of extended urbanisation has started to correct this (Castriota & Tonucci, ). Nonetheless, there is a relative absence of attention to the everyday and the planetary within theories of planetary urbanisation, particularly when contrasted to comparative urbanism.…”

Why does everyone think cities can save the planet?*

“…Environmental interconnections between localities also take more distantiated form, though, and the development of global/local networks of urban sustainability policy expertise is also an urgent topic for research, as Goh (2020) documents with respect to the colonial and postcolonial pathways connecting Amsterdam to New York and Jakarta, along which local climate adaptation planning expertise has propagated and been transformed. Finally, further afield from the city or even the global city network, in the absence of a multi-spatial framework, 'operational landscapes' (Brenner and Katsikis, 2014) of energy, resource extraction, logistics and waste processing which support urban agglomerations risk being rendered invisible (Arboleda, 2020;Castriota and Tonucci, 2018).…”

“…import assumptions of an existing system'. By contrast, Castriota and Tonucci (2018) have drawn attention to the limits of the capitalist subsumption of the environment under urban development, and to the corresponding possibilities of radical politics to contest this process. They argue, following the work of Roberto Monte-Mo´r, that 'the extended urban fabric can be locally appropriated in different ways, pointing towards processes of re-politicisation and extended citizenship in spite of the capitalist and industrial character of urbanisation' (Castriota and Tonucci, 2018: 513).…”