Beyond the City

Urban designer and architect Felipe Correa offers a provocative analysis of historical processes rarely examined through a single lens: resource extractivism and city building. The author begins by considering the vision of infrastructural integration known as the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America, which is shifting the region's historical North-South axis of extraction to an East-West orientation. Tied to capital's imperative to move raw materials out toward the Atlantic or Pacific, this shift in axis promises new “design and management challenges for . . . architecture and urban planning” (p. 2). To better inform those who meet these challenges, the book offers lessons from five case studies in Brazil, Venezuela, and Chile, where mining, oil, and hydroelectric power shaped regional urban formations. The cases highlight sites where experimental urban projects emerged amid extreme resource extraction. Methodologically structured around “design principles and spatial aspirations,” the book offers rich historical detail and illustrations including maps, design plans, and photographs (p. 11). The cases shed light on phenomena of interest beyond the disciplines of planning and urban design.Belo Horizonte arose like many Latin American cities, inspired by French positivism, controlled by elites, and concerned with controlling traffic and hygiene (i.e., labor). Departing from the colonial model, planners created a “diagrid” of diagonal streets and orthogonal blocks (p. 19). This led to a less prescriptive architectural outcome that mixed building types but allowed for urban density. When Juscelino Kubitschek became mayor in the 1940s, he brought on Oscar Niemeyer to move architecture beyond industrial demands with the leisure and tourism complex at Pampulha. The built-from-scratch approach set the stage for similar “capital city as an experimental project” ventures, including lesser-known cases like Goiânia and, later, Brasília (p. 37).In northern Chile's desert, nitrate mining and its requirements—labor, management, and transport infrastructures—led to enclaves like María Elena. Here the extractive imperative shaped urban outposts like Renaissance military cities (p. 49). With this conquest of the desert, labor control, though undertheorized by Correa, was central. The idea of the “resource extraction network” draws attention to how dispersed mines (oficinas salitreras) were part of a constellation connected by a transport grid (p. 39). Other support settlements arose as “oasis towns,” including those that provided medical services, prostitution, and nightlife (p. 47). These were “privatized” networks, imagined not as utopian ventures or nation-building experiments but as means of improving productivity and profit (p. 61). As a result, labor conflicts were common, housing was substandard, and the economy was subject to the boom and bust cycles of the global market.Like the private nitrate complexes yet in contrast to the city as nation-building experiment, oil cities like Judibana, Venezuela, were wholly planned by the American company Creole Petroleum (also known as Standard Oil). The oilmen hired the US design firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to build a bureaucratic city as a manifestation of oil's priorities. The idea was to achieve labor discipline while minimizing the company's obligation to provide services (p. 77). Labor segregation and a distinctly American feel for suburban life ensued. What comes after oil besides environmental ruin? Correa speculates rightly that nature must be more highly valued but seems to suggest, unconvincingly, that a different kind of oil urbanism is possible.Built on a design originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Ciudad Guayana project on the other side of Venezuela reflected Cold War ambitions of the Alliance for Progress to bring together US academic disciplines to promote development in the South. The idea here was a “linear city” with different functional nodes (heavy industry in one, commerce in another, residence in another, etc.). Critics saw it as an expression of a Platonic imposition rather than an Aristotelian one shaped by local idiosyncrasy. For his part, Correa points out how class segregation was deepened by the design, even if the city succeeded as a regional industrial hub.The final case is the hydroelectric center of Vila Piloto, Brazil. Sparked by the push into the interior (the genocidal character of which goes unremarked), the rise of hydroelectric power challenged foreign utility companies. Even so, it birthed the rise of regional planning that built on the model of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The region was the geographic referent for social and political life, with transport and communication networks integrating city and territory. River basins became core territorial units around which urban experiments arose. Vila Piloto was a spherical city of concentric rings, which were thought to serve more efficient service delivery. Built as a city for housing workers, Vila Piloto rose up as one of many along what would become the “chain of dams” along the Paraná River.The cases highlight how cities were imagined as sites where new social orders can be created. Urban designers seek to understand how conditions shape design implementation, and in this Correa succeeds. Richly described from the bird's-eye view of the planner, the book would benefit from a more critical take on violence against labor and nature entailed in these extractive urbanisms as well as more human-centric insights into the quality of life (or suffering) experienced therein. Nonetheless, the work illuminates intersections between city, hinterland, and global capital circuits that have shaped urbanization in Latin America. The book may also spark ideas, not for designing better extractive urbanisms but perhaps for thinking beyond the extractive imperative itself

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