Presentation short abstract

The struggle against settler colonialism through the occupation of urban spaces in a plurinational manner represents a milestone in rethinking urban political ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

In peripheral areas of global capitalism such as the Ecuadorian Amazon or the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, infrastructure projects are catalysing the white fence characteristic of settler colonialism processes. This presentation aims to show how these processes occur in contemporary times through complex processes involving new infrastructure that formally seek to involve local populations. At the same time, these infrastructures generate a process of space-whitening, which deepens the mechanisms of settler colonialism by shaping new forms of urban spaces around the accumulation of oil extraction in the Ecuadorian Amazon or global tourism in mexican Riviera Maya. In these urban interstices, new subjects are emerging who demand a plurinational space in which to practise their ways of life in central locations close to infrastructure. New collectively owned neighbourhoods in the Ecuadorian Amazon and new forms of dispute over tourist symbolism in the Mayan ceremonial centres of the Yucatan Peninsula represent a theoretical transgression. Political ecologies have tended to analyse these processes far from their traditional corpus, where racialised populations have been reified to rural and jungle spaces. However, a task of decolonising political ecology involves considering the long histories and memories of indigenous peoples against the dispossessions of settler colonialism, while at the same time reformulating more broadly the tensions between urban proposals and social metabolism.