Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to analyze the so-called lost cities in the Amazon from the twentieth century onwards assessing the perceptions of their abandonment against the background of developmentalist policies in contemporary Brazil.

Paper long abstract:

From the early-twentieth century onwards many industrial cities were funded in the Brazilian rainforest against the background of the Latin American developmentalist project. The imagery of an urban-industrial future was registered by public officials who documented the developmentalist zeitgeist, and it materialized in long-term plans based on policies to colonize the hinterland entwined with a belief that industrialization would be the sole means to fulfill the nation’s promise. However, by the mid-1980s, many newspapers and articles started to classify these cities as underdeveloped and abandoned places. Although the reasons were manifold and mostly had to do with poor governmental management, development agencies and the media mostly related this failure to the wilderness of the forest, mobilizing stereotypes such as the “green hell” as an impediment to the Western sense of progress in the region. This argument could historically be traced back to other processes, which merged Amazonian abandoned cities with an imaginary unconquerable nature in the Americas and worldwide.

Through an investigation centered on environmental memory, this paper aims to assess the socio-environmental resilience of these cities, which includes their plants, ruins, and ecosystems and which may counterbalance the idea of abandonment currently sustained. The lost cities of the Amazon are privileged spots for investigating the pitfalls in discourses on modernization and progress so prevalent in Latin America as well as the lingering and transformation of the legacy of big development projects which still impacts the imaginaries, expectation and life of people in the Amazon today.