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Paper short abstract:

From 1950s agrarian colonization spread in Latin America. I analyze the concept of regional planning used by German geographers to study it. Based on a functional space, geographers zoomed out and imagined regions where effective colonization would bring welfare and modernization to countryside.

Paper long abstract:

Beginning in the 1950s, agrarian colonization projects spread throughout Latin America. Many were promoted under agrarian laws designed to promote rural modernization and provide land to peasants. Agrarian colonization accelerated after the 1960s under the Alliance for Progress. Promoting spontaneous and state-led colonization would avoid revolutionary agrarian reform and expand the arable land needed to launch the Green Revolution. Scholars from different disciplines tried to follow the ongoing projects and studied individual cases. Instead, geographers emphasized the need for a regional approach as a research method to study the colonies, but also to improve them. For geographers, region was more than a unit of analysis, it was a unit of projection of rural futures. In this paper, I analyze the concept of regional planning used by German geographers to study and project agrarian colonization in Central and Andean Latin America. Using different theories, such as Thünen's concentric circles and Christaller's central place theory, and a functional conception of space, geographers zoomed out colonies and imagined regions where the state would direct an effective colonization that would guarantee the welfare of colonists, the connection of colonies to local market centers, and the establishment of cash crops that would modernize the countryside.