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Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the seemingly "abandoned" company town of Serra do Navio, located in the Brazilian Amazon, exploring its process of creation, abandonment, and its afterlife as heritage, spanning from the 1950s to the present.

Paper long abstract:

This research aims to investigate Serra do Navio, a mining company town located in the Brazilian Amazon (Amapá State). This once-model village acts as a case study of the heritagization processes that abandoned industrial places are submitted worldwide. After being established in the 1950s to accommodate workers employed in the mineral extraction activities in the Amazon, Serra do Navio was progressively abandoned by its residents in the 1990s. In 2010, despite the severe environmental damage caused by mining in the region's landscape and environment, the city was declared heritage by the National Heritage Institute (IPHAN). To interrogate this polemic recognition, overly focused on the modernist architectural legacy, this research plays with the ambiguity of utopia and dystopia. It applies those concepts to discuss the past and present life of the Company Town Serra do Navio, once deemed a utopian modernist city and nowadays struggling to maintain its formerly praised socio-economic legacy. To investigate this, the work combines both archival and ethnographic research to analyse the former mining enterprise of Indústria de Comércio de Minério (ICOMI). This industrial settlement went from being the first mining company town to settle in the Brazilian Amazon region to an afterlife as a national heritage. Through these investigations, this paper illuminates the failure of Brazilian developmentalist projects while it sheds light on the possibilities and challenges brought by deindustrialization beyond the abandonment status.