HOUSING BEYOND THE METROPOLIS: Inhabiting Extractivism and Extensions in Urban Amazonia

Abstract

This article contributes to debates on the decentering of urban research by critically examining emergent forms of housing in the mining municipality of Canaã dos Carajás, Brazil, beyond the dominant lexicons that have emerged from the country's metropolises. The notion of ‘beyond the metropolis’ is offered here as a geographically situated, conceptual placeholder that empirically grounds calls for dislocating urban research. I draw upon fieldwork conducted in Canaã in 2018 and 2019, after the construction of the largest open-pit mine in human history, which attracted tens of thousands of migrants and more than doubled Canaã's population in five years, creating a severe housing crisis. By looking closely at how regional developers, local authorities, mining giant Vale as well as Amazonian majorities came up with their own ‘solutions’ to the housing problem they faced, I foreground the role of ‘extractivism’ and ‘extensions’ in driving and shaping urbanization and inhabitation—beyond the metrocentric emphasis on agglomerative dynamics driven by industrialization and rural-to-urban migration. This twofold conceptual grammar grounded in non-metropolitan Amazonia is absent from current housing debates and illustrates the generative analytical potential inherent in the move beyond the metropolis.