Expanding and Deepening: Planetary Urbanization and Today’s Dimensions, Directions and Scales of Extractivism and Colonialism in Latin America
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32991/2237-2717.2025v15i3.p127-158Keywords:
Landscape, planetary urbanization, Latin AmericaAbstract
The critical role of non-urban landscapes as the invisible infrastructure of urbanization has been historically overlooked, while their resources have been absorbed as seemingly “limitless” flows, without acknowledging the socio-environmental conflicts generated by their extraction. This article examines the transformation of the lower Cesar River basin (Colombia) to critically assess these processes in Latin America. Drawing on planetary urbanization theory, it incorporates a diachronic reading of the territory based on environmental history. Through archival research, literature review, and interpretive cartography, the study reconstructs its historical trajectory from the eighteenth century to the present through four productive phases: the clearing of tropical dry forest and the introduction of cattle ranching, the technified production of cotton, the agro-industry of oil palm, and large-scale coal mining. The findings offer three main contributions. First, they present a postcolonial reading of planetary urbanization, framing it as the cumulative result of successive extractive phases articulated to metropolitan demands since the colonial period, rather than solely as a phenomenon of contemporary global capitalism. Second, they show how extraction networks imposed a universalizing vision of the territory, marginalizing local epistemologies and degrading strategic ecosystems. Third, they reveal the persistence of the center–periphery dynamic, as each phase reconfigured the relationships between non-urban landscapes and cities, transforming the territory to meet external demands without fully integrating it into urban morphological or socioeconomic logics, thus challenging the idea of a complete homogenization of the urban. The analysis highlights how colonial processes of dispossession laid the groundwork for today’s global extractive networks. These results are relevant to global debates on environmental justice, energy transitions, and the role of peripheries in the urbanization of the Anthropocene.
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