Urbanisation Without Cities?

How industrial agriculture is reshaping Indigenous health, ecology and urbanisation in the Brazilian Amazon.

Urbanisation Without Cities? Hydraulic Infrastructure and the Ecologies of Vulnerability in the Amazon.

Join Dr Fábio Zuker for a thought-provoking talk exploring how hydraulic infrastructure linked to industrial agriculture is reshaping Indigenous territories in the Brazilian Amazon, with profound consequences for health, food security, and ecological life.

Focusing on Bananal Island in the state of Tocantins, between the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savannah, this research examines how dykes, canals, and irrigation systems have transformed the region’s hydrology. Rivers have silted up, fish populations have declined, and soil fertility has collapsed, forcing Indigenous communities including the Javaé, Krahô-Kanela, and Krahô-Takaywrá to become increasingly dependent on supermarket food once produced within their own territories.

At the same time, stagnant water created by these infrastructures has intensified the spread of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, extending patterns of urban disease into remote forest regions.

Drawing on environmental anthropology, global health, and political ecology, Dr Zuker introduces the concept of “infrastructural urbanisation” to argue that urban-industrial systems increasingly shape environments far beyond city boundaries. These Indigenous territories become neither fully forest nor fully urban, but spaces exposed to the overlapping vulnerabilities of both.

This event will be of interest to those working across global health, environmental humanities, anthropology, climate justice, development studies, geography, and Latin American studies.

Speaker
Dr Fábio Zuker is a Researcher at the Pensi Institute (José Luiz Setúbal Foundation) and the University of São Paulo, and a GCHU Visiting Global Research Associate.

Please note this hybrid event will take place in the Walter Room, Kellogg College and Zoom.