Floating Neighborhoods, Fake Countries, and the Long Histories of Authoritarian Modernization and Inequality in Urban Amazonia

In the late 1960s, the governments of Brazil and Peru commissioned strikingly similar studies to analyze the most prominent poor informal neighborhoods of their major Amazonian cities, the Floating City (Cidade Flutuante) of Manaus (Brazil) and Lower Belén (Belén Bajo) in Iquitos (Peru). Both neighborhoods had the distinct characteristic of being located in water, with stilts and floating homes, and next to the city centers. The studies, unsurprisingly, yielded similar conclusions: the neighborhoods had to be destroyed, to be replaced by modern housing units in different locations. Although the outcomes of the neighborhoods would ultimately diverge, the lead-up shared historical and intellectual trajectories. Since the 1950s, the urban policies of most Latin American regimes entered an era of developmentalist overdrive galvanized by ideas, methods, and institutions associated to modernization theory. This was true in many parts of the world, but Latin American nations featured some of the most explosive rates of urbanization, were among the most unequal anywhere, and, increasingly, were ruled by authoritarian regimes. In the Amazon Rainforest, these factors were compounded by challenging environmental conditions that amplified senses of both possibility and urgency. Amazonia had long been imagined as a strategic frontier in need of settlement and control. Its cities were among the most materially precarious in their countries. Policy makers pathologized their popular spaces and their inhabitants, characterized their customs as backwards, and championed the imposition of modern infrastructure over the rainforest. This paper situates aggressive efforts to transform urban Amazonia during the Cold War era as part of longer processes. It shows that the displacement and exploitation of riverine and indigenous communities that came to characterize urban policies since the 1950s had long been a salient aspect of the ideology and practice of state formation in Amazonia, and these interventions tended to perpetuate existing socio-spatial inequalities.