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

Friday, 12 June 2026, 11.30am to 12.30pm

On Bananal Island, in the Brazilian state of Tocantins, between the Amazon and the Cerrado savannah, hydraulic infrastructures built to sustain industrial agriculture have dismantled the ecological conditions on which Indigenous life depends. Dykes, canals, and irrigation systems have altered the region's hydrology so profoundly that rivers have silted up, fish have vanished, and soil fertility has collapsed — forcing groups such as the Javaé, Krahô-Kanela, and Krahô-Takaywrá to depend on supermarkets for food once grown and caught within their own territories. The same infrastructures that have deepened food dependency have also created stagnant water bodies that breed mosquitoes carrying dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, urbanising disease patterns in communities far from any city. This talk argues that these transformations constitute a distinct form of infrastructural urbanisation: the extension of urban-industrial metabolic relations into forest territories through hydraulic engineering, commodity dependence, and the increased presence of mosquito-borne diseases typically associated with impoverished urban environments. These Indigenous territories become neither fully forest nor fully city, but spaces exposed to the overlapping vulnerabilities of both.

Speaker(s): Dr Fábio Zuker (GCHU Visiting Global Research Associate; Researcher at the Pensi Institute (José Luiz Setúbal Foundation) and the University of São Paulo)

Venue: Kellogg College - Kellogg College 62 Banbury Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX2 6PN United Kingdom

Department: Kellogg College (College)

Organiser: GCHU

Host: Global Centre on Healthcare and Urbanisation

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/urbanisation-without-cities-tickets-1989659070841?aff=oddtdtcreator