Help Meleiza Finish Her Fieldwork!
Spende geschützt
Dear friends,
Everyone has a moment when a little solidarity goes a long way. You all likely know Meleiza. She is a fantastic researcher, but more importantly her research comes out of a deep history of political organizing. From her work as a journalist at KPFK in Los Angeles, to her work with black communities for self-determination in Chicago, anti-gentrification work in Oakland and her current work on race, biodiversity and urbanization in the Amazon, this woman is a tireless fighter. She is endlessly curious, and committed to producing knowledge that helps advance human dignity. Many of us know what a struggle the PhD is – financially, emotionally, intellectually, bureaucratically. Lots of us get help from partners and parents, family and community. In this case it is community - that’s us, and the time is now.
Meleiza had a setback with visa issues that cost about $2000 in lost airfare, lost rent and lost time. Now she is holed up in Santarém, Brazil with maxed out credit cards, $150 to her name, a nasty case of dengue, and not enough cash to get medical care. If there were ever a time to show some love for a fellow traveler, it is now.
We need to raise about $1500 to get her through the month until her fellowship payment comes through. If you can’t contribute, send her a note of solidarity and love. The PhD is a lonely beast – let’s tame it together.
You can read more about Meleiza on her website , and about her current research below.
Love and gratitude,
Annie Shattuck (friend, colleague, admirer)
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Who and what makes a city?
My research seeks to understand cities and their spatial forms as historically and geographically specific processes, produced in and through economic, political, and social relations with rural hinterlands. Through ethnographic, historical, and geovisual documentation of the daily lives, socio-spatial practices, and political mobilizations of urban and peri-urban farming communities in Santarém, a mid-sized port city in the Lower Amazon region, this project traces the historical and ongoing evolution of “cidades da floresta,” a distinctive type of socio-ecological urbanism and urban form that has emerged on the peripheries of cities and towns throughout Amazônia. Literally translated as “forest cities,” these spaces – where urban settlement, forest ecology, and agrarian livelihoods come together in a unique synthesis – not only reflect Amazônia’s historical dynamics of regional development, but also continue to be vital spaces of socio-ecological reproduction for the world’s largest rainforest and the people who dwell within it.
Many of the farmers who live in these and similar settlements on the outskirts of Amazonian cities are migrants, mainly from rural areas in Brazil’s North and Northeast; landless peasants who came to the city looking for employment, to access state and social services, or simply to find a bit of land and a place to call home. Like their counterparts to the south – the infamous favelas of Brazilian megacities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo – many of these districts were established through informal or illegal occupation; ‘autoconstructed’ by residents themselves in ways that tend to reflect and respond to immediate personal, economic and community needs. In Amazônia (and other parts of North & Northeastern Brazil), migrant farmers, in addition to adopting “urban” norms and activities, continue to engage in small-scale agriculture and/or extraction of forest products as key strategies for subsistence and livelihood on the urban periphery. In the process, they appear to have incorporated aspects of the Amazon rainforest into their living and working spaces, creatively adapting traditional peasant and indigenous practices of agroforestry to support diversified livelihoods in a rapidly changing – and increasingly precarious – urban context.
Today, as Amazônia faces a host of challenges – most notably from climate change, expansion of the agribusiness-driven soybean industry, massive state-sponsored infrastructure projects, and a renewed wave of intense and often violent land struggles on the frontier – dwellers and defenders of Amazonian “forest cities” have become increasingly visible at the forefront of critical social movement and policy debates at a national level over agrarian reform, sustainable development, and the future of the city itself. As a result, two models of urban development have been produced in Santarém, and contend for expansion on its peri-urban periphery: cidade do agronegócio, the “city of agribusiness” (Elias 2007), and cidade da floresta, the “forest city” (Trinidade Júnior 2013). By examining the ways in which dynamics of regional development, social movements, state policy, and everyday subsistence practices in the Amazon have produced morphologically and ecologically distinctive forms of urban space, I argue that the cidades da floresta – and the growing movements for the life of the “forest city” – present us with critical opportunities to think in new ways about the very concept of “urban sustainability,” and the necessary sociopolitical conditions through which these and similar environmental goals can be realized.
In other words, the particular trajectories, natures, and fates of Amazonian “forest cities,” while seemingly unique, may indeed have something to teach us about all cities – and the possibilities contained therein toward alternative paradigms of urban development that can better support people, livelihoods, and the environment.
Everyone has a moment when a little solidarity goes a long way. You all likely know Meleiza. She is a fantastic researcher, but more importantly her research comes out of a deep history of political organizing. From her work as a journalist at KPFK in Los Angeles, to her work with black communities for self-determination in Chicago, anti-gentrification work in Oakland and her current work on race, biodiversity and urbanization in the Amazon, this woman is a tireless fighter. She is endlessly curious, and committed to producing knowledge that helps advance human dignity. Many of us know what a struggle the PhD is – financially, emotionally, intellectually, bureaucratically. Lots of us get help from partners and parents, family and community. In this case it is community - that’s us, and the time is now.
Meleiza had a setback with visa issues that cost about $2000 in lost airfare, lost rent and lost time. Now she is holed up in Santarém, Brazil with maxed out credit cards, $150 to her name, a nasty case of dengue, and not enough cash to get medical care. If there were ever a time to show some love for a fellow traveler, it is now.
We need to raise about $1500 to get her through the month until her fellowship payment comes through. If you can’t contribute, send her a note of solidarity and love. The PhD is a lonely beast – let’s tame it together.
You can read more about Meleiza on her website , and about her current research below.
Love and gratitude,
Annie Shattuck (friend, colleague, admirer)
------------------------------------------------------
Who and what makes a city?
My research seeks to understand cities and their spatial forms as historically and geographically specific processes, produced in and through economic, political, and social relations with rural hinterlands. Through ethnographic, historical, and geovisual documentation of the daily lives, socio-spatial practices, and political mobilizations of urban and peri-urban farming communities in Santarém, a mid-sized port city in the Lower Amazon region, this project traces the historical and ongoing evolution of “cidades da floresta,” a distinctive type of socio-ecological urbanism and urban form that has emerged on the peripheries of cities and towns throughout Amazônia. Literally translated as “forest cities,” these spaces – where urban settlement, forest ecology, and agrarian livelihoods come together in a unique synthesis – not only reflect Amazônia’s historical dynamics of regional development, but also continue to be vital spaces of socio-ecological reproduction for the world’s largest rainforest and the people who dwell within it.
Many of the farmers who live in these and similar settlements on the outskirts of Amazonian cities are migrants, mainly from rural areas in Brazil’s North and Northeast; landless peasants who came to the city looking for employment, to access state and social services, or simply to find a bit of land and a place to call home. Like their counterparts to the south – the infamous favelas of Brazilian megacities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo – many of these districts were established through informal or illegal occupation; ‘autoconstructed’ by residents themselves in ways that tend to reflect and respond to immediate personal, economic and community needs. In Amazônia (and other parts of North & Northeastern Brazil), migrant farmers, in addition to adopting “urban” norms and activities, continue to engage in small-scale agriculture and/or extraction of forest products as key strategies for subsistence and livelihood on the urban periphery. In the process, they appear to have incorporated aspects of the Amazon rainforest into their living and working spaces, creatively adapting traditional peasant and indigenous practices of agroforestry to support diversified livelihoods in a rapidly changing – and increasingly precarious – urban context.
Today, as Amazônia faces a host of challenges – most notably from climate change, expansion of the agribusiness-driven soybean industry, massive state-sponsored infrastructure projects, and a renewed wave of intense and often violent land struggles on the frontier – dwellers and defenders of Amazonian “forest cities” have become increasingly visible at the forefront of critical social movement and policy debates at a national level over agrarian reform, sustainable development, and the future of the city itself. As a result, two models of urban development have been produced in Santarém, and contend for expansion on its peri-urban periphery: cidade do agronegócio, the “city of agribusiness” (Elias 2007), and cidade da floresta, the “forest city” (Trinidade Júnior 2013). By examining the ways in which dynamics of regional development, social movements, state policy, and everyday subsistence practices in the Amazon have produced morphologically and ecologically distinctive forms of urban space, I argue that the cidades da floresta – and the growing movements for the life of the “forest city” – present us with critical opportunities to think in new ways about the very concept of “urban sustainability,” and the necessary sociopolitical conditions through which these and similar environmental goals can be realized.
In other words, the particular trajectories, natures, and fates of Amazonian “forest cities,” while seemingly unique, may indeed have something to teach us about all cities – and the possibilities contained therein toward alternative paradigms of urban development that can better support people, livelihoods, and the environment.
Organisator
Meleiza Figueroa
Organisator
San Pablo, CA
