Paper short abstract:

Building on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of planetary urbanisation, the paper intends to analyse the political economy of the commodity boom in South America in order to assert that the proliferation of resource extraction projects has created new forms of urban centrality and cityness.

Paper long abstract:

The current commodity boom can be regarded as one of the most significant and disruptive economic events in recent world history, as it has fuelled a massive wave of mining and energy megaprojects throughout the world with the purpose to supply the raw materials demanded by escalating industrialisation rates at the global scale. In light of the above, and on the basis of fieldwork conducted during 2013 in Colombia and Chile, the proposed paper intends to argue that in South America, this "boom" has set into motion an unprecedented pattern of production and transformation of space in the form of dams, power stations, mines, railways, ports and so forth, creating new forms of urban centrality that render obsolete the traditional urban/non-urban divide. Building on Henri Lefebvre's notion of planetary urbanisation, the paper will make an inquiry into the political economy of the commodity boom in order to recast resource extraction sites and their material infrastructures -usually regarded as non-urban-, as part and parcel of an urban fabric that spreads thickly and unevenly throughout the region, fostering a contradictory tension between global integration and territorial differentiation. Those contradictory movements, the paper will contend, are a core determinant of the highly unjust and fractured urban landscapes that have been emerging since the turn of the century around extraction sites. Most of these exploding settlements challenge conventional notions of cityness, and are marked by proletarianisation, environmental degradation, violence, displacement and systematic impoverishment of local communities, among others.