COP30 in the Amazon: Experience and challenges of Belém
Prof. Dr. Ana Claudia Cardoso, Federal University of Pará, Belém, Brazil
This public lecture will discuss three dimensions:
Cities in the Amazon – unknown and unheard off: The formation of biosocial spaces in the anthropogenic forest, the transitions imposed by colonisation, directed migratory flows and new forms of spatial organisation that give new meaning to the relationships between rivers, forests, humans and more than humans and transform deforested land into merchandise.
Belém in focus: transformations, permanence and resistance. The regional metropolis that prospered thanks to the rivers and the forest, but which has lost its memory of how to deal with water.
Contradictions and Possibilities brought about by COP 30: how a city that expresses ambivalent dynamics (democratically welcoming elites and marginalised populations) prepares itself in two and a half years to host the diplomatic meeting, while facing the challenges of the outdated construction agendas of such mega-events.
Ana Claudia Cardoso is an architect and urban planner and a full professor at the Federal University of Pará, Brazil (UFPA), teaching in the Postgraduate Programme in Architecture and Urbanism (PPGAU/UFPA), as well as the Postgraduate Programme in Regional and Urban Planning and Development in the Amazon Region (PPGPAM/Unifesspa). Her current research interest is the convergence between extensive urbanisation promoted by the public and private sectors in the Amazon region and the counterproposals of native spatial patterns that co-exist with the forest. She argues that imposed dichotomies (urban-rural, city-nature) overlap with social spaces that link corridors of villages and communities to rivers and the forest, and to cities, in support of the defence of the right to ethno-socio-biodiversity. She holds that the processes observed in the Amazon region are variants of those experienced in other regions where the condition of being peripheral prevails.
Website https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=B030fugAAAAJ
Chair: Tilmann Heil
Date:
25 June 2025
11h45 – 13h15
Venue:
Seminar Room S252
Classen-Kappelmannstr. 24, 50931 Köln
This event is co-organized by the Thematic Area South South Relations of the Global South Studies Center (GSSC)