Morphological analysis as a tool for socio-environmental reparation: contributions from the Amazon context

Abstract

This paper adopts the Latin American context of eco-territorial struggle to explain the importance of overcoming ‘repertoires’, here understood as knowledge assets about how to shape human settlements, that have become universalized due to colonization and globalization. It proposes the adoption of morphological analyses as a prosthesis, or artifice, to expand the outreach of human senses and to localize knowledge. Geotechnologies and the representation of rural-urban transects are used to explain spatial repertoires and technologies which are usual in the region, in order to indicate that the representations are not neutral, and that once they have become deeply rooted in local culture and environment circumstances, they may contribute to an understanding of the social production of space in the forest, and to confronting the imminent global environmental collapse. By analyzing the morphological transitions between consolidated portions of two metropolises and one intermediate-sized city, and settlements distributed throughout the forest, inserted into the peri-urban areas of these cities, the paper demonstrates that the study of socially-produced forms may reveal more than peripheral and deprived spaces. These transitions reveal combinations of classic morphological elements and the physical site, water bodies and vegetation, which may be duly named and characterized as physical repertoires and localized spatial grammars of the Amazonian urban, that have inherited knowledge of the rhythms and limits of rivers and tropical forests and of the capabilities of coexisting with them.