URBAN TALK
Friday, 27.06.2025, 4.00 p.m. | IfA Halle 2

Prof. Dr. Ana Claudia Cardoso - COP30 in the Amazon: the importance of rivers and forests for urban planning in the Amazon biome, in the past and in a possible future

In November 2025, the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) will take place in Amazonia, in the city of Belém, Brazil—a regional metropolis that once thrived thanks to its rivers and forest, but has since lost its memory of how to deal with water. The event’s preparation reveals contradictions and possibilities: how a city with ambivalent dynamics (democratically welcoming elites and marginalised populations) gets ready in 2.5 years to host the diplomatic meeting, while facing outdated mega-event construction agendas.

Looking beyond Belém, the lecture focuses on cities in the Amazon – unknown and unheard of: the formation of biosocial spaces in the anthropogenic forest, transitions imposed by colonization, directed migratory flows, and new spatial organizations that reshape relationships between rivers, forests, humans, and more-than-humans, turning deforested land into merchandise. This input discusses the shift from an ancient logic of social production of space in the forest, which produced lasting landscapes capable of housing daily life, human work and multiple forms of life, to another established after colonization, which normalized the agglomeration of people and their separation from what was external to them. In peripheral societies such as the Amazon countries, this premise causes inequalities and social injustices, as it collapses the structures on which people's well-being was based.

Prof. Dr. Ana Claudia Cardoso will embark from the premise of the production of the rainforest. She will discuss how habitats can be compatible with the living forest—the tropical agrarian low-density urbanism of yesterday and today. This stands in contrast to the colonial metropolis and the creation of dichotomies through the transfer of repertoires and technologies. In opposition to colonialism and environmental racism, which have broken with forest culture and led to the social production of risk, she proposes the forest as a technology for readaptation.

Photo © Ana Claudia Cardoso

Prof. Dr. Ana Claudia Cardoso is a Professor at Federal University of Pará, Brazil (UFPA) in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (UFPA), Postgraduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism (PPGAU/UFPA) and Postgraduate Program of Economics (PPGE/UFPA).  She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture (Oxford Brookes University /UK, 2002). She is a Researcher of Brazilian National Research Council (CNPq) since 2010, and has experience in Urban and Regional Planning applied to Eastern Amazonian context. Her current research interest is the convergence between the extensive urbanization and cities naturalization processes, assuming that the right to the city needs to encompass the right to nature for all those who need its support to build their livelihoods. See more: www.labcam.net