Alternativas adaptativas: a autogestão de inundações em ontologias amazônicas

Abstract

The spatial concentration of ecological and environmental risks and vulnerabilities constitutes another facet of urban dispossession imposed on the peripheries of capitalist production. Its destructive and degrading operation becomes plainly evident during climatic events, notably the increasingly intense, frequent, and unpredictable urban floods affecting Brazilian cities. Framing an assertive delineation of contemporary socioecological problems, the research problematizes the prioritization of capital accumulation and circulation within techno-scientific solution agendas. Critically, it questions nascent investments in adaptive strategies that might be incorporated into Brazil’s predominant modes of housing and urban management, reading such investments as reflections of a programmatic disarticulation of alternatives to capitalist spatial production. By situating the relevance of epistemologies of difference for political-philosophical horizons in urban-environmental planning and governance, the study foregrounds riverine lifeways in Amazonian floodplains. These seasonally inundated ecosystems—long shaped by diverse and transnational societies—are treated as significantly and conveniently marginalized by the very destructive logics that sustain capitalist reproduction. The research therefore asked whether flood self-management in Amazonian várzeas could contribute to the adaptation of urban settlements to hydro-geoclimatic events. To this end, an exploratory study was conducted on self-management measures within Amazonian ontologies, compiled from anthropological and archaeological literature via a scoping review and online literature mapping using search engines, with priority given to peer-reviewed articles, essays, and book chapters in Portuguese, English, and Spanish. Five cases were delimited according to the representative character of recorded strategies relative to the overall panorama of measures obtained; these were subsequently mapped, described, and analyzed through a methodological bricolage combining relational approaches and scalar analysis. The modeling thereby produced new interpretive registers. Modeling resulted in: a cartography of flood self-management across the Amazon Basin—covering territories in Brazil, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia—and made publicly available via an online platform; adaptive readings of the justified hydro-social relations; ontological entanglements embedded within local practices and potential correlations across distinct spatialities; and the identification of knowledge gaps concerning structural and non-structural measures employed in Amazonian wetlands. The work corroborates the ecological-environmental and politico-economic character of climate challenges, emphasizing the historical-geographical condition of Amazonian ontologies as valuable for new materialities, representations, and imaginaries. Broadly, these autonomous and co-produced languages, motivated by flood-prone spatialities, contribute meaningfully to rethinking urban-environmental inequalities in Brazil and beyond.