Online keynote lecture: Reproaching extended urbanization in the Brazilian Amazonia

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Abstract
Drawing on Monte-Mór's decades of fieldwork across the Brazilian Amazon and Atlantic Forest, this talk traces the theoretical evolution from extended urbanization to what he terms extended naturalization, the centripetal counter-force through which dense ecological patches push back against the urban-industrial tissue. Moving through Lefebvre's tripartite periodization of agrarian, industrial, and urban eras, Monte-Mór argues that we are now witnessing the emergence of an urban-natural tissue poised to supersede, without eliminating, the urban-industrial one. The talk grounds this transition in concrete experimental utopias (the MST, indigenous land reclamations, quilombola and ribeirinho political struggles, solidarity economies) understood through Bloch's "not-yet-conscious" and Lefebvre's "possible impossible." At stake is a cosmopolitical emancipation project in which the oikos is simultaneously politicized and naturalized, opening space for other economies and other cosmologies beyond capitalist accumulation. The talk closes by invoking May 1968' injunction (soyons réalistes, demandons l'impossible) as a horizon for revolutionary praxis adequate to our planetary societal crisis.

Roberto Monte-Mór
Roberto Monte-Mor graduated in Architecture (1970) and Urban Planning (1971) from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning (1980) from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and Ph.D. in Urban Planning (2004) from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is currently a Full Professor at the Center for Development and Regional Planning (Cedeplar) of the Faculty of Economic Sciences (Face) and at the Graduate Center for Architecture and Urbanism (NPGAU) of the School of Architecture, both at UFMG. He teaches and conducts research in the areas of economics and urbanism, with an emphasis on Urbanization and Urban and Regional Planning Theories, working mainly on the following topics: urban and regional planning, metropolitan planning, regional and urban economics, popular and solidarity economics, urbanization (extensive and intensive), spatial organization and the environment, spatial production among traditional populations, urbanization, and development alternatives in the Amazon.