The Impact Of The Iirsa Road Infrastructure Programme On Amazonia

The first book on The Initiative for Regional Infrastructure Integration in South America (IIRSA) and its potential implications for South America

This book analyses the potential socio-economic and environmental impacts of the Initiative for Regional Infrastructure Integration in South America (IIRSA), a continent-wide programme. IIRSA aims at facilitating intra-regional trade and at improving trade and transport links with world markets. This is the first book on IIRSA and its potential implications for South America and more specifically for Amazonia. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the infrastructure programme and deals particularly with methods to assess the probable effects of road construction in environmentally fragile territories. To deepen our understanding of the potential impacts of roads in these areas, the book combines insights from economic and environmental sciences and gives a critical review of traditional assessments and strategic environmental assessments (SEAs). A comprehensive approach of assessing impacts is presented in three case studies of SEAs: the Corredor Norte in Bolivia, the road between Manaus and Porto Velho in Brazil, and the proposed road to link Suriname with Brazil.

This book analyses the potential socio-economic and environmental impacts of the Initiative for Regional Infrastructure Integration in South America (IIRSA), a continent-wide programme. IIRSA aims at facilitating intra-regional trade and at improving trade and transport links with world markets. This is the first book on IIRSA and its potential implications for South America and more specifically for Amazonia. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the infrastructure programme and deals particularly with methods to assess the probable effects of road construction in environmentally fragile territories. To deepen our understanding of the potential impacts of roads in these areas, the book combines insights from economic and environmental sciences and gives a critical review of traditional assessments and strategic environmental assessments (SEAs). A comprehensive approach of assessing impacts is presented in three case studies of SEAs: the Corredor Norte in Bolivia, the road between Manaus and Porto Velho in Brazil, and the proposed road to link Suriname with Brazil.

Through more than five hundred years of the history of Peru's Interoceanic Highway, this book shows how the purposes, portrayals, and importance of roads change between historical periods, and thus why roads bring many more impacts and costs than their advocates and critics generally anticipate.

During the last decade, the South American continent has seen a strong push for transnational integration, initiated by the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who (with the endorsement of eleven other nations) spearheaded the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), a comprehensive energy, transport, and communications network. The most aggressive transcontinental integration project ever planned for South America, the initiative systematically deploys ten east-west infrastructural corridors, enhancing economic development but raising important questions about the polarizing effect of pitting regional needs against the colossal processes of resource extraction. Providing much-needed historical contextualization to IIRSA's agenda, Beyond the City ties together a series of spatial models and offers a survey of regional strategies in five case studies of often overlooked sites built outside the traditional South American urban constructs. Implementing the term "resource extraction urbanism," the architect and urbanist Felipe Correa takes us from Brazil's nineteenth-century regional capital city of Belo Horizonte to the experimental, circular, "temporary" city of Vila Piloto in Três Lagoas. In Chile, he surveys the mining town of María Elena. In Venezuela, he explores petrochemical encampments at Judibana and El Tablazo, as well as new industrial frontiers at Ciudad Guayana. The result is both a cautionary tale, bringing to light a history of societies that were "inscribed" and administered, and a perceptive examination of the agency of architecture and urban planning in shaping South American lives.

This book compares and contrasts the contemporary development experience of neighbouring, geographically similar countries with an analogous history of exploitation but by three different European colonisers. Studying the so-called ‘Three Guianas’ (Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana) offers a unique opportunity to look for similarities and differences in their contemporary patterns of development, particularly as they grapple with new and complex shifts in the regional, hemispheric and global context. Shaped decisively by their respective historical experiences, Guyana, in tandem with the laissez-faire approach of Britain toward its Caribbean colonies, was decolonised relatively early, in 1966, and has maintained a significant degree of distance from London. The hold of The Hague over Suriname, however, endured well after independence in 1975. French Guiana, by contrast, was decolonised much sooner than both of its neighbours, in 1946, but this was through full integration, thus cementing its place within the political economy and administrative structures of France itself. Traditionally isolated from the Caribbean, the wider Latin American continent and from each other, today, a range of similar issues – such as migration, resource extraction, infrastructure development and energy security – are coming to bear on their societies and provoking deep and complex changes.