S
cholars and practitioners of urban planning need to rethink the field’s futures at this important historical juncture: some might call it a moment of truth when there is little left to hide. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed many cracks, contradictions, and inequalities that have always existed but are now more visible. This also includes the global vaccine apartheid that is ongoing as I write these words. Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
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Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining.
- I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
- Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed.
- Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real.
- They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
Moreover, this is a time when the violence through which U.S. imperialism has exercised power worldwide is increasingly exposed. Protests in the summer of 2020, which spread all over the United States like fire through a long-dried haystack, showed Americans and the whole world that racialized violence and police brutality are real. They also revealed that such brutality is spatially facilitated in American apartheid—a condition that planning has been far from innocent in creating and maintaining. I think this reckoning is particularly important in the United States, the belly of the beast, where there might have been more of an illusion about planning innocence.
What’s a Rich Text element?
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hat happens when a postcolonial left, unified by its commitment to contesting the global neoliberal order, finds itself divided on the tactics and strategic horizons that might remake their society anew? Thea Riofrancos’ Resource Radicals is a book that seeks to answer this question through a focus on longstanding struggles over extractivism in Ecuador. Examining leftist contestations between the Correa government and anti-extractivist movements around large-scale mining and extractivism, Resource Radicals seeks to understand how competing claims to economic development and territorial integrity recast the stakes of struggles over democracy, popular sovereignty, and climate justice.
Rafael Correa came to power at the height of the Pink Tide: a wave during the late 2000s in which left-wing governments came to power in Latin America, marking a rupture in the neoliberal consensus. His government had been brought to power by social movements unified — albeit provisionally — by their critique of a neoliberal order that they held responsible for bringing about poverty, the decimation of organized labor, environmental devastation, economic deregulation, and the influence of foreign capital, among other social ills. Shortly after Correa came to power, however, the new government reneged on proposals to leave oil in the ground and began to explore and accelerate mining projects. The provisional consensus that had been bound together through critiques of free market reform and US imperialism quickly fractured over conflicts around the export-dependent model of resource nationalism, dividing “resource radicals” into resource nationalists in power and anti-extractivists in resistance. Correa’s government — the “left in power” — had used the resource boom to dramatically raise spending on social programs. In the process, his government pushed to increase drilling and create a large-scale mineral mining sector that would utilize the export-dependent model to provide a fiscal basis for reducing poverty and addressing the social needs of the poor. But Indigenous and environmental movements — the “left in resistance” — disagreed with this extractivist model of economic development, demanding not only a radical resource nationalism controlled by the people, but the cessation of extraction and mining altogether. For these movements, despite its distributive outcomes, extractivism presented a threat to their land, water, and territorial rights. Exploring these intra-left conflicts, Riofrancos notes, Resource Radicals “is an account of a left divided” – a deep and careful dive into the urgent dilemmas that arise when the rights of Indigenous sovereignties come into conflict with economic mobility for the majority.
Resource Radical's empirical richness and theoretical depth, as Geoff Mann notes, are “only possible” as a result of “long, detailed, and engaged” research. Riofrancos has spent nearly two decades working in Latin American solidarity movements, having first moved to Ecuador in 2008 to learn about Correa’s government and the social movements that brought it to power. Resource Radicals is therefore the product of many years of collaboration and respectful research in deep solidarity with both popular movements across various fronts of struggle, as well as with left-wing Latin American governments. Riofrancos negotiates the tensions between such heterogeneous contexts with grace and perspicacity, giving new life to how we might confront the challenges of building popular coalitions that can adequately navigate the fraught relations between democracy, Indigenous rights, economic justice, and ecological futures.
The five discussions below are each written by deeply community-engaged anti-extractivist scholars in their own right, who advance important normative, theoretical, and political questions raised by the book, and in the case of Klinger, Porter, and Davis Matthews, use the opportunity to reflect on how Resource Radical’s insights help them approach their own research on extractivism in new light. The result is a lively and generative forum conversation that reveals how commitments to political strategy and grounded struggle are not only inseparable from, but actually critically constitute theories that can break new paths for articulating “a future away from endless socio-ecological compromises” (Klinger) and that can balance “being strategic and being visionary” in working “towards a more just world together” (Davis Matthews).
