The Amazon’s road to growth? Infrastructural imaginaries of Brazil’s BR-319 Highway

Abstract

In the Amazon, roads are closely intertwined with various social livelihood activities but also cause irreversible environmental destruction. As such, roads engender different infrastructural imaginaries of how economic growth should be pursued, signified and contested in rainforest landscapes. This paper focuses on infrastructural imaginaries of Brazil’s BR-319 Highway, an unfinished road that plunges through some of the best-preserved sections of the Amazon rainforest. Based on a multisited ethnography of the road, it explores the various meanings and functions of ‘growth infrastructures’ in globally vital ecosystems facing destruction. We identify three distinct infrastructural imaginaries: (1) the road as a path to economic development and freedom; (2) the road as unleashing a surge of destruction; and (3) the road as co-existing with sustainability aims. Our analysis reveals how these imaginaries reflect diverse and competing (counter-)articulations of ‘growth’, distinctively shaping human-nature interactions, infrastructural politics and economic futures in the world’s largest rainforest.