Settler urbanism, emotional geographies, and Indigenous planning in Ecuadorian Amazonia

Abstract

Affects and emotions serve as tools of governance in settler urbanism, facilitating colonial dispossession and control of Indigenous land. Drawing on modernist logics, housing projects in indigenous territory seek to instill fixity and urban orders on mobile Indigenous populations through the management of fear and uncertainty. Here we examine the production of emotions associated with the development of the Pañacocha Millennium Community, a public housing project in the Petroamazonas oilfields of what was once Indigenous Kichwa territory in Ecuadorian Amazonia. We draw on research in Indigenous planning, the geographies of emotion, and critical urban studies to demonstrate the emotional impacts of the imposition of colonial governmental logics of housing production in Indigenous lands. At the same time, we examine the limitations of settler urbanist governance through emotion by documenting the embodied Indigenous relations with land, housing, and mobility captured in the concept territorio cuerpo-tierra, which has led to various forms of resistance and avoidance to the housing project. The case of the Pañacocha Millennium Community illuminates the role of emotion in urban planning and settler urbanism, in particular, and contributes to emerging work in Indigenous and decolonial planning.