From Territories of Extraction to Operational Landscapes in an Urban Era. The Urban Fix for Latin American Ruralities in Times of COVID-19

SARA BOCCOLINI

Londres

Congreso; Shifting Landscapes; 2022

London School of Economics and Political Science

There is a particularly intense and early spread pattern of Covid-19 detected in Latin American regions where extractive activities of raw materials for consumption in global markets predominate —even when compared to nearby metropolitan regions—. I constructed an explanatory hypothesis for this phenomenon, proposing to consider them as fundamental operating landscapes in global urbanization processes, and analyzing them in function of mobility strategies. This strategy made it possible to identify specific factors that determine the high rates of contagion and circulation of the virus. To ensure the reliability and availability of data and deepen the analysis and discussion of results, I selected the agro-productive region of Córdoba (Argentina) as case study; I processed socioeconomic and productive statistics, and reconstructed the spread of Covid-19 with data disaggregated by locality between March 2020 / January 2021. Contrasting these data made me affirm that the daily mobility patterns of its inhabitants are result of an unresolved dichotomy between their historical development as rural communities and their new role as landscapes articulated in global networks with high mobility of goods and people. This scenario tends to amplify local risk factors, even when compared to metropolitan regions considered to be at higher health risk. In this way, approaching these territories as an operational landscape could explain the spreading pattern of the virus and infer its development trends in the medium term, becoming a strategic contribution for health containment and remediation interventions and regional development policies.