Extractivism, territories and conflicts beyond the rural-urban dichotomy: the Mega Project

Abstract

A substantial part of the studies on extractivism focus their attention on rural spaces, which consider the primary sector individually. On the other hand, in the most recent formulations of urban extractivism, cities emerge without other articulations with rural extractivism, while it would be, strictly speaking, a real estate extractivism insofar as land is presented as the central element of dispute. Faced with this state of the question, we propose to investigate the territorialization of extractive processes, focusing on the Mega company as an instrumental case study. Our reading key focuses on the fact that while in the territorialization of extractivism the rural-urban binomial is diluted in a territory-network vertically integrated to production chains controlled by transnational capital, on the other hand, the social resistances that are raised against it are crossed by the rural-urban cleavage.