AMAZON MACHINATIO: IQUITOS, AN EMBLEM OF EXTRACTIVE URBANISMS IN THE PERUVIAN AMAZONIA

Abstract

 This article aims to shed light on one of the most important aspects in the historic conformation of the city: the extractive processes that give form to an urbanism with a specific territorial logic. These processes are commonly understood as dissociated from cities, since they are carried out beyond their administrative limits, but have in many cases driven their constitution and their forms of growth based on the extraction of resources. These extractive processes, in turn, operate in dependency on a series of artifacts or specific buildings that we shall call extractive types. The city of Iquitos, located in the Peruvian Amazonia’s northeast, is selected as study case, given that its urban development has gone through two extractive phases that have driven its development, and whose infrastruct ures remain as evidence within its urban fabric.