In the second half of the twentieth century, national governments championed road construction into the Amazon as the path to economic development, a process that continues to define the region today. No account of urban Amazonia is complete without an understanding of the roads that shaped its urban condition.

Many policies set out to build roads into the Amazon, but it was the bulldozer that gave the penetration road model its speed and scale, turning intention into thousands of miles of cleared forest and bringing about the greatest and most unprecedented change in the region’s history.

The research traces how large-scale mobility infrastructure, both rivers and roads, was deployed to open the Amazon to development. In Brazil, the Amazon River Basin was infrastructuralized for cargo shipping, a transformation that shaped the urbanization of its edges as much as any highway.

In 1958, Kubitschek’s Belém-Brasília highway pioneered roadside urbanism in the heart of the Amazon, seeding settlements along its length as it pushed into the forest. Today, that highway has morphed into a regional ring road that serves as the territory’s primary organizing structure.

Another key example is Nueva Loja. Formerly known as Lago Agrio, emerged not from a town plan but from the road network the Ecuadorian government built to serve Texaco’s oil operations, a city that grew along infrastructure designed for extraction rather than settlement. The research examines what happens once oil extraction ends while urbanization remains.

The research also looks at San Julian’s nucleo settlement pattern in the Tierras Bajas of Bolivia, where agricultural parcels and forest lattice radiate outward from a central clearing with a clarity rarely seen in Amazonian colonization. It stands as the rare case where a comprehensive urban vision, not just a road, shaped the territory.

Seen in relation to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, San Julian’s nucleo pattern registers as a distinct autonomous urban project within a rapidly expanding metropolitan region. The drawing reveals how a settlement conceived as an agrarian outpost now sits within the orbit of one of Bolivia’s fastest growing cities.

Aerial photographs of San Julian’s nucleo reveal the settlement pattern at two moments in time, from the early clearing of forest parcels radiating outward from a communal center to a fully cultivated landscape where industrial agriculture now presses against the original plan. The nucleo’s geometry endures even as the agrarian economy it was designed to support has been overtaken by large-scale monocrop production.

The research culminates in a design proposal for upgrading San Julian’s nucleo central, introducing denser civic and residential structures that build on the original plan’s spatial logic. Situated at the convergence of road and field, the project demonstrates how the nucleo framework can accommodate new population densities and civic aspirations without abandoning the agrarian order that defines it.

The outcome of this research will be published in Felipe Correa’s forthcoming book, “Building Roads to Take the Land,” examining the urbanization of the Amazon rainforest in the second half of the twentieth century.