Santiago Vélez Villegas, El Colegio de Mexico
This project analyzes the spatialization of the global tourism production network in northern Quintana Roo. The central argument is that this spatialization occurs through a process of peripheral tourist urbanization, which unfolds across three dimensions: the strategic territorialization of tourist capital, the consolidation of a labor regime organizing social reproduction on an urban-regional scale, and the production of an assetized and fragmented urban space. Employing a mixed-methods approach (combining cartographic and statistical analysis with ethnographic fieldwork and interviews) the research is centered on the primary urban corridor of northern Quintana Roo, encompassing Cancún, Playa del Carmen, and Tulum.
Francisco Montano, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
This project looks at two different forms of producing space and accumulating/distributing wealth in the biocultural region known as the P’urhépecha Plateau in Central Mexico. On the one side, it considers the avocadoindustry as a form of capitalist agriculture enabled by a series of international and local agreements and reproduced through legal and illegal practices where the appropriation and accumulation of land and embodied labor are a prerequisite for the extraction and accumulation of wealth. On the other side, the project looks at community processes of resistance to the agro-industry that pose the question of how to organize labor and redistribute wealth in order to kickstart processes of socio-ecological regeneration.
Claudia Alonso, Universidad de Chile
This study examines the energy transition in the Antofagasta Region as a socio-spatial and political process that goes beyond a purely technological shift aimed at decarbonization. In a territory historically configured as an extractive enclave, the transition materializes through an infrastructural deployment that reorganizes space and modes of territorial intervention. The study explores how this process is territorialized through energy and supporting infrastructures operating across three interrelated dimensions: the ground, through large-scale solar and wind complexes and transmission corridors; the maritory, via the expansion of desalination, pipelines, and port terminals; and the sky, where tensions emerge around regimes of visibility, scientific protection, and control of atmospheric space.
The research analyzes how these configurations produce spatial patterns such as enclaves, corridors, and nodes, and how they are articulated through governance arrangements involving the state, corporations, and financial actors, thereby defining criteria of territorial prioritization and margins of decision-making. Methodologically, it combines critical cartography, documentary analysis, structured interviews, and qualitative fieldwork.
Regions in the Brazilian Cerrado are strongly impacted by expanding raw material production. The EU’s Deforestation-free Regulation (EUDR) addresses imported deforestation, but a major gap remains: by following the FAO forest definition, it excludes about 74% of the Cerrado, leaving this biodiverse savanna largely unprotected. This thesis investigates whether the EUDR could trigger spill-over effects, shifting soybean production from the Amazon to Matopiba, and examines potential impacts on land use, Indigenous communities, and ecosystems. Drawing on extractivism and green neo-colonialism, and based on expert interviews and document analysis, it assesses risks of land conflicts and exclusion for Indigenous peoples and smallholders. The study aims to inform more inclusive environmental policies that also protect non-forest ecosystems.
Agricultural production increasingly serves financial markets, especially through commodity futures, shaping the Matopiba frontier. This region in the Cerrado and Legal Amazon (Tocantins, Maranhão, Bahia, and Piauí) reflects agrarian extractivism, land concentration, and deep inequality. The study analyzes how wealth is generated through land appropriation and extractivist activities, based on observation and stakeholder interactions. It shows that rural areas are embedded in neoliberal financial logics, where actors such as investment funds and real estate capital intensify land-use expansion linked to soy, corn, and cotton production. It concludes that wealth accumulation is decoupled from social well-being, with inequality driven by concentrated land ownership and the financialization of agriculture.
This dissertation analyzes contradictions in MATOPIBA between agribusiness-driven development and persistent inequalities in Brazil’s last agricultural frontier. It examines how land financialization and agribusiness expansion affect local populations, with emphasis on hunger and food insecurity, using interviews, document analysis, and food security theory. Focusing on Campos Lindos, a major soybean producer with very low social well-being, it highlights the gap between high production and poor living conditions. It traces MATOPIBA’s formation from the 1960s and the Green Revolution to its formalization in 2015, and uses concepts such as territory, frontier, extractivism, and land grabbing to show how accumulation drives environmental degradation and social exclusion. The study concludes that MATOPIBA was not designed to address food insecurity and has proven unsustainable for both ecosystems and local populations.