This article was first published on 6 August 2025 by LAB partner Amazônia Latitude and translated for LAB by Stanton Geyer. You can read the original, in Portuguese, here.

Ahead of COP30, central Belém was transformed through parks and green corridors, while poorer neighbourhoods continued to lose rivers and waterways beneath concrete channels.

LAB adds: written before COP30, the issues raised are still valid, though forgotten by the world’s media, and pose questions for cities throughout the world chosen (some would say cursed) to host major international events.

As Belém prepares to host COP30, the city is caught between promises of an environmentally ‘resilient’ future and the legacy of an exclusionary form of urbanisation. The imprint of earlier urban reforms is still visible, dating back to the rubber boom, when Belém became a city of global importance in the Amazon.

Further down towards the baixadas, however, the same interventions seen since the 1970s continue. Rivers and streams are channelised into concrete channels, while communities along their banks are forcibly displaced. A city that once aspired to be the ‘Paris of America’ is now hosting global debates on climate policy. But who is this new Belém really for?

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Belém experienced a surge in wealth during the rubber boom. The city centre became the main beneficiary of this period, with the Theatro da Paz, landscaped public squares, European-style buildings, wide avenues, and an electric lighting network that became one of the most important tools of urban transformation in the Amazon. These reforms primarily served the rubber elites, who lived in the centre, where the latex economy was concentrated.

A city of light and shadow

Electric lighting was one of the great urban innovations of the period. From the outset, however, it was designed to serve the elite. Limited access in other parts of the city was justified by their marshy conditions, or what were then called terrenos baixos, or ‘low-lying lands’. In the city centre, there was light. Elsewhere, in the baixadas, where many of Belém’s poorest residents lived, there was darkness. It was in this contrast that the city’s defining divide took shape: the Belém of the baixadas and the Belém of the Belle Époque.

In Chão dos Lobos, Dalcídio Jurandir portrays an urban space on the outskirts of Belém known as ‘Não-Se-Assuste’. More than just a name, it reflects the urban exclusion that shaped and continues to shape the Amazonian capital. As in the novel, these spaces were marked by a lack of sanitation, precarious housing, and the marginalisation of washerwomen, working children, migrants, and others who made up the city’s invisible social fabric. This landscape was no accident. It was the result of public policies that consistently prioritised the Belém of the Belle Époque, while the Belém of the baixadas remained neglected.

Even today, the baixadas show the same patterns of exclusion that once defined the tenements and alleyways of Belém’s poorer outskirts. The light of urban innovation remains distant from the margins, while inequality continues to haunt those living in ‘darkness’. Has ‘Não-Se-Assuste’ really disappeared from Belém, host city of COP30?

A century on, history threatens to repeat itself. With COP30 approaching, urban regeneration projects are being presented as ways to reconnect the city with nature. In the centre, the Doca and Tamandaré canals are set to become linear parks, with viewpoints, environmental corridors, restored rivers, and ‘floating gardens’. In the igarapés of the baixadas, however, the approach remains unchanged: large-scale drainage works, channelisation, and the conversion of urban rivers into open sewers. This further distances residents from these waterways and severs the relationship between the city and nature in the baixadas, peripheries, and favelas. It directly contradicts the promotion of Belém as a ‘resilient city’.

The promise of an environmentally ‘resilient’ city for COP30 is not borne out in practice. Rather, it recalls the Brazilian expression para inglês ver – something done for appearances. While official discourse emphasises sustainability and environmental responsibility, the reality reveals deep contradictions. Urban infrastructure projects continue to move ahead without proper consideration of their socio-environmental impacts, especially for marginalised communities that have long faced exclusion and vulnerability.

One clear example came in the same year Belém was chosen to host COP30, with the announcement of a new road alongside the Abacatal Quilombola territory in Ananindeua. Named ‘Avenida Liberdade’ by the state government, the road is intended to connect Avenida Perimetral in Belém to the metropolitan ring road, cutting through kilometres of forest in the process. Yet its environmental and social impacts have been largely absent from public debate. The Abacatal Quilombola community has not been meaningfully consulted, and the project continues to advance without serious scrutiny. In doing so, it reinforces a model of development that privileges economic interests over environmental protection and the rights of traditional communities.

Abacatal reflects what some researchers describe as a ‘sacrifice zone’: a place where certain communities are sacrificed in the name of development. Kilometres of forest are cleared, while the full impact on the community’s way of life remains unknown, all for the construction of a new road. The project is justified as necessary for metropolitan expansion, yet it ignores the Quilombola territory and its relationship with the surrounding environment.

Similarly, urban igarapés are channelised and turned into open sewers, leading to the loss of water resources and the death of urban rivers. Framed as progress, these interventions prioritise expanding road infrastructure for increased car circulation over spaces for community use, disregarding the socio-environmental value of these waterways.

Preparations for COP30 lay this reality bare. The idea of a ‘resilient’ city becomes a selective concept, applied strategically to attract capital and serve economic interests, without delivering meaningful, equitable structural improvements for those outside the central urban core.

This socio-spatial divide is no accident. Investment in cities is rarely neutral. In Belém, the centre has long been associated with elites and the circulation of wealth, making it more attractive for urban regeneration. Revitalisation projects, financed by public and private capital, prioritise this area, boost the real estate sector, and respond to the demands of a city increasingly oriented towards the global market. Meanwhile, the baixadas and traditional territories remain marginalised, receiving mostly utilitarian interventions focused on flood control and minimal sanitation, without regard for residents’ relationships with the urban igarapés.

Urban interventions and rising land values are closely tied to real estate speculation: these spaces must become profitable in order to justify their transformation. In the context of COP30, a global mega-event, this pressure intensifies. Political and business elites involved in climate discussions must be able to see Belém as a city with tourism and economic potential, and as part of an Amazonian territory of immense environmental and strategic value.

Rivers beneath concrete

During the 1970s, following the launch of the Programa de Integração Nacional (PIN – National Integration Programme), Belém’s urban canals underwent one of the largest urban transformations in Latin America, with direct impacts on sanitation, public health, and quality of life. Introduced during the military dictatorship, the PIN was part of a broader development project aimed at integrating the Amazon into the rest of Brazil. The slogan was ‘integrate so as not to surrender’, but in practice this often masked territorial occupation and unchecked economic exploitation. The result was severe environmental damage to the Amazonian ecosystem and forced displacement for forest peoples, who lost traditional territories.

In Belém, the PIN’s legacy was not only the city’s most extensive programme of sanitation, public health, and urban infrastructure. It also left unprecedented environmental degradation in the rivers of the metropolitan region. The project radically altered the landscape, undermined the population’s historical relationship with the igarapés, and accelerated the channelisation and concreting of these waterways. While some structural conditions improved, the environmental losses were irreversible.

The Doca, once occupied by lower-income communities, was absorbed into the real estate market and the city centre, displacing its original residents as land and service prices rose. This reflects what geographer David Harvey describes as ‘creative destruction’: spaces once considered marginal undergo ‘renewal’, but in practice vulnerable populations are displaced and the urban landscape is reshaped around economic interests. Today, this same transformed area is the focus of the ‘Nova Doca’ Linear Park project, promoted by the state of Pará as a symbol of modernisation and sustainability. Yet this ‘regeneration’ does not stem from a genuine commitment to socio-environmental justice. It represents a new cycle of capital accumulation. Spaces once used for large-scale drainage infrastructure and working-class housing are now recast as high-value urban territory.

Within this new sustainability framework, the old channelised Doca canal is no longer desirable. The previous model of modernisation is dismantled to make way for the Linear Park, serving real estate demands and the aesthetic revaluation of the city ahead of COP30.

The Tucunduba River also reflects the selective nature of urban policy. For residents of the baixadas along the Tucunduba, the river has always been more than a water resource. It is a place of memory, identity, and belonging – part of Amazonian ways of life deeply connected to nature. Over time, however, successive channelisation works have eroded this relationship, turning the river into a concrete channel with no meaningful engagement with local communities. Meanwhile, the city centre continues to attract new investment, responding to the aesthetic and real estate demands of a global event.

This reality is echoed in ‘Rio Tucunduba’, a song by Os Tamuatás do Tucunduba, a carimbó group from the outskirts of Belém. The lyrics mourn the loss of the river as both a water source and a means of sustenance, denouncing a model of urbanisation that kills the city’s rivers:

The Tucunduba River, before it was settled,

held millions of fish; now it is destroyed.

They killed the river for the sake of killing,

they polluted the river for the sake of pollution.

In the Tucunduba River, you can’t even catch tamuatá.

Tamuatá, the ditch fish,

delicious in tucupi.

There is only one fish like it:

the acarí.

Tamuatá, a ditch fish,

a survivor of the periphery,

a wanderer through many channels.

My life is a constant struggle.

I feed on sludge and mud

from this waste I make my home.

I adapt to urban life,

delicious in tucupi.

In this world where little love remains,

I live with chaos, and death is routine.

And today I try to dream

in a world that is coming to an end.

(Os Tamuatás do Tucunduba, 2021)

Resilience for whom?

Public policy around COP30 seeks to project an image of resilience to tourists, institutions, and political actors involved in the event. Yet the baixadas, which for years have called for interventions that place rivers at the centre of urban life, continue to be overlooked, despite limited investment and infrastructure works in the periphery.

Social movements such as Tucunduba/Pró Lago Verde, Espaço GeoHostel, Boi Marronzinho, Chalé da Paz, and Cineclube TF carry out cultural and sustainability initiatives that reimagine urban space and strengthen pluriethnic and community identities. They also advocate for proper urbanisation and sanitation, proposing alternatives that combine infrastructure with environmental preservation. But the reforms carried out by public authorities have not met the expectations of residents or these movements.

As Zeca TF, a resident of Terra Firme and co-founder of Chalé da Paz, writes, the baixadas need spaces that bring environment and community together in an inclusive way, allowing residents to interact meaningfully with the natural environment.

By contrast, the real estate sector and large-scale capital have already benefited from the event. Although COP30’s stated purpose is to address global climate change, it also serves as a platform for political and economic elites to pursue new forms of profit. What should be centred on environmental solutions has instead been shaped by financial interests, turning the event into an opportunity to create public and private policies oriented towards profit, often at the expense of local communities and the environment. Ailton Krenak has warned of this commodifying logic, arguing that COP30 may help map previously undocumented natural resources in the region, paving the way for their economic exploitation.

This process is not confined to forest territories. It also extends into urban space, where public policy is increasingly directed towards the interests of an economic elite. Meanwhile, the primary stewards of the forest – Indigenous Peoples, Quilombola communities, traditional extractivists, and riverine populations – remain marginalised in the debate. Investors and privileged sectors of the Amazonian metropolis are already capturing the financial returns. While COP30 promises progress on the climate agenda, its decisions and negotiations are being shaped by interests that have little to do with those who sustain this ecosystem.

COP30 is not a celebratory event simply because Belém is hosting it. Yet it is crucial that these discussions take place within one of the world’s most vital ecosystems. The outcomes debated there will help determine whether the world continues along a destructive path, or moves towards alternative futures, narratives, and cosmovisions. These decisions should be guided by the ways of life of those who truly care for and continue to sustain life on this planet.

COP30 once again places Belém in the international spotlight, but it also lays bare the contradiction between the city being projected and the one that actually exists. The event’s legacy could be a model of genuinely inclusive urbanisation, one that values the relationships between communities and urban space. So far, however, it appears to be following the same logic established during the Belle Époque. As Belém prepares to welcome world leaders, the rivers of the baixadas continue to disappear beneath concrete. The question is whether the city is willing to confront the inequalities that have shaped it for more than a century.

Original layout and design by Alice Palmeira
Original editing and revision by Juliana Carvalho