Exploring how Belém do Pará’s historic city center can evolve beyond its extractive past, combining community knowledge, urban experimentation, and speculative design to envision resilient futures.

When we think of the Amazon, the image that often comes to mind is a pristine, lush forest. Yet urbanization in the region is accelerating rapidly, and the majority of its population already lives in cities. Belém do Pará, one of the Amazon’s largest cities with over two million inhabitants, has largely developed along Western urban standards that overlook the ecological rhythms, cultural diversity, and vulnerabilities of the territory. As climate impacts grow more severe, tensions between city infrastructures and the people who rely on them become increasingly evident.

With support from the PKG Public Service Center, this summer we advanced the Amazonian Urban Futures research line in collaboration with the local NGO Laboratório da Cidade. Together we engaged 17 students from underprivileged backgrounds in a workshop that combined urban exploration, historical reflection, and speculative design, valuing participatory processes and creative tools to foster agency, and recognizing that the people who live in cities are essential makers of their own futures.

Reduto Neighborhood

The workshop took place in the Reduto neighborhood, a 19th-century industrial district that declined in the early 20th century after the collapse of Brazil’s rubber boom. Once a thriving, affluent area and among the first in the Americas to have public electricity, Reduto today bears the marks of its layered history, a metropolitan Amazonian neighborhood shaped by the remnants of late industrialization at the periphery of capitalism.

Reduto is a true palimpsest. Late Art Deco façades, English cast-iron columns, brick neoclassical warehouses, and decorated iron gutters coexist with electric cars, delivery bikes, tangled overhead cables, and colorful graffiti murals. In distinctive Amazonian fashion, tropical trees sprout from crumbling walls while vultures circle above the streets, drawn by fish leftovers in the street markets. The neighborhood’s decaying beauty, a mix of opulent 19th-century architecture and the improvisational energy of a dense Latin American downtown, is visible at every turn.

Urban Drift

We wandered these streets together, learning to read the layers of Reduto’s history, guided by local historian Michel Pinho. It revealed how the city’s past structures present-day logics and, through the memory of its spaces, inspires young people to reimagine futures, using memory itself as a starting point for thinking about the city.

Students photographed façades, recorded ambient sounds, and collected stories, capturing the textures, rhythms, and contradictions of the urban fabric. For many, it was their first time in Reduto. They were encouraged to follow their curiosity, observe closely, and focus on subjects that resonated with them, uncovering the invisible layers of the city and witnessing how past and present coexist in this evolving landscape.

Making Worlds

Back in the classroom, the urban exploration unfolded into conversations about climate. Students reflected on how climate change is already affecting their daily lives and how its impacts will continue to leave vulnerable populations increasingly exposed. These discussions opened space to connect the neighborhood’s history with broader patterns of transformation, where colonization, the rubber boom, industrial decline, and global capitalism have all inscribed social injustices onto the built environment. Climate crises will become yet another force in this cycle, reshaping cities and deepening existing inequalities unless we act to alter the trajectory.

Together, we also examined a wide range of technologies, from speculative proposals to those already in use, spanning from high-tech engineering solutions to ancestral social practices. We debated their potential applications in an Amazonian city like Belém, encouraging students to engage with them critically while also imagining new possibilities beyond those we, as instructors, had introduced. From these conversations, we divided the students into groups, and each group began to draft concepts that would guide their own visions for the neighborhood’s future.

Science fiction became a tool for imagining radical possibilities, challenging students to see beyond the limits of the present and envision futures. The photos they had taken during the walkabout were printed and combined with cutouts and collected materials to create layered collages. As they immersed themselves in this unfamiliar process, the aesthetics of their imagined worlds began to take shape. These analog images were then animated digitally using AI tools and overlaid with the sounds they had recorded.

Plants that consume urban waste, waterways re-emerging from beneath concrete streets, trees as a new form of global currency, and cities that resist cultural homogenization are some of the many themes brought to the table. Through sound, image, protest, and poetry (a student even composed a rap!) they articulated visions that confronted entrenched histories, exercising agency to shape not only their own ideas but also the cultural imagination of an entire neighborhood. Rather than producing fixed solutions, the workshop created a space for experimentation, dialogue, and creative action, a process through which young people can influence how communities imagine their urban futures and, in doing so, actively shape the present.

This workshop was made possible by the PKG Fellowship for Social Impact and by the close collaboration with our local partners at Lab da Cidade. I am grateful to my co-mentors Kelly Vale and Augusto Junior for their partnership, and to Michel Pinho, who guided us on the historical walkabout.

Most of all, thank you to the students for their creativity and courage in transforming unfamiliar processes into creative visions. This is only the beginning. Each step opens new paths for collaboration between MIT and the urban Amazon, where imagination and democratic practice can shape the futures we most want to live in.