An entire new concept of the urban

Just as architects read the city as a historical palimpsest produced by social forces that become coded into material form – layers upon layers of ruins constituting a living fabric of social relations – Amazonia must be interpreted through the syntax of urban design, or else the concept of the urban must be crafted anew to incorporate the constructed nature presented by the forest. The relation between figure and ground is subverted, insofar as that which was defined as the surroundings – the antithesis to, or outside space of, the civic – are incorporated as a constituent part of an "expanded polis," within which humans and nonhumans cohabit in a common political space. In this process an entire new concept of the urban is made visible, one whose contours encompass a multi-species polity that we may initially find difficult to recognize because for too long our perspective has been confined to the epistemic enclosures of the Western city.

Paulo Tavares, 'The Political Nature of the Forest: A Botanic Archeology of Genocide' in The Word For World Is Still Forest (K. Verlag, 2016) p. 151