Improbable Cities, Compulsory Regions: Cycles of Extraction in the Atacama Desert and the making of the Big North

Abstract

Why have cities been constantly built on one of the driest deserts on Earth? Over five centuries, the Atacama Desert of northern Chile was reorganized around the extraction of a series of minerals. Extending Craig Morris's concept of compulsory urbanism beyond the Inca, this dissertation develops compulsory regionality: the political work of producing enough spatial coherence for mineral extraction to endure by assembling ecological zones, infrastructures, and populations that the desert has kept apart. Because of the spatial dispersion of the resources sustaining the productive chain, including the ore, water, fuel, and labor, successive regimes have enlarged the unit of production from the site to the region, building cities to hold that region together. Four such regimes organize the study. Inca administration compelled settlement within an imperial system of tribute and redistribution; Spanish colonial institutions sought to fix mobile populations in pueblos de indios around silver; Chilean elites and foreign capital expanded nitrate extraction by forcibly urbanizing the pampa; and vertically integrated U.S. corporations bound mines, power plants, water systems, and company towns into a single commodity region. Each regime is associated with a cardinal orientation that reflects the desert’s shifting relationship to the centers it served and their respective systems of accumulation: the Big South, the Big West, the Big North, and the Big East. These formations are reconstructed from archives in Chile, Bolivia, and Peru, together with historical cartography, legal analysis, interviews, and multi-source mapping. Regional integration produced a marked spatial hierarchy: access to water, energy, infrastructure, and urban investment followed the position settlements occupied within productive systems, raising a persistent question of the right to the region. Tocopilla generated electricity that animated Chuquicamata for twenty-eight years before its own inhabitants had electric light; the waters of the Loa were appropriated for industrial mining while the region’s urban populations drank water carried from the highlands with arsenic concentrations nearly eighty times current recommended limits. Compulsion was only half the story. The same territorial systems assembled for extraction became grounds for social and political agencies. Mobile communities persisted across attempts to settle them; pampinos converted industrial geographies into political ones through the mancomunales; and a shared regional identity named the Norte Grande before the state formalized it from above. Closing before the 1974 regionalization reforms of the military dictatorship, this dissertation shows that administrative regionalization inherited and formalized a geography produced through centuries of mobility and extraction. Improbable cities were the visible form of this compulsory regionality: settlements repeatedly produced where extraction required them, within inhabited and profoundly unequal territories that outlasted the cycles that made them.