During the course of July 2025, with support from the Inter-American Development Bank’s Cities Lab as well as the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism and Department of Urban Studies and Planning, graduate students from MIT’s Department of Architecture and Department of Urban Studies and Planning joined with students from the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) and the University of São Paulo (USP) to study and envision a more resilient and thriving city in Manaus, Brazil, focusing on sustainable urban development through improved housing and sanitation. The following is a blog series from the combined group of students from MIT, UFAM, and USP.
Paradigms – Marine Gapihan (MIT – MCP’26)
Photo credit: Marine Gapihan
In Manaus, I observed many competing urban, ecological, and cultural paradigms.
Historically home to numerous Indigenous groups, including the Manaós, the city of Manaus first “developed” through the colonization of its land and people and the exploitation of its resources during the rubber economy.; but its prosperity was short-lived, unraveling soon after the colonizers and migrants abandoned the area. Previously called the “Paris of the Tropics”, the city still encapsulates that European ancestry. At its center, a 19th century Opera, built following the standards of French architecture; but with a dome that echoes the national spirit of the Brazilian People, in green, yellow, and blue. Proud of this architectural prodigy but conscious of its own segregated history, the city offers free music and theater performances for both residents and visitors. Every night the city meets at the confluence of two worlds. In one, the ideals of Auguste Comte, Order and Progress, take shape in modern infrastructure and economic development. In the other, Indigenous communities continue to fight for their basic human rights; rights recognized and upheld by the Constitution, yet still too often denied. “Our bodies are accepted but not our minds”, explains Vanda Witoto, figurehead of the Indigenous community in Parque das Tribos.
Parque das Tribos embodies the paradox at the heart of Manaus. Nestled in the so-called “Fluvial City”, this Indigenous neighborhood remained without access to clean water until as recently as 2021. Even after securing legal ownership of their land, the community continues to engage in an ongoing ideological battle; fighting not just for rights, but for recognition. Vanda shared with us that this recognition must occur not only through the symbolic affirmations of international environmental conferences, but also, and more importantly, at the heart of Parque das Tribos. This recognition begins with enabling children to grow up with knowledge of their Indigenous heritage, allowing traditional healers to preserve and share ancestral medicinal practices, fostering the exchange of food and ideas among neighbors, and inviting outsiders to listen, engage respectfully, and participate in a living and evolving cultural landscape.
But as the rising river levels cause the riverbank to edge ever closer to the city of Manaus, what will become of this land? As the community faces mounting pressure from extractive industries, how can it assert its rights and safeguard its land against the systemic forces of economic exploitation? And what role does our project play in shaping a system that is not only sustainable and resilient, but that creates value, allowing the community to generate its own income, cultivate power, and nurture leadership from within?
Embedded in these reflections lie three fundamental questions that I asked myself during our trip: Who holds the right to the City, the Forest, and the River in Manaus? I hope this Fall workshop will help me explore and begin to answer those questions.
Seasonal rhythms and architecture – Jacob Payne (MIT – MArch’27)
Photo credit: Jacob Payne
Despite weather delays, missed connecting flights, and an unexpected day-long layover in Panama, our team made it to the ground in Manaus, the capital city of the Amazonas state, and got to work. Throughout the week, we explored the city by foot, by van, and, most notably, by boat.
On day four of the trip, we took a boat out to Careiro da Várzea, a town built right along the edge of the Amazon river, on the opposite bank from Manaus. The town was mostly quiet, local residents beginning to gather in the central church, the dull, incoming warnings of thunder, and a construction crew erecting new palafitas structures nearby. These palafitas, a wooden stilt-house vernacular in the region, make up nearly the entirety of the area’s buildings, lifting life a few meters above the river level. The necessity of these architectures was immediately apparent once we docked our boat and saw that, due to the present high river level, the roads were completely submerged. To navigate Careiro da Varzea during the high river season, the community constructs temporary walkways every year, connecting homes, community centers, schools, and stores.
I think I entered into this trip with the preconceived notion that these rivers were antagonists – players to be fought against. But by the week’s end it could not have become more clear that, while they remain strikingly powerful forces, there is no trace of a violent nature to them.
Instead, what we witnessed was a city shaped by accommodation, adaptation, and deep knowledge of seasonal rhythms. The challenges facing Manaus – flooding, waste, displacement, and urban heat – are not intrinsic to the water itself, but rather to the ways in which it has been neglected, blocked, or forcibly controlled. The most compelling responses I saw during my time there are those that embrace the fluvial character of the city rather than attempt to suppress it.
I could not be more grateful for the hospitality of the local stakeholders we had the opportunity to meet with and learn from (and for bearing with me as I attempted to communicate in my broken Portuguese). As we reconvene back home in Cambridge this fall, I’m looking forward to seeing how this work continues to develop over the coming months. Having taken this dive into the built and natural histories of Manaus and the surrounding region, I’m eager to develop a body of research and design-centered proposals exploring the future of this fluvial city.
Impressions – Kaede Polkinghorne (MIT – MCP’26)
Photo credit: Kaede Polkinghorne
Standing in the rain forest on July 4, I watched my cracked phone screen fill with images of broken buildings, sobbing parents, and forceful waters as the Texas Hill Country was ravaged by flash floods. I messaged friends and tapped through Instagram stories—mutual aid, organizers advocating for better drainage infrastructure at a Houston city council meeting weeks before, Ted Cruz vacationing in Greece. By the next morning, I was one degree of separation from a lost life.
The day before I had learned that Manaus does not have the same relationship to water as the gulf coast, where I moved as a teenager and spent the decade before returning to graduate school. On the gulf coast, “hurricane season” is layered over the other four seasons, a dark cloud extending from June 1 to November 30. In Manaus, the calendar is divided into distinct wet and dry seasons, with the wettest months being May and June and the driest being August and September.
On July 5, we visited Careiro da Várzea. Nathyele, our new friend at UFAM, explained that her grandmother lives nearby in a palafito—a type of stilt house like those found in Galveston or Grand Isle or any other coastal community. She gestured to the marombas—wooden catwalks that wind through the area—and told us that each year the government gives residents money and materials to construct them anew. After the water goes down, the marombas are deconstructed and the wood is discarded or reused.
A few days after our trip, the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project was terminated. This more-than-two-billion-dollar project was designed to rebuild land in the Barataria Basin and would have been “the single largest ecosystem project in the history of the US.” Restore the Mississippi River Delta issued a statement reading, “Mid-Barataria is more than a project—it represents a generational investment, paid for with the penalties of an environmental disaster.” The environmental disaster referenced is the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Back in Barcelona, I watch a film by Jiajia Zhang titled Between the Acts that Cordova, the gallery I am working at, is showing. In the film, Jiajia presents a collage of found footage to paint “a picture of an unsettled present in which mellow humor seems to be the only possible response to overwhelming crisis.” A clip features a home—two stories, gable roof, clad in white wooden slats—buckling under the weight of water. One camera sits on a hose that is inundating an upstairs bedroom while another is trained to the sagging ceiling on the floor below, which eventually collapses. Water bursts from the mouth of the home and projects forcefully from its windows, carrying household ephemera out of frame.Terra preta—literally “black soil” in Portuguese—is a type of earth enriched by the waste of farming communities between 450 BCE and 950 CE. When archaeologists find this soil, they know that they will find further evidence of past life paths nearby. Terra preta regenerates at a rate of one centimeter per year; one meter every century.
Same, Same but Different – Aashna Daga (MIT – SMArchS’ 26)
Photo credit: Aashna Daga
Visiting Manaus felt like déjà vu.
As we floated through the Amazon tributaries toward the town of Careiro da Várzea, the stilt houses or palafitas stood tall above the water, bracing against the rhythmic pulse of rising and falling tides. I had never been here before, yet it felt strangely familiar. In a strange way, these elevated homes, stitched together by wooden walkways, transported me straight back to a warehousing complex in Mumbai, where I spent the summer of my very first professional internship.
Eight years ago, in the middle of architecture school, I spent my summer in an industrial cluster in the suburb of the ‘city’. It was monsoon season, relentless, unpredictable, and all-consuming. The surrounding area had developed rapidly, with little thought for water runoff or flood resilience. As a result, the complex flooded routinely, water levels rising to the knees, sometimes even the waist. But life couldn’t stop. Makeshift wooden bridges would be quickly assembled, connecting warehouses to each other and to the outer road. They were built out of necessity, a practical yet poetic response to an environment in flux.
So when I saw the palafitas, I didn’t see them as “the other.” I saw a kindred spatial response to water, a shared choreography of movement, adaptation, and survival. Different geographies, yes. Different materials, yes. But somehow, the same logic. The same need to float with water, to keep going.
What struck me most wasn’t the architecture, it was the attitude. The ease with which people adapted. The quiet resilience of living with water, not against it. Whether in a flooding industrial suburb of Mumbai or a floating village in the Amazon, the logic was almost similar: build higher, move with the cycle, make it work.
That’s the moment I started asking: what is the imagination of water here? Is it a threat, a friend, a deity, a resource, a nuisance? We often speak of water with a certain fatalism. Floods are blamed on infrastructure failures, plastic-choked drains, poor planning. Water is something to be controlled, diverted, drained. In Manaus, the relationship seemed more fluid, both literally and metaphorically. The river is not something to conquer; it is something to live with, to float with.
This small encounter reminded me that sometimes, the most meaningful insights don’t come from manifestos or grand architectural gestures. They come from watching how people move through their worlds. From seeing how different communities respond to the same elemental forces in remarkably varied yet similar ways. These vernacular interventions- temporary bridges, stilt houses, floating platforms, are not just physical structures; they’re expressions of a deeper, more intuitive knowledge of place.
Same same, but different. For me, Manaus reminded me that water has many stories, and that architecture, at its core, is about learning to listen.
Not just a place to be preserved – Lucas Karmann (USP – Architecture)
Photo credit: Lucas Karmann
The first surprise upon arriving in Manaus was noticing that the city was not flat. As if that weren’t enough, I also imagined a place overtaken by water and built on stilts and floating platforms. A Manaus floating on the water, a ship-city.
The floating city of Manaus, I was told, was completely eradicated during the years of the Brazilian military dictatorship. Even today, constructions on the water face difficulties in being recognized and legitimized by Brazilian institutions and authorities.
What I encountered instead was a road-based city built on solid ground at an average altitude of 92 meters above sea level and with its back to the water, as if forgetting an old song. Yet while Manaus may have oriented its body toward the asphalt, its soul still faces the water. At the port and along the waterfront, boats such as speedboats, motorboats, ferries, and push boats arrive and depart, carrying people and goods. The nautical and river culture resists and still thrives.
But the river never forgets its song. Every year, it reclaims its space, advancing over its banks and the city. On July 2, the first day of our trip, the river reached 29 meters. Just nine months earlier, in October 2024, it was around 12 meters, the lowest level in more than 120 years of monitoring. In that interval, the waters rose almost 17 meters, equivalent to a five-floor building.
There are extremes that are messages, the climate announces its sentence. The highest level ever recorded in Rio Negro was in 2021, while the lowest was recorded in 2024. These numbers tell the story of a planet in crisis. We are experiencing and will increasingly experience extreme weather events, including severe droughts and floods.
The igarapés, veins that feed the great body of black water, also feel these effects. Small, human-scale dams could help maintain water levels in these tributaries, enabling year-round activities such as sport, fishing, and leisure, while also contributing to microclimate regulation. This is the vision for the Igarapé da Bolívia, where Wanda Witoto, an Indigenous leader from Parque das Tribos, dreams of creating a rowing lake.
The Amazon is not just a biome and a place to be preserved. Its proximity to the equator keeps temperatures high throughout the year. Beyond the stilt houses and floating structures, the region offers another lesson: how to build for resilience in extreme heat. The work of architects such as Severiano Porto and Almir Oliveira draws on ancestral knowledge to reimagine architecture and urban planning for a world growing hotter and more unequal under the pressures of climate change.
To ensure the future of cities and communities in Brazil and around the world, we must learn to move with the rhythm of the waters, not turn our backs to their song.
You Shall See No Other Country (Like This One) – Rodrigo Mendes (UFMS / GMF-USP)
Photo credit: Google Earth
Between the dystopia of Ignácio de Loyola Brandão and the patriotic exaltation of Gonçalves Dias, expressed in the very title of this text, between the clichés and the generosity of our people, between being a foreigner in my own land and the expanded understanding of what it means to be Brazilian, between predatory devastation on the periphery of capitalism and a nature still on the scale of the sublime, Manaus emerges full of potential and contradictions. A condition of terms not of exclusion, but of complementarity. Among these contradictions and extremes that converge in Manaus—almost as a microcosm of the Amazon—is the relationship between humanity and the environment, blurring the distinction between culture and nature, respectively as evidence and as absence of human design. Recent archaeological discoveries reveal cities and complex societies with infrastructures in the Amazon centuries before European colonization; ethnobotanical findings strengthen the hypothesis that part of the forest is, in fact, a construction; reaching the floating city of Manaus in the first half of the 20th century and the marombas in Careiro da Várzea, all of them render even more imprecise the line between nature and culture. There exists an entire riverine culture that has been developing there in its material and symbolic aspects for millennia. Although formal and official urbanism has defined the configuration of Manaus since the early decades of the 20th century through a constant denial of the waters—road-centered and marked by a notion of nature as something amorphous to be subdued and as an object to be manipulated by a subject—it cannot suppress a series of dynamics across multiple layers—urban, economic, social, symbolic, historical, and so forth—that unfold upon its rivers and igarapés, modulating Manaus’s landscape into hilltops and valley floors. This urbanism, which fails to understand the city as nature, is the counterpart of the preservationist ideology that separates the human from nature. Yet the city born of this mindset does not rest upon a neutral foundation; it determines it, insofar as it denies—in the case of Manaus—the waters as the central element of all cultures that have ever settled there. The absence of sewage treatment and of broad access to drinking water reflects the absence of rivers and igarapés in the urban everyday as objects of public policy and urban planning, that might restore them as primordial public spaces of a city located on the banks of the largest river in the world and at the heart of the planet’s greatest hydrographic basin. The boundaries that keep nature as something dissociated from human presence dissolves when Indigenous leader Vanda Witoto proposes a small dam in the Parque das Tribos, in order to form a small lake and thereby ensure the social reproduction of this riverine culture even during extreme droughts. It is not about imposing something upon nature, but about allowing to emerge from nature itself and from the surrounding world a form that embraces both.