Suburban industrial remnants: the transformative potential of the Latin American developmental legacy

Abstract This article integrates a comprehensive study of the legacy and potential of suburban industrial remnants and reflects on contradictions and opportunities for urban transformation. It emphasizes the socio-spatial effects of industrialization and deindustrialization in Latin America while focusing on the railway suburbs of the North Zone of Rio de Janeiro, prioritized in Brazilian developmental policies. Authors in the fields of critical geography and ethnographic anthropology who highlight local and global interactions, uninterrupted urban dynamics, and multiple logics, practices, and territorial forms are references for the research. Despite increased contradictions and conflicts deriving from historical processes, today there is a potential material and symbolic capital to benefit local populations if plurality in social relations is considered and forces present in the main agents who act in the suburban space are activated.