Thus, it can be argued that the pampas offer a type of ‘a priori’ territorial infrastructure that offers alternative means of urban intervention at a regional scale. The types of dispersed occupation of the pampas that stem from its original geomorphological and ecological features create a highly permeable network that allows for a high-intensity, yet sustainable, use of its territory, blurring the artificial lines that bisect them. The constant shifts in the Brazil-Uruguay-Argentina borders in the past fostered vague legal conditions that have been incorporated by local economies and cultures. Characterized by extensive agriculture and cattle-raising, and by the nomadic occupation symbolized by the image of the gaucho, the ‘South American cowboy’, the pampas offer a cohesive territorial system that takes place in the most historically uneasy geopolitical context of the continent. In this scenario, this work investigates alternative modes of urbanism on the Brazil-Uruguay-Argentina borders, whose predominant landscape – the vast plains of pampas – generates specific economical and cultural practices that continuously (and historically) bypass national limits, assuming an identity that overlooks regimental border control. This condition is exceptionally visible in South America, whose patterns of territorial occupation (both aboriginal and foreign) do not necessarily abide to the international agreements in place. Their abstract solidity foolishly overlooks numerous social, economical and cultural practices that disregard their constraints, even under severe institutional surveillance. Being a construct of geopolitics, national borders are not as unshakeable as governments expect.
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