Industrial mining and artisanal mining, two forms of space production.

Abstract

Extractivism means both an economic system and a model of territorial appropriation. Appropriation of material and immaterial resources that tend to reorganize the space and ways of life of the territories, transforming it substantially with irreversible social, environmental, economic and spatial implications. In this sense, the present research, through a cross-sectional study that relates the space and the actors that produce it, constructing descriptive diagrams and drawings that reflectively detail the space of the extraction, makes an introspection on the socio-cultural characteristics, space generated by mining extractive activities in the Ecuadorian Amazon foothills where large-scale industrial activities and small-scale (informal) artisanal activities converge. It is argued that industrial mining triggers linear processes while artisanal mining triggers dense processes with incremental logics.