The Kichwa Chakra: A Micropolitics of Care

Contemporary urbanism faces the imperative of rethinking its relationship with inhabited territories, especially amidst growing environmental challenges. This research proposes the Kichwa Chakra from the Ecuadorian Amazon as a vital paradigm. The chakra is a living landscape that stems from the body-earth relationship. Paradoxically, it emerges within the land reform strips projected in the 1960s and 70s, yet transforms their colonial extractivist logics.

In Kichwa, chakra means "sown land" and refers to the incorporation of a portion of the jungle and its subsequent transformation. This is a vital process that the Kichwa people are not only deeply conscious of, but also feel intrinsically part of.

The chakra's spa-al configuration is directly influenced by the reciprocal care and nurturing actions carried out primarily by chakramamas, Kichwa women. Indeed, the chakra's design and measurements directly reference female bodies: their rhythms of interaction and their stimuli to the earth create a stratified landscape that mimics the jungle's trophic structure. This spatio-temporal configuration, besides protecting the land, is a habitat for diverse beings that coexist and intertwine. In the chakra, therefore, forms do not precede; rather, they arise from the mutual participation between body and earth, making explicit some characteristics and possibilities of the
environment. This vital cycle, contained within the bodies of the chakramamas, reveals a rela.onal way-of-being fundamental to kawsay [human and non-human life].

We posit that the Kichwa Chakra embodies a micro-narrative. It does not directly oppose the dominant; instead, it operates from corporeal knowledge or living knowledge to transform imposed boundaries: the dominant cartography – encompassing both Western epistemologies and ontologies of accumulation – that has emptied the body of its inherently rela-onal knowing. This capacity for selfreconfiguration, which evokes Viveiros de Castro’s (2010) “I as another” and the act of “predation” from perspectivism, reveals pedagogical and opera-onal tools and
approaches that can nurture a minor, relational, and therefore ethical urbanism. Namely, an urbanism that promotes an exploratory freedom that flourishes precisely by disengaging from the logic of accumulation, cultivating a “savage” thought distinct from the domesticated one seeking profit (Lévi-Strauss, 1997).