This paper studies how the public provision of transportation infrastructure impact output convergence and trade integration in a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model in which the transportation cost between countries is endogenously determined by the stock of public infrastructure in both countries. Because of its particular conception, the so-called "Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA)" serves as the case study. Data from Argentina and Brazil is thus used to solve the model. Two main results emerge. First, increasing public investment in infrastructure provides an impetus to commercial integration but does not necessarily generate output convergence. Second, the model shows that the only way for the two countries to achieve output convergence (in a win-win economic growth scenario) is to coordinate their increments on public infrastructure, as proposed by IIRSA.

Global geopolitics has shifted dramatically over the last thirty years. After the vanishing expectations of a unipolar international system led by the United States, China has gained an increasingly dominant role in areas as innovative as quantum computing, robotics and artificial intelligence. In the non-digital dimension, the eastern superpower has made gigantic investments in its Belt and Road Initiative, which include the development of a massive network of highways, industrial centers, harbors, pipelines and bridges, among many other works of infrastructure. These investments allow for the connection of more than 60 countries worldwide, guaranteeing China s energetic security, easier conditions for trading goods and services and, perhaps more importantly, a significant influence in the political and economic events of the world. States with political regimes as diverse as those of Russia and India are part of this growing network; in various cases, in exchange for the benefits associated wi th being part of it, major concessions were made. By way of illustration, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, among others, given their lack of capacity to pay for sorne of the works, have agreed to forfeit control of specific areas of their territories.

During the last decade, the South American continent has seen a strong push for transnational integration, initiated by the former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who (with the endorsement of eleven other nations) spearheaded the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), a comprehensive energy, transport, and communications network. The most aggressive transcontinental integration project ever planned for South America, the initiative systematically deploys ten east-west infrastructural corridors, enhancing economic development but raising important questions about the polarizing effect of pitting regional needs against the colossal processes of resource extraction. Providing much-needed historical contextualization to IIRSA’s agenda, Beyond the City ties together a series of spatial models and offers a survey of regional strategies in five case studies of often overlooked sites built outside the traditional South American urban constructs. Implementing the term “resource extraction urbanism,” the architect and urbanist Felipe Correa takes us from Brazil’s nineteenth-century regional capital city of Belo Horizonte to the experimental, circular, “temporary” city of Vila Piloto in Três Lagoas. In Chile, he surveys the mining town of María Elena. In Venezuela, he explores petrochemical encampments at Judibana and El Tablazo, as well as new industrial frontiers at Ciudad Guayana. The result is both a cautionary tale, bringing to light a history of societies that were “inscribed” and administered, and a perceptive examination of the agency of architecture and urban planning in shaping South American lives.