The Imaginary Atlas, Amazonia: Reimagining Cities within the Brazilian Forests

The Imaginary Atlas, Amazonia: Reimagining Cities within the Brazilian Forests presents new urban imaginaries that bridge traditional knowledge with emerging technologies. Through an interactive installation at Brazil’s COP30 climate summit, Kent Larson’s City Science Group collaborates with the Federal University of Pará, the Emílio Goeldi Museum, and local researchers and creatives to explore future visions for Amazonian cities.

The installation will be deployed at the Forum Landi, in the historic heart of Belém’s old town, during COP30 in November 2025. Its goal is to spark global debate about the Amazon’s future among climate stakeholders and policymakers. This strategic timing and venue amplify the project’s impact beyond traditional art audiences, reaching decision-makers shaping environmental policy.

The Imaginary Atlas: Amazonia is an immersive, interactive installation blending urban research, cinema, and gaming to explore possible urban futures in the Brazilian rainforest. It asks how cities might grow in co-creation with their ecosystems, rather than at their expense. The project begins in Belém do Pará, in the heart of the Amazon—a region at the intersection of biodiversity, urban complexity, and global climate negotiations.

Using real-time game engines, 3D scans of the city and surrounding nature, fantastical new characters, and an immersive audio soundtrack, the installation simulates evolving Amazonian landscapes and cities. Audiences move through “ecologies of the future,” shaped by shifting combinations of climate data, traditional knowledge, and political choices. These scenarios are rooted in Belém’s current dynamics—its deep jungle islands, informal settlements, and verticalized concrete metropolis—extrapolated into metaphorical geographies.

The project advances the City Science Group’s The Power of Without research theme, which argues that heavy infrastructure solutions are often financially unfeasible and insufficient to meet the needs of rapidly urbanizing communities. Instead, it proposes a third approach to urbanization that bridges traditional knowledge with emerging technologies. The project investigates how bottom-up designs rooted in ancestral knowledge can integrate with new technologies to expand access to health, education, and crisis response—while respecting environmental limits and community needs.

Kent Larson is an architect, MIT Professor of the Practice, an entrepreneur, and the director of City Science at the MIT Media Lab. His research is focused on compact transformable housing, ultralight autonomous mobility systems, sensing and algorithms to recognize and respond to complex human behavior, and advanced modeling, simulation, and tangible interfaces for urban design.

Biography: MIT Media Lab
Website: Wikipedia.com

Gabriela Bìlá Advincula is a Brazilian architect, multimedia artist, educator, and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab’s City Science group. She believes that cities are places that catalyze change, leading to transformation, and develops interactive-immersive interfaces to explore how humans will adapt to technological impacts on future cities.

Biography: MIT Media Lab

The City Science research group in the MIT Media Lab investigates how new models for urban architecture and personal vehicles can be more responsive to the unique needs and values of individuals through the application of disentangled systems and smart customization. They develop technology to understand and respond to human activity, environmental conditions, and market dynamics, and are interested in finding optimal combinations of automated systems, just-in-time information for personal control, and interfaces to persuade people to adopt sustainable behaviors.

Website: media.mit.edu/groups/city-science/