This article discusses the paving of the BR-174 roadway in the mid-1990s and socio-spatial consequences in the state of Roraima. The case is presented as an example of the transformation that territorial interventions have evinced in the Amazon region within a context of state neoliberalization and the production of a transnational economic space. Federal investments for roadway development and ancillary infrastructure brought about unprecedented connectivity and spearheaded economic growth. Yet, the article argues that, besides new discourses of sustainable regional development, the logics dominating projects such as the BR-174 upgrade are those of neoliberal transnational expansion. The entrepreneurial State becomes a partner for the establishment of external markets rather than the main agent for the integration of the national territory. Therefore, in the BR-174 plan, Roraima appears mainly as strategic space for crossboundary integration and the linking of the Brazilian Amazon to Caribbean ports. Nevertheless, after over a week since the project was concluded, territorial concentration deepened and new socio-spatial inequalities have emerged in close relation to the functions and flows that roadway integration created.
Amazon region; Roraima; BR-174
