This paper fosters dialogue between neoliberal urbanism and post-colonial research, drawing attention to city-regional formation in the global South. It critiques the Manaus Metropolitan Region (RMM) initiative as a state-space remapping guided by ecological entrepreneurialism. In 2007, Amazonas state created the framework to spearhead growth in an extensive territory construed as both urban and pristine. RMM mobilises infrastructure investments and forceful zoning to reconcile the expansion of tax-exempted manufacturing, with exclusive ‘global city’ redevelopment, and heightened conservation measures seeking to leverage both the symbolic value of peri-urban rainforests and their potential to generate carbon-credit revenues. Focusing on the Manaus–Iranduba Bridge and its socio-spatial impacts, the paper problematises visions of sustainable urbanisation that circulate transnationally and exacerbate territorialised patterns of geographically uneven development. Hence, top–down global city-regional construction spearheads political reactions, social mobilisation and territorial conflicts of complex resolution and important implications for translocal activism and coalition building.