Extended urbanization in the Brazilian Amazonia

Roberto L. Monte-Mor, Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional (CEDEPLAR)

In this paper, I apply the concept of extended urbanization to the Brazilian Amazonia in an attempt to understand the new socio-spatial relations that organize its territorial restructuring at both regional and national scales. I claim that a contemporary understanding of Amazonia—particularly, of Frontier Amazonia—requires an urban-industrial approach that allows a better comprehension of the complexity of the socio-spatial relations that are being produced as urbanization accompanies the frontier. It implies looking at Frontier Amazonia from the theoretical window of urban (socio-spatial) theory and to analyze it through the manifestations of a socio-spatial praxis that has urbanity at its centre. The strategies and processes that characterize contemporary urban-industrial capitalist economy and political culture in Amazonia (and in both its sub-regions and other globalized places) are stressed as manifestations of the mixtures and exchanges that the local and regional cultures and material means apply upon them.