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Frontier Urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon: Implications for Regional DevelopmentAuthor(s): Brian J. Godfrey and John O. BrowderSource: Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Winter, 1990), pp. 127-129Published by: University of Wisconsin PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3513358 .

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Conference ReportF r o n t i e r Urbanization i n t h eBraz i l iar l A m a z o n : Implicationsf o r Reg iona l DevelopmentBrian J. Godbey and John 0. Browder

The Amazon Basin, particularly the Brazilian portion, con-stitutes one of the world's last great settlement frontiers. Thedramatic changes now occurring in the vast region have attractedwidespread attention, both from the popular press and fromscholars concerned with tropical ecology and regional development.The main sources of preoccupation have been the Amazon's rapidrate of deforestation and the intense social conflict betweennative peoples, agricultural migrants, cattle ranchers, miners,and large firms. The region's rapid urbanization, though hasreceived only scant attention.While the Brazilian government has massive investment in landdevelopment schemes like the Transamazon Highway, cattle ranches,hydroelectric projects, and timber and mining projects, theAmazon's inland settlement frontier has become steadily moreurbanized. In 1980, for the first time, over half of thepopulation in the Brazilian Amazon lived in urban areas (definedas settlements with more than 2,000 inhabitants). While stillsubstantially below the urban proportion of the total Brazilianpopulation, 67 percent in 1980, urbanization has been proceedingat a much faster pace in Amazonia--nearly 11 percent per year.The rapid growth of scores of large Amazonian "boom towns," oftenpeopled by tens of thousands of migrants in the course of a fewyears, raises vexing problems for conventional urban and regionaldevelopment theory.Because this important contemporary phenomenon had not yet beensystematically analyzed, Brian J. Godfrey of Vassar College andJohn 0. Browder of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and StateUniversity organized a session on it at the last Annual Meeting ofthe Association of American Geographers (M G), held in Baltimore,Maryland, March 19-22, 1989. This session, entitled '|FrontierUrbanization in the Brazilian Amazon: Implications for RegionalDevelopment," was jointly sponsored by the Urban Geography andLatin Americanist Geographers specialty groups of the AAG. Paperswere presented by Godfrey and Browder, as well as by JacquelynChase of the University of California, Los Angeles, and byMarianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood of the University of Florida,Gainesville. Stephen Bunker of the University of Wisconsin servedas discussant for the session papers.Godfrey's paper focused on "Frontier Settlement and theEmerging Urban Hierarchy of Eastern Amazonia," evaluating the

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128 LusoBrazil ian Review 27:2evolution of Xinguara--a frontier town in southeastern Para,located at the juncture of roads

leading into the resource-richXinguregion--in light of links to the regional system of townsand ities. Godfrey concentrated on the production complexes oftimber, agriculture, and cattle, which employ a large part of thetown's population and provide much of the basis for localservices. Within the town, Godfrey noted a steady proletarianiza-tion of the local labor force. Although most of the small timbermills that initially dominated the local economy have departed,with the depletion of nearby mahogany stocks, several more highlycapitalized plywood operations have opened in recent years,depending on timber from farther afield. Xinguara, which wassituated on a "resource frontier"

in the late 1970s, is now on a"relic frontier" experiencing the beginnings of rural depopulationandurban primacy, as the town has become a municipio (county-level) service center and is also increasingly tied economicallyto more distant centers. Although the town's strategic locationin the regional road network ensures its survival, future growthwill depend in large part on whether new economic activities arefound to replace the resource-extractive activities that havedominated the local economy up to now.The paper by Schmink and Wood, "The End of the Road: Changesin Life and Work in Sao Felix do Xingua, 1978-1984," examined theresults of their longitudinal study of social changes in a rivertown in southern ParA. Sao Felix do Xingu has been noticeablyaffected by in-migration and new economic activities since thelate 1970s, following the establishment of new road links. Thestudy documented increasing social differentiation by class andgender in this once cohesive, traditional setting; overall, wageearners fared better than those engaged in subsistence activitiesin the increasingly monetized economy of the town. Prospects forthe poorer migrants, concentrated in new neighborhoods with fewurban services, appeared bleak.Chase's paper, "Household Divisions of Labor, Migration andUrban Settlement in the Brazilian Amazon," focused on issues ofgender and survival strategies on the frontier. Her researchemployed qualitative techniques of in-depth interviews with womenin the neighborhood of Vila Nova, a poorer section of the rivertown of Conceigao do Araguaia, again in southeastern Para. Thepopulation here consists mainly of rural migrants who had decidednot to proceed farther inland on the expanding frontier. Thistendency to stay put, Chase hypothesized, was in large part a"backwash" effect of the impetus for frontier migration itself;women and family households served both to "anchor" more firmlythe mobile male migrants and to provide essential family income inmultiple activities of the "informal sector" while men wereengaged in more lucrative, but less reliable forms of resourceextraction on the frontier. Chase pointed to the ways in whichAmazonian frontier migration has to be put into the context ofhousehold labor and reproduction strategies.Browder's paper analyzed "The Socio-economic Structure of a NewTown in the Amazon Frontier: The Case of Rolim de Moura,

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Godf rey and Browder 129Rondonia." This case contrasts with those discussed earlier fromthe state of Para, where large landholders are most influential,in that Rondonia's frontier is dominated by smaller land-holders.Browder contended that Rondonia has seen a proliferation of smalllandholdings in recent years, and that much of the urban"population retains strong ties to surrounding rural areas in thefrontier, either through property ownership or intermittent workarrangements. Browder also found a petty bourgeoisie of towns-people to be predominant in rural land tenure. Importantquestions linger concerning social mobility, class formation, andstructural economic change in Amazon boom towns. Are such townsdominated by well-heeled national elites that have merely extendedtheir influence onto the frontier, or are new frontier elitesemerging without direct links to national capital? Do dynamicsmall settlements offer migrants greater opportunities foraccumulation than the large regional metropolitan centers? Underwhat conditions does the structure of the frontier urban economychange either toward greater diversity of production, or, as sooften has been the case, into structural decomposition andeconomic decline? These and other interesting questions awaitfurther research.In his final comments Bunker put the papers into the context ofrapid regional change and emphasized several theoretical chal-lenges to development theory. The combinations of land specula-tion and natural resource extraction driving the Amazonianfrontier create different patterns of social stratification,migration, proletarianization, and inter-urban commerce andcommunication. Analyses of Amazonian urbanization will realizetheir theoretical potential only if they tske the peculiarities ofthe regional economy into account.