Towns in the Jungle: Exploring Linkages between Rural-urban Mobility, Urbanization and Development in the Amazon

Recent evidence indicates profound changes in population mobility in the Amazon frontier. Following the earlier large-scale migration influxes from long-settled regions, the most dramatic forms of population mobility under way are currently within the frontier. In particular, more and more rural households see temporary or permanent mobility of one or more family members to urban areas as a way of earning cash income and diversifying risk. This strategy helps to alleviate dependence on dwindling forest resources, and at the same time has engendered an increasing process of urbanization in the Amazon, with drastic impacts for regional development and rural and urban environments. This paper analyzes how the changing nature of population mobility flows into and within two frontier areas of the Brazilian and Ecuadorian Amazon, from the large-scale, inter-State or inter-province rural-rural flows during initial settlement times, until the more complex, rural-urban and urban-urban flows in more recent times, have shaped a specific type of urbanization in the This Chapter is from the volume: de Sherbiniin, A., A. Rahman, A. Barbieri, J.C. Fotso, and Y. Zhu (eds.). 2009. Urban Population-Environment Dynamics in the Developing World: Case Studies and Lessons Learned. Paris: Committee for International Cooperation in National Research in Demography (CICRED) (316 pages). Available at http://www.populationenvironmentresearch.org/workshops.jsp#W2007