Where Deforestation Leads to Urbanization: How Resource Extraction Is Leading to Urban Growth in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

Developing the Amazon into a major provider of internationally traded mineral and food commodities has dramatically transformed broad expanses of tropical forests to farm and pasturelands and to mining sites. The environmental impacts of this transformation, as well as the drivers underlying the process, have already been well documented. In this article we turn our analytical lenses to another, less examined effect of Amazon land use and environmental change, namely, the creation and development of new urban areas. Here we argue that urban growth in the Amazon is a direct residual of international interest in the production of traded commodities and of the capacity of local urban residents to capture capital and value before it is extracted from the region. Specifically, we suggest that urban growth is occurring fastest where cities have access to both rural export commodities and export corridors. We also show correlations between urban growth and lower rural population density and cities' capacities to draw migrants from beyond their immediate rural surroundings. More broadly, we argue that urbanization in the Amazon is better interpreted as a symptom rather than a driver of the region's land use and land cover change.