Rapid urban population growth has become one of the most distinctive attributes of Third World development since the Second World War. Not only has growth occurred in preexisting large cities, it has also taken place in numerous small pioneer towns on frontiers. The emergence and growth of new settlements has important social and environmental implications, but the patterns of frontier urbanization have not received a great deal of attention. Based on a comprehensive review of secondary source materials and a comparative analysis of two emerging centers in the Brazilian Amazon, this project has as its goal the illumination of the larger political-economic role of frontier urbanization in the process of national and global capital accumulation. The investigators will study under what political and economic circumstances new settlements originate; what functions are provided by the rapidly growing frontier settlements; how these functions have changed over time in response to regional production in mining, timber, and agricultural sectors; to what extent frontier towns provide services, employment, and consumer opportunities necessary for the social reproduction of the local population; what industries emerge in the new Amazon towns; and how these industries are linked in capital composition to national and transnational enterprises. This innovative and timely study will develop a model of landscape change and urban transformation using a number of research methods drawn from spatial analysis, history, and historical geography. This research effort offers a contemporary test of theory at a time when a clearer understanding of the development of urban frontiers can contribute to policies concerning settlement expansion in the Amazon, one of the world's most important and fragile ecological areas, and it is also likely to add to our knowledge of frontier urbanization in other tropical areas of the world.
