Rural-to-urban migration is a worldwide phenomenon and the Amazon is no exception. Nonetheless, a very large proportion of its immigrants are small farmers who originally came from the High Andes and Northeastern Brazil, wagering their future on the frontier landscapes of the Pan Amazon. This flow of people into rural communities slowed dramatically after about 2000, when rural families began to move their primary place of residence to urban centers. In Brazil and Bolivia, they tend to move to Amazonian cities, large and small; in Amazonian Peru, Ecuador and Colombia, however, they are more likely to move to cities in the highlands or on the coast. In Brazil, the relative proportion of rural and urban residents in the Legal Amazon was approximately equivalent before 1990; however, by 2000 more than seventy per cent of residents resided in what the national census bureau considers urban areas. Most of the rural-to-urban migration has flowed to the six largest metropolitan centers: Manaus, Belem/Ananindeua, São Luiz, Cuiabá/Varzea Grande, Porto Velho and Macapá/Santana. There has been a similar expansion of intermediate and small cities, many of which are the administrative centers for municipalities renowned for their role in agricultural supply chains (Itaitatuba [AM], Sorriso, Sinop [MT], Tailândia [PA], Ji-Paraná [RO]), corporate mines (Marabá, Parauapebas, Oriximiná [PA]), wildcat mining towns (Itaituba [PA], Pontes e Lacerda (MT), or cattle landscapes renowned for high rates of deforestation (Altamira, São Félix do Xingu [PA], Humaita [AM]). Most doubled their populations between 2000 and 2010 and have been growing at…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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