| The Brazilian Amazonia is being socio-economically, spatially, and ecologically restructured as bulldozers, chainsaws, and axes combine to destroy the tropical rainforest and replace it with agricultural and grass lands, mining camps, and towns and hamlets of various sorts. However, Amazonia is still largely perceived as a rural region, if not a pristine jungle and its urban growth has been mostly understood as a temporary feature.; I argue, instead, that the urban phenomenon is not only present in Amazonian cities and towns but also in a myriad of socio-spatial forms such as mining areas, colonization projects, timber industries, cattle and farm enterprises, in addition to service and commerce urban concentrations spread throughout the region. The complexity of Amazonia's---and Brazil's---current urbanization requires new approaches to understand the diverse socio-spatial forms and processes being created throughout the territory beyond the old city-country dichotomy.; The concept of extended urbanization expresses a particular social spatiality brought about by late capitalism referring to the extension of contemporary socio-spatial relations---urban-industrial forms and processes---formerly restricted to cities and towns onto regional, national, and global scales. It encompasses the socio-spatial fabric from the dialectical unity of urban centers and the urban tissue that extends urban forms and processes---including urban praxis---onto the countryside and social space as a whole, producing unprecedented levels of time/space/societal (re)articulation. In that context, (radical) modernity and (extended) citizenship are addressed as contemporary features of extended urbanization in Brazil and in Amazonia.; In this dissertation, I apply the concept of extended urbanization to the Brazilian Amazonia in an attempt to understand the new socio-spatial relations that (re)organize the territorial restructuring at both national and regional scales. However, the multitude, the pace, and the intensity of the restructuring processes taking place in Amazonia today make it impossible to approach the region in its totality. I thus focus on three southern Frontier Amazonia micro-regions: Rondonia, Mato Grosso's Nortao, and Southern Para & Tocantins's Bico do Papagaio. Those Southern Frontier Amazonia regions are used to tell the (hi)story of urbanization (and spatial production) of Amazonia and of Brazil itself. |
