The city’s reinvention in the jungle

Abstract

I sum up my research about the border during the 1970s and 1980s, when the Brazilian so-called Legal Amazon was violently occupied. The investigation ranged from the federal state of Maranhão Pre-Amazon to the states of Pará, Mato Grosso, Goiás, Rondônia and Acre. I polarize two groups of opposite social experiences in the framework of the generation of cities and of an urban way of life in this peculiar setting. At one extreme the spontaneous formation, which stemmed from little settlements and the free occupation of land by migrants mostly arriving from the semi-arid region of the Northeast. At another extreme the planned cities, i.e. the territory occupied by migrants arriving from the South and from the Espírito Santo and Minas Gerais region of Contestado. These cities expressed modern conceptions of the urban in the framework of interventions by the dictatorial state, with its ordering logic.