A Amazônia legal e os contornos da fronteira capitalista no século XXI

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the current territorial characteristics of the Brazilian Center-North-Amazon region, based on the Cerrado and the Amazon Forest, identifying the elements that outline the capitalist frontier in this early 21st century. It highlights the way that medium-sized cities have served the capitalist precepts in the recent process of urbanization of the region and seeks to relate the transformations that occurred in the Cerrado territory from the modernization imposed by capitalism, through an urban restructuring through which the Midwest region. It has been going through the process of expanding the economic frontier over the Amazon since the mid-twentieth century, also highlighting the urban restructuring of the eastern Amazon. It starts from the understanding that the Brazilian State fits the demands of the world capitalism through the implantation of the urban-industrial model. The urbanization of this region, the result of regional development policies implemented mainly after the 1940s, became a viable action of this condition and the state arrangements allow investing in infrastructure, creating planning agencies and providing population migratory flows towards the cities that polarize in the territory, concentrating surplus of cheap labor and boosting urbanization in the Amazon. The approach method is the Historical and the detached analysis is the Dialectic, and this work is the partial result of a research component of the projects “PGPSE/CAPES Territorial Development and Sociobiodiversity: perspectives for the Cerrado world” and “PROCAD/CAPES Territory, Environment and Rural-Urban-Regional Dynamics in the Brazilian Amazon”.