When we think of the Amazon region, I think its fair to say that most of us think of the vast expanses of virgin rainforests, crossed by the largest river who gives the area its name. We don’t usually think of cities. And yet, Amazonia is home to 40 million people, 80% of which live in cities. IN other words, from the perspective of the human population, Amazonia is urban. To discuss this, I talk to Adrián Lerner Patrón about two articles. The first, published in NACLA, is titled “The Amazon’s Forgotten Cities’, and the second titled “The Ruins of a Steel Mill: Planetary Urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon”, linked in the show notes.
We talk about the history of urbanization in Amazonia, focusing on Iquitos in Peru and Manaos in Brazil, including the particularities of cities formed in extractive frontiers, the militarized logic to secure them, and the rise and fall of developmentalist hubris.
We delve into the histoyr of the SIDERAMA (Companhia Siderúrgica da Amazônia Sociedade Anônima) steel mill - created in 1961 and liquidated in 1997 - through the lens of planetary urbanization. Overall, Adrián invites us to think about what is unique about Amazonia cities, but also to understand the global reach of urbanization during the 2nd half of the twentieth century and the need to rethink the role of Amazonia during the Anthropocene.
Adrián Lerner Patrón is a Philomathia Fellow in the Consortium for the Global South at the University of Cambridge, with a focus on “Ecologies in Place,” and a lecturer and research associate in Global History at the Free University of Berlin. 
I also want to add that this episode is our first in collaboration with NACLA - the North American Congress on Latin America. (NACLA) is an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1966 to examine and critique U.S. imperialism and political, economic, and military intervention in the Western hemisphere.

You can find the two articles here: "The Amazon's Forgotten Cities" in NACLA
 "The Ruins of a Steel Mill: Planetary Urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon” in the Journal of Urban History