New Perspectives on Mobility, Urbanisation and Resource Management in Riverine Amazônia
Résumé
In recent years, the Amazon has experienced simultaneous processes of urbanisation and creation of protected areas. Debates over the changing role of traditional peoples in the management of such areas have largely taken place in the absence of reliable information on these popula-tions' connections to urban areas. We review the literature on Amazônia to explore how rural–urban mobility redefines patterns of resource use. The focus is primarily on riverine areas of the Brazilian Amazon. Connection to urban areas does not necessarily imply deep changes in production techniques, but induces new norms, rules and values around access to and management of resources. Rural–urban mobility challenges the capacity of local groups to maintain collective resource management, but on the other hand involves the reassertion of traditional territories and identities through social and economic networks. Mobility and migration have long been integral to the livelihood patterns and political strategies of rural and indigenous populations in Latin America (Adams et al., 2009; Alexiades, 2009). Recently, however, the magnitude of social dispersion and changes in settlement patterns associated with rapid urbanisation have renewed research interest in the implications of these processes for resource use and management in general (Wright and Muller-Landau, 2006), and within the Amazon basin in particular (McSweeney and Jokisch, 2007; Padoch et al., 2008). Urbanisation in Amazônia has been better studied on agricultural frontiers (Browder and Godfrey, 1997; Barbieri et al., 2009) than along the floodplains and the Amazon's main tributaries. However, these areas are increasingly important for resource conservation in the region (Parry et al., 2010a). Indeed, as