Context

Since the 1970s Brazil's Amazonia, the last settlement frontier in South America, experienced an intensive development of its rural areas of never seen dimensions: construction of interregional highways, colonisation of small farmers, establishment of large farms and agro-business, extraction of mineral and biological resources and construction of huge hydro-electric projects. As a result of this efforts to "modernise" and integrate Amazonia into mainstream national development, conflicts of interests and about land have increased, urbanisation has accelerated, the indigenous population marginalized and rain forests have been destroyed. Even though these processes still describe much of what happens in present-day Amazonia, in recent times one can observe stronger efforts by the Brazilian government and NGOs to establish environmentally sound, socially balanced and economically viable regional development, guided by the principle of sustainability.

Functionally connected to the above-named development of rural areas in Amazonia, regional urbanisation increased rapidly. Today, more than half of the regional population lives in towns. The settlement system in Amazonia has also changed profoundly. Gold digger settlements and chain-like settlements of small farmers along the new highways have developed in connection with the colonisation projects next to indigenous settlements,traditional river settlements and the outpost barracks of rubber tappers or Brazil nut gatherers in rural areas. At the same time, the urban system in Amazonia has experienced a particularly profound restructuring. Traditional towns have remained static while several young pioneer towns began to boom and to develop into dynamically growing regional centres. Dependent on their respective regional environment, these different types of rural and urban settlements differ fundamentally with respect to their demographic development, economical basis and socio-cultural structures.

For this continuing population shift from rural areas to towns and an the increasing interconnection between rural and urban areas, economical, social and ecological rural-urban linkages have to be taken into stronger consideration for strategies of sustainable regional development in Amazonia. Economically, important aspects of the interconnection between towns and rural areas are the processing and marketing of agrarian products produced in rural areas on the one hand and the supply of rural areas with non-agrarian products on the other. Socially, the linkage between towns and rural areas is characterised by permanent or temporary, forced or voluntary migration activities, for which the search for work alternatives, education etc. as well as socio-economic interdependence (distributor - small farmer) and unequal structures of power can be seen as possible migration motives. From an ecological point of view, it is mainly the different levels of resource use and environmental stress connected to the respective ways of living and settlement patterns which determine the urban-rural linkages. Survival strategies and livelihoods of social groups, in urban as well as in rural areas of the third world, are thus strongly influenced by the respective regional peculiarity of the rural-urban interactions. Solution concepts for sustainable development, therefore, have to be attuned to the different structural characteristics, process dynamics and conflict potentials and have to be made available via appropriate local and regional political regulation instruments.