Rainforest Cities or Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism

Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon

Author: John O Browder

Amazonia has undergone a significant urban transformation since the late 1970s. This is the first comprehensive analysis of urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon. Drawing on comparative household and sectoral survey research, the authors find that the growth of Amazon cities fits no single current theory of urbanization; instead they propose a pluralistic theory of "disarticulated urbanization" to explain the region's varied and volatile settlement patterns.

Norman Myers

Brings into focus the entire urban dimension of environmental change in Amazonia. Read the book and you will find it enlarges your understanding of the world´s last great rainforest frontier. It presents an impressive rethinking of conventional analyses of social change and regional development throughout Amazonia. A splendid publication.

David Hyndman

Rainforest Cities provides the first comprehensive analysis of the varied and volatile settlement patterns that characterise the urbanisation process in the Amazon. . . . a valuable contribution to regional development and environmental studies.

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Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism

Author: Gary Gereffi

In the past two decades, industrialization on a world scale has undergone significant shifts. The contributors to this volume explore and elaborate the global commodity chains (GCCs) approach, which reformulates the basic conceptual categories for analyzing varied patterns of global organization and change. The GCC framework allows the authors to pose questions about contemporary development issues that are not easily handled by previous paradigms and to more adequately forge the macro-micro links between processes that are generally assumed to be discretely contained within global, national, and local units of analysis. The paradigm that GCCs embody is a network-centered, historical approach that probes above and below the level of the nation-state to better analyze structure and change in the contemporary world.