Amazonia, like many other great world regions, is often envisioned as one homogeneous entity. A vast and intricate mosaic of distinctive local environments, reduced to a simplistic regional archetype, becomes E1 Dorado, Second Eden, Green Hell, Earth's Lung, or the Last Frontier (Hecht and Cockburn 1989; Godfrey 1993). Such stereotypes perpetuate deeply entrenched, monumentalist myths of Amazonian exceptionalism, and they also mislead with obsolete images of pristine rural landscapes only recently endangered by rapid change. For several centuries the Amazon Basin has been heavily affected by outside political and economic forces. In recent years the region has accompanied Latin American trends of rapid urbanization. Increasing populations in Brazilian and Spanish American areas alike now reside in cities (Browder and Godfrey 1990, 1997; Brown, Sierra, and others 1994). Brazil as a whole experienced an urban transition during the 1960s, and the six states and former territories of the North Region - Acre, Amapa, Amazonas, Para, Rondonia, and Roraima - became predominantly urbanized in the late 1970s. By 1991, the year of the most recent Brazilian census, almost 58 percent of the total population of the North Region lived in towns and cities (Table I). Most contemporary commentators have overlooked Amazonia's rapid and pervasive urbanization, emphasizing instead familiar themes, such as the cultural survival of indigenous peoples, rubber tappers and extractive reserves, small-farmer colonization projects, deforestation rates, and other well-known manifestations of the rural Amazon. The prevailing ignorance about modern urban Amazonia reflects the absence of scholarly studies of Brazil's northern cities. Standing out among the few works on the subject are urban histories of Belem (Penteado 1968) and Manaus (Benchimol 1977) and, more recently, sociological studies of industrial development (Despres 1991) and peripheral shantytowns (Mitschein, Miranda, and Paraense 1989). Only in the late 1980s did seminal works by Bertha Becker (1985) and Donald Sawyer (1987) point to an urban transformation of the Amazon interior. It is time to recognize Amazonia as a predominantly urbanized region with intricate, multifaceted, and internally varied linkages to national and global spheres. Readers who are interested in the full argument laid out in this note may wish to turn to our collaborative work, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon (1997). Perhaps it is not surprising that our perspective emphasizes the considerable internal heterogeneity of Amazonia. In ecological terms the region has long been divided between the floodplains of the major rivers and the uplands. Before contact with Europeans, native Amazonian settlements clustered along the major waterways, probably on terraces and bluffs, protected from periodic inundations of the floodplains below (Denevan 1996). TABLE I - POPULATION GROWTH AND URBANIZATION IN BRAZIL AND THE NORTH REGION, 1940-1991 BRAZIL NORTH REGION(2) Percentage Percentage YEAR Population Urban Population Urban 1940 41,236,315 31.2 1,462,420 27.7 1950 51,944,397 36.2 1,844,655 31.5 1960 70,070,457 44.7 2,561,782 37.5 1970 93,139,037 55.9 3,603,866 45.1 1980 119,002,706 67.6 5,880,268 51.7 1991 150,367,800(b) 75.0(b) 9,337,150 57.8 Sources: IBGE, various years. a Includes the states and former territories of Acre, Amapa, Amazonas, Para, Rondonia, and Roraima. b Preliminary figures, according to the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE. 1991). Since the colonial period populations have clustered along the watercourses at entrepots that were formed to transport such natural resources as Brazil nuts, minerals, and animal skins. …