Jungle Cities: The Urbanisation of Amazonia

The population of the Amazon Rainforest became predominantly urban during the twentieth century. In Brazil and Peru, the two countries that comprise the majority of Amazonia, 80% of the region’s people now live in cities. The imposition of modern built environments over Amazonian nature and the displacement of the peoples and ways of life associated with them was central in the quest of regional, national, and transnational elites to “develop” the rainforest. Critical junctures in the socio-environmental histories the largest Amazonian cities in each country and in the Upper Amazon,  Iquitos, Peru, and Manaus, Brazil, reveal how instead of this dichotomy between modern cities and tropical nature, urbanisation took the form of entangled social orders and ecosystems.


Adrián Lerner is a historian of modern Latin America, especially the Andes, Brazil, and the Amazon Rainforest. He has published broadly on issues related to the environment, urbanisation, public health, gender, violence, human rights, development, international relations, and authoritarian politics in the region, often in relation to global processes. 

Born and raised in Lima, Perú, he has undergraduate degrees (BA and Licenciatura) in Humanities and History from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and a MA, MPhil, and PhD from Yale University. He is University Assistant Professor in Latin American History at Cambridge University. Before that he was the Philomathia Fellow in Ecologies in Place at the Consortium for the Global South at Cambridge; Lecturer and Research Fellow in Global History at the Free University of Berlin; and the Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Urbanization and the Environment at Princeton University. 

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