"Cities in the forest" and "cities of the forest": an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) spatial approach to analyzing the urbanization-deforestation relationship in a Brazilian Amazon state

Contemporary urbanization has been reorganizing the territories and the socioeconomic relations in the Brazilian Amazon as a whole. We seek to identify a general typology of relationships between urbanization and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, in the light of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) theory. We have applied this approach to the 144 municipalities of Par??, in the Brazilian Amazon, in the inter-census interval from 2000 to 2010. The EKC approach included the spatial analysis method of geographically weighted regressions (GWR). Deforestation, measured by the PRODES program by Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), was used as a measure of environmental degradation and the urbanization has been restricted to a socioeconomic characterizing, based on a set of 22 variables from the national census database, aggregated at the municipalities level. The results showed two main typologies: (1) the decreasing monotonic and (2) "U" shape. The first one indicates municipalities with urban-based economies that have in their income composition an important share of an economy based on the historical structural diversity of the Amazon rural production systems. The second one indicates municipalities with urban-based economies in which the income composition points to an agrarian economy based on rural production systems supported by large, intensified, and homogeneous landscapes that have established a predatory relationship with natural resources. We argue that these two typologies found can be used to establish two city models: "cities of the forest," where it would be possible to combine the local traditional knowledge with scientific and technological advances, mediated by the city life, and "cities in the forest," where the urban-industrial development strategy that has been changing the relationship between society and nature since the 1950s is in place and still very much alive.