Dr Adrián Lerner Patrón

Caitlin Morrissey 

Adrián, what is an Amazon city, and what makes a city an Amazon city from your point of view?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Thank you, Caitlin. So an Amazonian city for me is essentially about location. So Amazonian Cities are cities that have grown in the tropical rainforest, located in the basin of the Amazon River and its massive riverine system which is among the largest and most powerful in the planet. So it would be tempting to suggest a list of conditions to be an Amazon city, which, in my mind, would have to revolve about these environmental conditions. But in fact, the environmental conditions are so powerful in general that this is actually inescapable. So it’s just there. On the other hand, there might be a certain need to limit the field and exclude cities that are not Amazonian Cities. So for example, the cities in the western slope of the Andes, which are very much Andean cities, rather than Amazonian Cities but they are where the Amazon rainforest begins, so Chachapoyas is an important one in Peru. Or cities with an identity and historical links that tie them to other regions, like Santa Cruz in Bolivia or cities in more liminal regions like Cuiabá in Brazil which is in the Mato Grosso in this kind of rapidly expanding agricultural frontier. But I don't want to push this too much. These identities can be multiple and change over time. So for example, Belém of Pará, the most historical and one of the largest Amazonian Cities is very much both an Amazonian city in the estuary, right, and also an Atlantic City and a historical Black city, so these limits are diffuse. So I would leave it to the location aspect of it. So for me, the simple answer is, Amazonian Cities are cities located in the Amazon basin and very much influenced by those environmental conditions.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you very much. What a terrific place to get us going. Is there anything else to understand about the plurality of Amazonian Cities in relation to their proximities to some of these geographies? You've started to obviously, talk about cities that have multiple different identities on perhaps the fringes, cultural traditions, indigeneity, and then perhaps to reflect upon the urban vernacular. So the way that the urban vernacular responds to these different geographies?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Yeah, that's a great question. The different Amazonian cities have different features but fundamental shared trade, I think, is this extractive relationship with the rainforest. By and large, Amazonian Cities are based on exporting, processing, colonising and otherwise exploiting the Amazon interior. So a key shared feature is that of the enclave, kind of, this role as a connecting lots or nodes between the rainforest and the global, national and regional capitalist economy and all the cities need to adapt and eventually master the environmental forces of the rainforest. So our cities were, depending on the scale and the historical trajectory and evolution, the presence of the rainforest, so from, you know, rivers to rain to heat, to insects to animals, has been, and its felt more or less strongly, but the impetus to overcome it has been at the centre of their historical ethos. And the interesting aspect of that, to me, is that, on the one hand because these environmental conditions are particularly strong and intense, this makes the modernising impetus very strong as well. On the other hand, the conditions and the same conditions and their strength and intensity, and the relative poverty and isolation of the Amazon and of these cities make this modernising bent actually very difficult and precarious. So the cities always seem on edge, and many cities, indeed, don't really last in the Amazon. So there's this paranoia that the cities are going to disappear and some cities have disappeared. Many cities actually have disappeared through history. And so, those that remain, often have very good reasons to be there and to remain. So they're either located in a critical riverine meeting point or crucial-- with good conditions for a port, or more recently, where highways and roads meet, or they have been endowed, through time with major infrastructure like airports, or through political decisions to become, you know, regional capitals or to be the site of military bases.

And finally, but critically, all these cities have major presence of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous forms of knowledge, Indigenous architectures and forms of Indigenous activism. And these are not always obvious to outsiders but they are invariably there, and they're very often inspite and against these modernising and extractive impulses because the Indigenous peoples have often been targeted as problems for these modernisations, right, as kind of the opposite of it. And the popular and often poorer parts of these cities tends to be where these traditions are more noticeable. So the popular market, the food, the architecture of the popular informal neighbourhoods. In terms of the differences, right, which is kind of the core of the question. Amazonian Cities can be very different. And I would not attempt a kind of typology here, at least. And in any case, there are many possible typologies. But in terms of historical paths, I think there are the older cities which tend to have a colonial origin, which were, you know, Spanish or Portuguese colonial outposts which therefore obtain some of the characteristics of those foundational eras. And these outposts generally respond to Indigenous settlements or just to like very important locations of Belém of Pará is very close to where the Amazon meets the Atlantic. So that's an obvious kind of place to build a city, in many ways. But also, for example, Moyobamba in Peru are crucial examples of that. And then, for example, a missionary, a major missionary establishment, is created there, and that eventually leads to the flourishing of the city.

But there are the typical port cities of the Amazon rubber boom. So the second half of 19th Century is a really threshold moment for the region where there is the kind of the boom in the demand for wild Amazonian rubber for industrial uses in the industrialising world. And this is a defining period of the integration of the Amazon into both the global economy and the processes of nation formation in South America, whose countries, as I'm sure some listeners may know, became independent in the 1820s. So some cities like Manaus or Iquitos, which are cities I know best, existed before as missionary villages or military forts, but not really cities, until this crucial period of the 1850s and 60s. So the cities then often bear the imprint of this boomtown era of aggressive modernisation. Some of the older cities, who are at the centre of this new era, like Belém, but others, like Moyobamba, but lost power and were displaced by this new-- by the Amazon rubber boom. And some of these boomtown cities remain, but others disappeared and were literally reclaimed by the forest when the rubber boom went bust.

And then there are newer extractive enclaves of different kinds, often along highways or as enclaves for cultivation of cacao, for example, and processing of it, or for timber mining, legal and illegal, oil extraction, drug trafficking, etc, and these are often parts of broader networks of cities, and often again, alongside roads and rivers more traditionally.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much. And what you're really establishing is this idea that Amazon Cities must be seen in relation to national, global, local, Amazonian, sort of networks of various different kinds. So there's a real plurality, but these multiple scales at which we can begin to understand the ways that they have urbanised and sort of those urbanising forces. We asked you two quite similar questions, which was to understand how Amazon Cities historically have had a different development path to other cities in South America, and the forces that have shaped that, and then, relatedly, the urbanisation of Amazon Cities in relation to other Latin American cities. But we can expand that out. And you've begun to really explain so clearly the urbanisation of Amazon Cities. What do we need to understand about how that differs to other cities in this broad, enormous region of South America and Latin America, maybe more, more particularly?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Yeah, it's an excellent question, and that's something I often think about in my own research. You know, they, as one writes a thesis and then a book, they often force you to think in those comparative terms. My project was comparative to begin with, right? But I would actually say that Amazonian Cities have generally followed the broader strokes of Latin American urbanisation. The broad patterns have not been that different. The difference has been, I think, of scale and intensity. So Latin American urbanisation as a whole can be framed as a colonial enterprise, all about the conquest and exploitation of the interior and of its resources and its peoples. So this sense-- and as well colonial in the sense of having a civilising mission, right, imposing European and then Western rationalities. And all of this has been stronger in Amazonia because the landscapes where they are, both were very isolated and potentially very rich, but also considered the epitome of wilderness and tropicality, right, and its peoples have been often stigmatised as kind of the less civilised Indigenous people. So this colonial broad pattern has been both a part of the-- not dissimilar to the rest of the region, but also stronger there in this borderland frontier region. Also, has lasted longer because the Amazon, ‘the conquest of the Amazon’, quote, unquote, in some ways, is ongoing. So this took extreme degrees there. It targeted some of the less powerful population, some of the most stigmatised population. The extraction of the resources has taken place in ecosystems that, as I mentioned, are very powerful but also fragile and also with very little oversight or accountability, and also with the perpetual justification, especially since the rise of nation-states, also in the Portuguese and Spanish Empire era, but especially since the rise of nation-states this excuse or justification of extending national sovereignty in a vast territory where there was little state presence, right? There's this notion of protecting the national territory and expanding the national interests and rationales there.

So many Latin American cities have been born as extractive enclaves like the Amazonian ones, and then evolved to political capitals, administrative centres with growing commercial sectors and have eventually become industrial ones. And this has also been the case in the Amazon, but again, because of where they are, this seems more extreme. The sense of enclave is stronger where there are no other cities, literally for miles and miles.

So during the rubber boom, also because this integration to global capitalism and really the influence of capital was extremely abrupt, and the fortunes were created very fast. This was absolutely over the top with insane displays of wealth, developmental hubris, and this kind of really intense aim to overcome nature. But then again, the fragility was always there, so when the boom ended, this seems like it could literally crumble. Similarly, when Latin American cities exploded through informal neighbourhoods, often very poor ones, Amazonian Cities did too, but the neighbourhoods were often even more precarious than the usual ones in other cities in physical terms, partly because of the ecological conditions, partly because these are again comparatively very poor parts of the continent and of these nations, and even more stigmatised and constituted even larger proportions of the cities than in other urban centres. And then the fact that these cities are borderlands and in regions that are seen as geopolitically critical has also always allowed them to attract governmental efforts, so funding and incentives and infrastructure, however weak it remains, there has been this justification. So they eventually had unique characteristics in this sense, at least in the second half of the 20th Century, we could call, era of development. So, we have for example, Manaus is the most famous case, has become a special economic zone for industrialisation with enormous fiscal benefits since the 1960s, 60s, ‘70s. And for example, they have been huge military centres with large military bases and with a very important military presence in civilian life, which is not a minor factor in countries with a very problematic authoritarian tradition of military governments and dictatorships.

And finally, they have also, like cities in Latin America and elsewhere, experienced phenomena like suburbanisation and gated communities and the like. And again, in some cases, this has been more extreme than in other parts of Latin America because of these incentives, because of this-- of the economy and because the needs are perceived as more critical. So I would say, in broad terms, the patterns are similar, but tend to be more extreme with some unique characteristics. So evidently the types of infrastructure are different. Large-scale transport is more critical. Connectivity to rivers, for a very long time, was the defining factor to the rise of the cities, then roads, then airports. So trains have been less important in the Amazon than in other parts of the continent, for example, just because it's just incredibly difficult to build railroads in a region like this. So the airport has been a game changer, and the cities that have airports have really taken off.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Wow, that's so fascinating. We have a question here about what is needed for Amazon Cities to become more sustainable and more prosperous while retaining their Amazonian identities. There's also a question about what is needed in Amazon Cities to sort of support flourishing populations? I was reading some of your work, and you mentioned that, for example, when urban-environmental reforms were introduced in the past, actually they were profoundly harmful to populations who were displaced and persecuted. And so this idea of flourishing, who flourishes, and how does the environment flourish in relation to these very unequal urban environmental reforms? So could you talk a little bit about some of that? If that is indeed the way you interpret the response to that question, and add in anything else that seems relevant?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Yeah, thank you. And that is very much the case. Environmental reforms and urban organisation has often been deployed as a civilising tool that has targeted Indigenous peoples and river and populations, stigmatised them and created problems for them and really displaced them. And arguably, the Amazon Cities have been a centre for settler colonial patterns. In Latin America, where there's been an explicit attempt to displace indigeneity and to even erase it. I don't think the frame of settler colonialism necessarily applies to Latin America as a whole, but in the Amazon, where there's arguably being a kind of a very long-term genocidal process, and in the cities where the effort to modernise has been framed against local populations, I think it very much is worth thinking with. I mean, I'm a historian and not a planner, and so I don't really have a recipe, but I do have politics and kind of ways I think the world would work better. And of course, the end goal to my mind should be to find a balance between growth, human development, environmental protection and a certain preservation of cultural authenticity without refining it, right. And I think this requires a mix between a clear agenda from central and regional governments, which has existed but has often assumed this sense of cities as enclaves, cities as civilising centres. And so what this would require is a more inclusive decision-making process within the cities which should empower historically excluded populations, like Indigenous populations, but also taking into account that these Indigenous population are often quite heterogeneous, that have evolved over time and transformed themselves and been in contact with other populations, that there is a relatively large percentage of Afro-descended populations in many Amazonian Cities, and that there are huge immigrant communities, both historical and more contemporary. My own ideal would be that these Amazonian Cities have true influxes of policies that allow for economic growth, which we cannot really escape because these cities are again relatively economically deprived so there needs to be certain engines for growth. So tourism and ecotourism is an important one, for example, these days, but there are many others. There are efforts to create centres for, you know, bioeconomy and green economy. My ideal would be through key investments in certain areas and infrastructure, that this could become global examples of innovative green cities that integrate Indigenous forms of knowledge that are respectful of Indigenous lifestyles, and that that make good use, in the best sense, of making use of Indigenous technologies while also benefiting these communities.

Caitlin Morrissey 

It strikes me as being quite-- well, incredibly complicated, because of the nation-states that are governing or claim various parts of the Amazon rainforest. And how does the rise of nation-states in this region affect or inhibit or stall or-- do you see much collaboration between the countries, or do they have various different agendas? Are there different ways of interpreting how the nation-states sit in relation to those goals?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Yes, the rise of nation-states is a crucial factor here, the rise and, of course, the permanent process of building nations and states has been critical and has created a lot of problems. So of about a dozen international conflicts in Latin America, in South America in 20th Century, almost all have taken place in Amazonia. So there is really-- and these cities have been-- many of these cities have been critical nodes for them, right? Because this is where the military bases are these are the populations that end up being more affected, etc. So this is just to give an example.

The way to turn the question around has been that competition, in some ways, has been key to the development of these cities in a not always negative way. So for example, it has fostered when one large Amazonian city has modernised its port, then the other ones started doing the same to compete. Same with the idea of the Free Trade Zone or Special Economic Zones, there has been a kind of a reactive process to that. So when the ones in Colombia, Leticia and Iquitos first started flirting with the idea, Manaus eventually put it to practice after decades of the local elites having pushed for it. So the competition has played an interesting role. At the same time, there have been very long-time processes of collaboration and of exchange, right, Indigenous cultures to begin with, of the Amazon, are not bound by national borders in the same way that other populations and phenomena are. They're not always the same, but they are in touch with each other. They have transformed themselves together. There have been also process of cultural and scientific exchange for a very long time between academic institutions and NGOs and between governments themselves in certain cases. So, yeah, there have been efforts through time. There are periods where this becomes, really, has become particularly strong. So, for example, after World War II, there was a kind of very clear effort to create a unity of scientific efforts in the region. But there is a lot that needs to be improved and one thing would be better transport networks that connect the region. At the same time, better and more coordinated forms of surveillance for preservation and against illegal economies and to the preservation of legal economies, actually, because there tends to be a sense of yes, illegal mining, but illegal mining and oil extraction also cause of kinds of problems because they act without a lot of governmental oversight. And one very practical kind of not that difficult to implement solution would be better integrated touristic circuits, for example. So the tourist would visit two or three of these cities rather than just going to one as a kind of launching place for an Amazon tour. You know, the river connects all these places and airports, and so there could be a way to frame this. And in some ways, this comes down to the importance of telling the story and presenting the Amazon as a single region, as a single place, so not thinking about the nation-states but thinking about Amazonia as one macro-region where the cities are key regional nodes. I think that is an important factor that can be changed through-- both for us academics, in the way we think about the region, but also in more you know, for how governments present the region high-end for tourist campaigns and through collaboration, even in the private sector.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much. And just to pick up, or actually to continue on this idea of governing, I suppose, in the Amazon region, for this more harmonious – if it can be achieved – urban-environmental relationship. Do you see much collaboration and coordination between different tiers of governance within the cities with other cities, and particularly across national borders?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Between the cities themselves there is not. Between the different tiers of governmental entities, yes, for sure and sometimes very conflictive and problematic ways in some cases. So the most obvious example, for example, for example, is the Manaus Free Trade Zone which was often framed as a project of the Brazilian military dictatorship, which is when it got started in 1967. But actually looking at the archival evidence, when I spend a lot of time in Manaus doing research there, it has been a local demand for a very long time, essentially since the rubber went bust in the 1910s and thereafter, a local commercial association, which is, you know, in a way, a conglomerate of the regional elite, had been demanding fiscal benefits for a very long time, and then they got them, eventually, from the Federal Government of Brazil, but the Federal Government of Brazil coordinated all these with regional authorities who gave fiscal benefits. And then the municipality of Manaus, so the city government actually gave free real estate to develop some of these industry, etc. So there have been coordinations. They have often been for problematic ends without taking into account environmental conditions, etc. But there are examples. At the transnational level for urban governance, there's a lot less that I know of besides the more obvious things like customs or some public health campaigns and things like that. At a national level, yes, and it could be a lot better, but yes, at the kind of transnational one, not that I know in particular, so that's something to certainly improve.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you. And I suppose, something that we've been touching on at different points in this conversation, you've mentioned that academics sometimes frame their research in relation to, for instance, the Colombian Amazon and cities within the Colombian Amazon taking a rather national framing of the Amazon, rather than the Amazon as a macro region. You've mentioned that the governments also do that, but how—so those just being two examples of different ways that the Amazon is framed. How well does the world, this obviously quite a large question, but how well do you see that the Amazon is or is not understood? And do you encounter common misconceptions or unhelpful framings, I suppose?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

So the crucial thing here is that the world largely ignores that these cities exist and that's why I often begin my talks and some grant proposals and things like that saying the Amazon is an urban region. More than 80% of the population of Amazon rainforest actually lives in cities and that often gets a lot of eyes open and people start paying attention. Because everybody wants to ‘save the rainforest’, quote, unquote, right? What does this mean, right? Because I think we are all aware that this has to involve the local population to make any sense and to be plausible at all. But the local population actually live in cities. So people in Manaus and Belém and Iquitos and Leticia etc need to make that decision because they are the ones who interact with the rainforest on an everyday basis in all kinds of ways. They drive cars there or decide to take public transport, right? But they crucially, I think above all, elect the authorities who actually govern this region so it’s indispensable to take into account that these cities exist, that they are there, and that they are in many regards, the places where the Amazon rainforest is managed and ruled.

The other aspect of these cities that I think deserves more attention once we acknowledge that they exist is that they're extremely interesting, cosmopolitan places. They have received immigration from all over the world. They have not only dozens of different strands of Indigenous traditions, but they also have received Portuguese and Spanish and Italian immigrants. They have large communities of descendants of people from the Middle East and of African descent and Asia, actually, and Catholics and Jews and Muslims. So some of the first synagogues and some of the first mosques in Brazil and Peru were constructed in the Amazon because of this large influx of population. Especially with diasporic populations, right? Large influxes of these communities during the rubber boom. But there is also large influxes of Chinese immigrants at certain points. So some of the most delicious chifas, which is what in Peru we call Chinese Peruvian restaurants, are in places like Iquitos. So they're incredibly rich cultural places. And this again, mixes with the Indigenous populations and in a place like Belém of Pará, which is, as I mentioned earlier, an Atlantic City as well, with a very deep colonial history. This is all mixed with Afro Brazilian traditions, and with a kind of deep history of slavery, but also of Afro-descendant resistance and of independent Black free communities. So this really creates very unique cultural landscapes that deserve to be known much better. And this is not only at the global level. At the national level as well, these cities are seen as largely exotic by populations both in Peru and Brazil and Colombia, and most people don't ever step a foot in these cities. They are far. They're difficult to reach, even when they're connected by roads, the roads are not great and the flights are expensive. In Brazil, it's more obvious, just because the immensity of the country, but in the other countries, it’s more of the quality of the infrastructure and the stereotypes that still are very much present.

Caitlin Morrissey 

It's so interesting. It's so bizarre, almost, that the world does still not realise that the Amazon is urban. From your assessment, how has this misunderstanding been produced and reproduced over time, despite the fact that there's tens of millions of people living in cities in the Amazon? How has this misconception come about, do you think?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Yeah, I think it has many roots. So one is this a need to have this trope of wilderness and, quote, unquote ‘savagery’ that Western narratives tend to require, I'm including, kind of, the national narratives of countries like Peru and Brazil in this. So the sense of the need of an internal conquest, the need to expand the nation-state essentially creates what this Haitian anthropologist Trouillot called the ‘savage slot’ right? And the Amazon tends to occupy that and that is very much dissociated from the idea of urbanisation. And this dissociation is problematic, right? Like these are not different things necessarily. Indigeneity and urbanisation are not that have to be separate at all, but in the national, global imaginaries, they tend to be, so that is a central aspect of it, I think.

There is also a more conspiratorial way to think about this, that is not only in terms of these tropes, but in the function that they have, which is to allow these regions to be-- and their populations to be exploited, that framing them in those terms is very much functional to the extractive interests. So very important to frame, sorry, to use the stories of these cities as an antidote against narratives that frame the Amazon as wilderness, as the bad sense, right, of a savage place, as kind of the epitome of the tropical, untamed world and its people as part of that. Also, in the more kind of positive aspects there's this kind of utopian vision of the Amazon as a place that can be framed as the opposite or the antidote to the flaws of modernity and capitalism. I think these cities show that for a very long time, and indeed, sometimes for centuries, the Amazon has very much been modern. It has been in contact with the forces of global capitalism, with the growth of nation-state, it has received enormous migratory flows. So it is not a region devoid of historical change. It has adapted. It has changed as Indigenous people have participated in different ways.

Caitlin Morrissey 

And I think going back, something that you were just saying reminded me of this idea of tabula rasa, which I think you've written about before, but particularly in places that have been colonised under settler colonialisation, it supports that to communicate that there was nothing there, the land was ready for taking. And like you say, this permits, in some way, this continuation of extraction and also taking over, just establishing a sense of belonging in lands that have obviously been home to people for tens and thousands of years prior to the colonial force incoming.

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

There is very much that idea of tabula rasa, and it is also tied in very problematic ways with the expansion of national sovereignty that I mentioned before and this kind of militarisation of territory. Because these are seen as lands where the defence of the national territory is seen as problematic and because there have been international conflicts there because state sovereignty is generally weak there. The notion of the tabula rasa, this denigration of Indigenous populations, which has been often explicit, remains explicit, just generate this very explosive means where you can actually frame the story of these regions a constant war against Indigenous populations. And I would argue that the processes of urban modernisation have been very much part of that. So the telling the story in a completely different way, I think, can be very important for that.

Caitlin Morrissey 

This leads us on quite nicely to our final question, which is again, quite, quite a big question, and I'm not sure-- there's an implicit question here about who should be telling the story about Amazon Cities? But what is the story that Amazon Cities should tell the world, and what are the risks of this not being told? Obviously, you've covered some of this already, but perhaps is there's something you'd like to add?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Yeah. So I think there are a number of possible answers to that, and I am very aware of my own positionality in this. A story that I think I could help tell is one of a kind of a critical history of urbanisation in long term, and of urban environmental conflict and of the ideologies that underlie it, and of the displacement that it has caused, without ignoring the important processes of local agency that have also shaped these cities. Because it's not only a history of top-down development against the Indigenous population, it is that, it is also history of people building their cities from below, creating cities, creating communities that they like and where they remain, of ethnogenesis, right of new kinds of people's immigration that create very unique space and very unique communities that are not replicable anywhere else in the world. And you have talked about similar examples in places like Istanbul in one of your first episodes, right? Like kind of food that could not happen anywhere else, and that, in some ways, symbolises the wealth of a city. So that's what I would-- that's what I try to do.

Another thing I think we can do from academia is to empower local voices. And this has different degrees of difficulty. In Brazil, there are very, very rich academic communities. There are massive public universities that produce a wealth of academic knowledge about these cities. So in Manaus and Belém have some of the largest networks of public universities in Brazil. They have Masters and PhD students that essentially, at least in my field in history, produce an enormous amount of dissertations and thesis about these regions. So I think it's important to empower these voices. That is less so in the other Amazonian countries.

And of course, then there's the more displaced voices of Indigenous communities and of generally traditionally excluded peoples, the history of Afro-descendants, history of women, the history of even populations that are in between all these groups and are harder to define and those have been in a very complicated space because Amazonia has not been excluded from academic research, including in the mainstream of the Western world, for a very long time. In fact, it arguably has been the centre of anthropological research and of ethnographic innovation since the outset of the discipline of anthropology, but not necessarily in cities, right? So this, indeed, this kind of local urban populations of the Amazon, Indigenous, and not only Indigenous, but riverine populations, have often played this awkward, liminal role in academic knowledge. So I think it's very important to integrate these voices, to empower local intellectuals to dialogue with them, to give them platforms, those of us who are lucky to be in institutions that have the resources and the platforms to do so. But it's not always easy because it does require access. It does require spending time there. These are not the most the easiest places in the world to navigate. You know, just to put a kind of very obvious example: internet in the Amazon is not very good, has not been very good for a long time. That alone makes an enormous-- including in the cities, it’s getting better, but it's slow. It's very difficult to do a Zoom talk from the Amazon. It is very expensive so you can start getting the image. But there's also generally the fact of needing to spend time there to get access and to gain the trust and to really establish genuine dialogue with voices, with people whose voices should be integrated as narratives. Yeah, I think that's two ways, I think, in which we could improve how we think about these places.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you very much. My final question to you is to ask you if there's anything else that you'd like to say that the questions that we have asked haven't elicited from you?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

It's a good question, and I don't think-- I don't think I have one. Let me just think for a second. Well, yeah, one thing I would say is that the Amazon is obviously constantly changing, and if there's a danger of reifying it and attributing characteristics that actually evolve, including the environmental ones, there are places that are becoming deforested. Climate change also happens in the Amazon. The river flows in different ways, in different years, and has different patterns. So everything is in motion, and it's like everywhere else, these things are in constant reformation. So even the environmental factors, which we might assume to be an immutable characteristic of the cities are in constant--

At the same time. I think it's very important, this is something I realised in my own research. It is really important when we study the Amazon to actually spend time there because there are things that just don't make it to the record in the way that one can experience there. And this is an anecdote I often tell, but I was once in kind of my favourite hangout place in Iquitos watching football game and there was this blackout in the city which is something that happens quite often. And then I was watching this game, and this place was fortunate enough to have its own power, electricity. What do you call it?

Caitlin Morrissey

Generator?

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Generator, yes. The whole city was out and this place had light. And I was like, okay, I can still watch my game. But suddenly, all the flying bugs in the world entered this place because they didn't have walls, it was an open space, and it was just madness, all kinds of mosquitoes and like pterodactyls almost attacking you and it was carnage. But that just made me think, whoa, imagine what this city of half a million people lit every night, does to the Amazon rainforest, right? Imagine what is this as an ecological phenomenon, and many things like that, right? Like just the humidity and the heat and the fact that you, you know, your first rain in the Amazon rainforest, you just go out with your umbrella and you literally last two seconds there, you have to just run away. The umbrella won't stop anything. So there's this very experiential aspect of the city that I think more people should experience in order to get a sense of it. And the other thing is that we absolutely do need more integrated, transnational, comparative perspective. So I've tried to do my bit by studying, doing comparative history of Amazon Cities, study Iquitos and Manaus. But there is a ton more work to be done in terms of smaller cities and the ones in Bolivia and Colombia and Ecuador, but also with rainforest cities in other parts of the world, right? There are rainforest cities in Asia with very similar characteristics. And whenever I'm in a conference and I read and listen to the work by colleagues who study, I don't know Singapore, sometimes these stories look so similar, and yet we're not in dialogue. And I'm sure there are comparable stories in Africa and all over the tropical world that could be told and really beyond urbanisation. So cities and the modernisation have a way of having very similar patterns and a way to de-exoticise the Amazon would be to compare and contrast and see what is actually different and what is, in fact, part of the tropes that we are repeating.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much. What an incredible hour it's been learning from you. Adrián, thank you.

Adrián Lerner Patrón 

Thank you, Caitlin.