What Ancient Amazonian Urbanism Can Teach Today's Cities

Almost half of Indigenous people in Amazonia now live in cities. Yet urban planning and public policy have often overlooked the deep connections between Indigenous societies, urban life, and the region's landscapes. For decades, Amazonia was portrayed as an empty frontier or a sparsely populated rural periphery. This narrative ignored the profound demographic collapse that followed European colonization and obscured the role Indigenous Peoples played in shaping the region's territories and settlements.

Today, Amazonian cities face growing challenges related to extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, water management, and urban expansion. Understanding how Indigenous societies organized settlements, managed forests, and developed resilient territorial systems over millennia can help inform more sustainable urban futures.

Drawing on the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) publication Cities in Amazonia: People and Nature in Harmony, this blog explores how archaeology is reshaping our understanding of the contributions of Indigenous Peoples to the formation of Amazonian cities and landscapes and shows how this legacy can contribute to more resilient cities.

Archeological research has fundamentally changed our understanding of Amazonia's past. The region has been continuously inhabited by Indigenous Peoples for at least 13,000 years. By the time Europeans arrived, in CE 1492, there were between 8 to 10 million Indigenous people living in the greater Amazonia. Far from existing in isolated communities, many lived within large and interconnected settlement systems.

In several parts of the region, archaeological research has revealed large groups of settlements composed mainly of earthworks, wooden structures, drainage canals, and transformed forests, arranged as clusters of villages connected by roads and surrounded by cultivated or managed forests, long before colonial orthogonal street grids were introduced.

These settlement systems took different forms across the region. In some areas, researchers have documented extensive settlement clusters integrated with agricultural landscapes. Elsewhere, monumental earthworks and elevated settlements demonstrate sophisticated forms of territorial organization and collective labor. In the Upano Basin, LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) surveys have uncovered thousands of earthen platforms linked by drainage canals and extensive road networks (see map below for the location of these and other archaeological sites across the region).

Although these settlements differed from European cities, they reveal large-scale forms of planning, infrastructure, and social organization. Together, they show that Amazonia supported diverse urban traditions long before the introduction of colonial street grids and city models.
 

These findings have reshaped how we understand what constitutes a city. Conventional definitions of urbanism often emphasize dense populations, permanent stone architecture, and clearly defined boundaries. In Amazonia, however, urbanism took shape through the transformation and management of landscapes rather than through stone walls.

Settlements were integrated into broader ecological systems. Boundaries between living spaces and their surroundings were often permeable, creating mosaics of villages, gardens, orchards, managed forests, and transportation routes. Communities combined permanent infrastructure with seasonal mobility, challenging simple distinctions between sedentary and mobile populations.

Paths and roadways, known as varadores, connected settlements and facilitated exchanges across extensive territories. These corridors were often lined with useful plant species and embedded within productive landscapes. Rather than separating cities from nature, Amazonian urban systems were built through continuous interaction with forests.

A defining feature of this urbanism was the creation of agroforestry systems. They reflected deliberate ecological management. People transformed surrounding forests into highly productive environments rich in fruit trees, medicinal plants, and other useful species. This contrasts sharply with frequent contemporary patterns of deforestation associated with extensive cattle ranching and land conversion.

Research on Amazonian biodiversity further highlights the long-term impact of these practices. Of approximately 16,000 tree species identified in Amazonia, just 227 species account for nearly half of all individual trees, including culturally and economically significant taxa such as açaí, paxiúba palm, rubber tree and cacao. Many of these have been cultivated and managed by Indigenous communities for millennia

Equally significant are the anthropic dark earths known as terras pretas. Created through the long-term management of organic waste, these fertile soils now cover between 2 and 3% of the Brazilian Amazonia and remain vital for agriculture today. Taken together, these practices have created a distinctive biocultural legacy that continues to shape Amazonian landscapes.

The relevance of these findings extends well beyond archaeology. Today, around 70% of the Amazonian population lives in cities, making urban areas central to both the protection of the biome and the quality of life of its people. Amazonian cities remain deeply connected to surrounding forests, rivers and rural territories. Urban residents depend on forest and river systems for food, livelihoods, cultural practices and transportation. Products such as açaí, fish, bushmeat and timber move from forest territories into urban markets and households.

Many Indigenous and riverine households maintain ties to both urban neighborhoods and in forest territories, moving between them seasonally and sustaining social, economic and cultural networks across multiple locations. Agriculture, fishing, seed management and river navigation therefore remain integral parts of urban life throughout much of Amazonia, challenging planning approaches that treat cities and nature as separate domains and pointing instead to a regional model in which urban and forest systems support one another.

Indigenous knowledge offers valuable insights for addressing contemporary urban challenges. Practices such as integrating orchards and native vegetation into settlements, managing organic waste to improve soil fertility, and designing infrastructure that works with ecological processes can help strengthen resilience and environmental sustainability.

These approaches are particularly relevant for green infrastructure, resilient techniques, water management, food security, and biodiversity conservation. They also align with broader efforts to promote urban development pathways that recognize the interdependence of people and nature.

Amazonia's future will be increasingly urban. As cities continue to expand, the challenge is not only to accommodate growth but to do so in ways that strengthen ecological resilience and improve quality of life.

Rethinking the urban future of Amazonia requires recognizing the knowledge and practices that Indigenous Peoples have developed over millennia. Archaeology demonstrates that Indigenous societies developed sophisticated systems of settlement, mobility, forest management, and environmental stewardship over thousands of years. Their knowledge and practices are preserved not only in archaeological sites, but continue to live through contemporary Indigenous communities, territories, and ways of life.

Recognizing this biocultural heritage is more than an acknowledgment of the past. It is an opportunity to build cities that are better adapted to the realities of Amazonian environments. By working with Indigenous Peoples and recognizing their knowledge and territorial priorities in planning, governance, and investment decisions, policymakers and development institutions can contribute to more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable urban futures.

A Shared Agenda for Amazonian Cities

Building this future calls for a perspective that moves beyond isolated projects toward integrated, long-term territorial approaches. Through programs like IDB's Amazonia Forever, its support to MINURVI's working group for the eight Amazonian countries, and to the Amazon Cities Forum, the IDB has been working alongside governments and regional organizations to advance a shared agenda for sustainable urban development, and to help build the collective knowledge, like the publication that inspired this blog, that can guide it.

Additionally, the Amazonia Forever Program supports Indigenous organizations and communities through projects that strengthen their bioeconomy initiatives and territorial governance. Many of the products generated by Indigenous-led enterprises are marketed and sold in urban centers, creating important economic links between rural territories and cities. 

As these economic and social ties grow, it becomes increasingly important to recognize that Amazonian cities and Indigenous territories are not separate worlds, but deeply interconnected ones. The task ahead is to bring this interconnectedness—and the knowledge, perspectives, and ways of life it represents—into how Amazonian cities are imagined, planned, and built for generations to come.

For further information, see the IDB publication of Cities in Amazonia: People and Nature in Harmony, which was launched during the COP30 Local Leaders Forum in Rio de Janeiro.