Introduction: Frontier Thinking and the Amazon Region

Abstract

The chapter introduces the aims and content of the book, highlighting its focus on peripheral socio-economic areas and marginal regions where development, as traditionally defined, is still in the nascent stages. These peripheries constitute new frontiers for economic development and typically unveil a disconcerting combination of change and continuity, if not frustration. Frontiers contain the germ of renovation, the chance to begin something anew and avoid the failures experienced elsewhere. However, almost invariably, the result is a missed opportunity to enact a different trajectory, and the frontier becomes a spectre of what it could have been. Because socio-spatial frontiers emerge, primarily, to mitigate and ameliorate the troubles and insufficiencies that characterise the politico-economic centres from where people, capital and institutions originated, the central claim of the book is that frontiers are characterised by built-in obsolescence and fleeting hopes of renewal. This is the most essential paradox, among many others, of the genesis of frontiers: the frontier space is pregnant with opportunities and possibilities, but in most cases, it delivers only stillborn dreams and expectations.