Were there other societies with towns and cities? The impression I've got is basically "the Incas, and jungle tribes" for all of pre-Colombian S.America. I'm sure it's more complex than that.
Yes! The Chimu are a fascinating example it was an extremely hierarchical and centralized Kingdom that existed on the Northern desert coastal plain of Peru around 800 ad till it was conquered by the Inca in the 1460s. The capital of the Chimu was at Chan Chan which is most famous for it's 10 ciudadelas, massive fortified complexes that served the Chimu Kings as palaces and administrative foci of the empire in life, and after death as a burial place for the king. Because of the Chimu practice of split inheritance the king's direct heir would inherit political power but all wealth the king had accumulated in life in terms of land and access to labor (the Chimu like the inca didn't have a system of money) would go to the secondary heirs who would manage it as a bureaucracy out of the former Kings ciudadela, and also ritually honoring the former king, with the new king building his own own and expected to secure his own wealth through conquest or massive land reclamation projects using intricate systems of canals to reclaim the desert and turn it into farmland. The Chimu state was extremely centralized; they practiced a form of redistribution, where all resources were basicallu run through and controlled by the state.
it's actually hard to find good information about the Chimu on the internet; but Khan academy has a wonderful article about them. I'm currently reading Chan Chan: Andean Desert City which is my sourcr. It was written in 80s and based on Archaeological excavations conducted in the 70s at Chan Chan and other parts of of the north coastal plain that that the Chimu occupied. It's probably pretty outdated now; but still a really good overview of them. I can't speak for the rest of South America but even before the rise of the Chimu, urbanization and agriculture on the North Coastal plain goes back as far as 1800 bc.