Migration and Urbanization in Brazil: Processes of Spatial Concentration and Deconcentration and the Recent Debate (original) (raw)

OVERVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY URBANIZATION IN BRAZIL

Academia Letters, 2021

This article is an adaptation of an excerpt from a PhD thesis called Fragmentos Urbanos: Segregação socioespacial em Uberlândia-MG, also published as a book with the title Retrourbanism-New Urbanization Models of the 21st Century in a Global South Context. The urbanisation process observed in Brazil today comes from an attempt to change established by the 1988 Constitution, through a chapter dedicated to Urban Policy. Several attempts came to regulate this chapter, which only happened with the City Statute (Brazilian federal law), Law 10,257, of July 10, 2001. In the context observed in the 1980s, the process of economic globalization intensifies, since the bipolarizing effect of the world is undone and neoliberal policies are established. One of its main characteristics is the global economy, which according to Castells (1999), was only possible due to the new infrastructure provided by information and communication technologies. The territorial exclusion process established over the 1970s had serious results made explicit in the cities in the late 1990s. Maricato (2001) highlights two consequences of this process, one of which is what the author calls environmental predation, due to this dynamic of housing exclusion and spontaneous settlements, and the increase in urban violence, felt most intensely in areas marked by homogeneous poverty, in large cities. The election of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) takes place amid the population's desire to maintain economic stability, achieved by the previous government, but also the need for urgent improvements in social policy. In pursuit of urban policies initiated in 2001, with Law 10.257 (City Statute), Lula implements, in his government, the Ministry of Cities. According to the ministry's own website

Brazil: accelerated metropolization and urban crisis

Area Development and Policy, 2016

Migration and rapid demographic growth in large metropolitan areas in Brazil are associated with high levels of territorial and social inequality. Four indicators of an associated urban crisis are examined: inequality in housing conditions, per capita income and years of schooling; a poor (or lack of a) public transport system, urban congestion and traffic accidents; high levels of violence and murder and the rapid diffusion of diseases linked to the lack of sanitary facilities. Territorial guidelines for a more balanced polycentric urban network and an active urban policy are required to address these issues but face a lack of political will.

Brazil's Early but Unfinished Urban Transition

Veiga (2002) looked at the multiplication of municipalities, especially in the period after the 1988 Constitution and observed that, in 84% of the 5,507 municipalities described by the Census, the official "urban" seat had 20,000 or less inhabitants. He noted that one particular municipality (União da Serra in the state of Rio Grande do Sul), only had 18 people in its "urban" segment. To Veiga, this over-dimensioning of the "urban" reflects society's identification of rurality with backwardness and degradation and as a characteristic to be "overcome". These views contrast with those of another author (Caiado, 2003) who, writing from the perspective of the state of São Paulo, sees urbanism stretching out into rural areas to such an extent that the rural-urban dichotomy has become meaningless. According to Caiado, the main phenomena at work are conurbation, metropolization and the expansion of non-agricultural activities in rural areas. More than anything else, this brings into question the functionality of municipal limits since the spatial location of economic, environmental and other realities extend beyond the limits of such units. Such contrasting perspectives reflect not only the classic problem of defining "urban" in ways that will be acceptable to most people, but also the realities of a large and very heterogeneous country which includes both heavily occupied and dense areas as well as large and sparsely-settled regions. Such disparities are an invitation to "half-full" versus "half-empty" arguments. Ultimately, the fact that a majority of municipalities have small urban populations does not detract from the fact that the country has a large number of very "urban" localities and that these house a significant proportion of the total population.

A Century of the Evolution of the Urban System in Brazil

Review of Urban & Regional Development Studies, 2013

In this paper, we study the hitherto unexplored evolution of the size distribution of 185 urban areas in Brazil between 1907 and 2008. We find that the power law parameter of the size distribution of the 100 largest urban areas increases from 0.63 in 1907 to 0.89 in 2008, which confirms an agglomeration process in which the size distribution has become more unequal. A panel fixed effects model pooling the same range of urban size distributions provides a power law parameter equal to 0.53, smaller than those from cross-sectional estimation. Clearly, Zipf's Law is rejected. The lognormal distribution fits the city size distribution quite well until the 1940s, but since then applies to small and medium size cities only. These results are consistent with our understanding of historical-political and socio-economic processes that have shaped the development of Brazilian cities.

The degree of urbanisation in Brazil

Regional Statistics, 2019

Urban and rural are two central concepts used by a wide range of policymakers, researchers, national administrations, and international organisations. An option for defining urban areas is the use of the degree of urbanisation, a measure that classifies an area within a region based on a range of factors including population size, population density, the degree and extent of the built-up area, and many other concepts. A new approach proposed jointly by the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy, European Commission (DG REGIO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) not only uses the traditional criterion of population density to determine the degree of urbanisation, but it also includes a contiguity rule, and it is applied to spatial units of the same size (1 km2 grid square cells). The authors have performed a comparison study using this new approach and two other methodologies, one proposed by the OECD in 2011 and the other developed by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) in 2017. The results demonstrate that the degree of urbanisation for 42% of the Brazilian municipalities was the same using any of the three methods. The results using the DG REGIO/OECD approach and the IBGE methodology matched for approximately 70% of the municipalities. Concerning the differences observed in the results of the test, it is necessary to consider the purpose and scale of each method: while the IBGE methodology intends to provide local and detailed results, the purpose of the other two methodologies is global and more generic.

Three Models of Urbanization in Brazil: RETROurbanism

International Journal of Development Research, 2020

In this article we will demonstrate the process observed in contemporary Brazilian cities, from the perspective of the implementation of the Urban Agenda and the political processes that culminate in an unfinished agenda.We also strives to understand the influence of the real estate and financial markets on the city's production. In this context, we will identify the form of action of public, private and social movements in the production of the contemporary city, analyzing it from the point of view of its urbanization scales, in order to understand its role as a business and the role of neoliberalism in the urbanization processes in the cities of the global south, specifically in Brazil.We will conclude this text defining the three models or urbanization observed in the contemporary Brazilian cities. Copyright © 2020, Guilherme Augusto Soares da Motta. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.