The degree of urbanisation in Brazil

Abstract

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 Cooperation 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 km 2 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.

Human mobility and urban malaria risk in the main transmission hotspot of Amazonian Brazil

“…Half of its 18,638 inhabitants reside in the town of Mâncio Lima, the only urban area in the municipality (07˚36'51" S, 72˚53'45" W). We note that urban areas in Brazil are defined according to relatively arbitrary administrative rules that do not necessarily consider population density and other internationally adopted criteria [32]. Here we delimitate the town of Mâncio Lima essentially as done by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) but extend the urban area to two urbanized neighborhoods (Iracema to the Northwest and Pé da Terra to the Southeast), which are situated along the main road that crosses the town, following the "urbanicity" criteria developed by Dal'Asta and colleagues [33] for use in this setting.…”

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Infectious Diseases in Brazil: A Case Study on Dengue Infections

“…Urban municipalities are the minority in Brazil: only 21% of Brazilian municipalities are classified as urban. The percentage of the rural area varies from 35% to 42% in the North, Northeast, and South [18]. The Southeast and Central-West regions, respectively home to the megacities of Rio and São Paulo and the Federal District, set themselves apart with the lowest number of rural municipalities.…”

Cohort profile: the Mâncio Lima cohort study of urban malaria in Amazonian Brazil

“…The study site, the town of Mâncio Lima (07°36'51"S, 72°53'45"W), is situated in the upper Juruá Valley region of Acre State, westernmost Brazil, close to the border with Peru ( online supplemental figure 1 ). Because urban areas in Brazil are defined according to relatively arbitrary administrative rules that do not necessarily consider population density and other internationally adopted criteria, 18 we delimitated the town of Mâncio Lima essentially as done by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics but extended the urban area to two urbanised neighbourhoods (Iracema and Pé da Terra) situated along the main road that crosses the town, following ‘urbanicity’ criteria developed for use in this setting. 19 At the time of the study onset, the municipality of Mâncio Lima had an annual parasite incidence (number of new laboratory-confirmed malaria cases per 1000 people per year) estimated at 422.8, the highest for a municipality in Brazil.…”