Geography
Areas of Influence of Cities – 2007
With the release of this publication, IBGE continues its traditional line of research on the Brazilian urban network, whose fundamental milestone is the study Divisão do Brasil em regiões funcionais urbanas (Division of Brazil into urban functional regions), conducted in 1996, by means of a field research, aspiring to learn the relations among Brazilian cities based on the flow analysis of goods and services.
Aiming at portraying the new picture of this network and allowing intertemporal comparisons, new surveys were conducted, also by means of field researches, in 1978 and 1993, which originated the study Areas of influence of cities. Together with the pioneer version, this brought important contributions to the comprehension of different forms of spatial organization of society in time.
In the 2007 update, object of this publication, there was an attempt to describe the hierarchy of urban centers and delimit the associated areas of influence, starting from the aspects of federal and enterprise management and the supply of equipment and services, so as to identify the territory points from which decisions are issued and the command over a network of cities is taken. For such, data from a specific research were used, and secondarily, data from other surveys carried out by IBGE, as well as records originated from public organizations and private enterprises.
The publication is structured in three parts. The first one presents the research results, brings some reflections on the relations established among the centers, and highlights the main changes in the current Brazilian urban network considering the results obtained in previous studies. The second part discourses on the methodological aspects and explains the conceptual differences that characterize each of the studies conducted in these four decades. The last part contains the results of intermediate classifications adopted in the construction of the current picture of the urban network in the country, and offers a general view on the flows reported at the survey questionnaires. The maps that portray enterprise relations of the highest-level centers are presented as an appendix. The CD-ROM enclosed with the publication contains, besides the information of the printed volume, the matrix constructed from data collected in the questionnaire, whose diversity and information richness propitiated varied analyses to those interested in the theme.