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Revisiting the hierarchy of urban areas in the Brazilian Amazon: a multilevel approach

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Abstract

The Legal Brazilian Amazon, while the largest rainforest in the world, is also a region where most residents are urban. Despite close linkages between rural and urban processes in the region, rural areas have been the predominant focus of Amazon-based population-environment scholarship. Offering a focus on urban areas within the Brazilian Amazon, this paper examines the emergence of urban hierarchies within the region. Using a combination of nationally representative data and community based surveys, applied to a multivariate cluster methodology (Grade of Membership), we observe the emergence of sub-regional urban networks characterized by economic and political inter-dependency, population movement, and provision of services. These networks link rural areas, small towns, and medium and large cities. We also identify the emergence of medium-size cities as important nodes at a sub-regional level. In all, the work provides insight on the proposed model of ‘disarticulated urbanization’ within the Amazon by calling attention to the increasing role of regional and sub-regional urban networks in shaping the future expansion of land use and population distribution in the Amazon. We conclude with a discussion of implications for increasing intra-regional connectivity and fragmentation of conservation areas and ecosystems in the region.

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Notes

  1. The Legal Brazilian Amazon—defined for planning and administrative purposes by the federal government in 1966 by Law No. 5173—includes 760 municipalities currently distributed across nine states: Pará, Amazonas, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Roraima, Amapá, Acre, Maranhão, and Tocantins. The western side of Maranhão is included in the Legal Brazilian Amazon, while the other states are completely included in the administrative region.

  2. Economic-ecological zoning (EEZ) is a spatially explicit planning instrument, usually developed at the state level, which includes an assessment of environmental and socioeconomic conditions and provides directions aiming at reconciling economic activities and environmental conservation (Sombroek and Carvalho 2000).

  3. We thank one of four reviewers for the suggestion of principals (d) and (e).

  4. Unfortunatelly the statistics about urban area of Amazonian municipalities were not available from online sources. For that reason, we present in Table 2 the population density of the entire municipalities (state capitals) instead of their urban areas. This table, however, is shown illustratively only. For our GoM analysis, we use the urban perimeter from IBGE, although the distinction between urban and rural still carries some imprecision.

  5. For analysis of trends in urbanization, we used the Brazilian Demographic censuses from 1970 to 2000.

  6. In the Portuguese, “domicílios coletivos”.

  7. The urban area is based on the classification adopted by IBGE in the Brazilian Census, according to the municipality law from September 1, 1991 (IBGE 1991, 2000). Therefore, for all the variables used from the Demographic Census, we selected the observations classified as in the urban sector, which includes: (a) urbanized area (city); (b) not urbanized area (distrital seats), and (c) isolated urban area. We recognize that the classification of observations into urban sector is somewhat imprecise and may include more than one settlement, but is the closest we can get using the micro data from IBGE. For the geographical variables, we considered the urban perimeter also provided by IBGE. We explicitly recognize that some bias still persists due to likely variation in measurement from one census to the other.

  8. Garcia et al. (2007) use a slightly different strategy. They define two extreme profiles representing the ends of the ranking and calibrate the observations (municipalities) by means of the degree of pertinence, g ik . This implies a continuous hierarchy, differing from our calibration of three extreme profiles. The additional profile in our calibration is a response to empirical findings from Costa and Brondizio (n.d.) of important node cities representing municipalities with average population size. Even when we tried different calibration, such as the deffuzification with k = 2, as proposed by the authors, our general results did not change significantly.

  9. For instance, if a selected urban section of the municipality had 23% of its urban households served with garbage collection service, it was classified as belonging to the third decile of the garbage collection service distribution (from 20 to 29%).

  10. The first regional level was based on the main capitals included in the extreme profile, “Medium Cities and Urban Agglomerations”, plus Belém. The second regional level incorporated the other capital cities in the same extreme profile. The first sub-regional level was based on the remaining cities classified as a member of the previous extreme profile. The second sub-regional level included the cities classified in the mixed profile, “Medium cities with good infrastructure”. The first local level includes cities with the highest urban population growth rates. The second local level includes cities with average urban population growth rates. The third local level represents cities with the lowest population growth rate.

  11. According to Browder and Godfrey (1997), the main difference between a populist and a corporativist frontier is the degree of capital penetration and the scale of production, although the authors consider other elements which encompass such distinction. While Santarém is part of the government project of small-scale agricultural colonization scheme back to the 1970s, the recent introduction of large scale soybean production and export is redefining its orientation towards the national and global economy. This recent penetration of agribusiness has developed in tandem with surviving smallholders who contribute significantly to regional food production but whose production is mostly based on limited access to technologies.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Anthony Cak, Scott Hettrick, Álvaro D’Antona, and Andrea Siqueira for logistical support in the field and laboratory, and constructive reviews of this article. We thank four anonymous reviewers and the editor for their valuable comments and suggestions. The larger project of which this is a part benefits from the experience and input of these investigators, and funding from the National Institutes of Health (grant no. HD35811-04/07, Phase II),National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/LBA (Grant no. NNG06GD86A, Phase III) and National Science Foundation/USD (grant no. BCS-05-27578, Estuary). We finally thank Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), the Department of Anthropology, the Antrhopological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change (ACT) at Indiana University, the Centro de Desenvolvimento e Planejamento Regional e Urbano (CEDEPLAR/UFMG), and Departamento de Planejamento Regional (UNIVAP), institutions which the authors belong or collaborate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Brown University, Maxcy Hall 112 George Street, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Gilvan Guedes

  2. Anthropological Center for Training and Research on Global Environmental Change, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Gilvan Guedes, Sandra Costa & Eduardo Brondízio

  3. Department of Demography, University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil

    Gilvan Guedes

  4. Department of Regional Planning, University of Vale do Paraíba, São José dos Campos, Brazil

    Sandra Costa

  5. Department of Anthropology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

    Eduardo Brondízio

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  1. Gilvan Guedes
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Correspondence to Gilvan Guedes.

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Table 4 Variables used in the fuzzy cluster models in order to establish an urban hierarchy in the Legal Brazilian Amazon
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Guedes, G., Costa, S. & Brondízio, E. Revisiting the hierarchy of urban areas in the Brazilian Amazon: a multilevel approach. Popul Environ 30, 159–192 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-009-0083-3

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