Cities in Brazil
Brazil is an immense country that covers a very vast territory. The climates and culture vary greatly among different parts of the country, and there are many fascinating cities across the country.
Almost eight out of ten Brazilians live in a city, which is a fairly high reported rate of urbanization. However, it should be taken into consideration that the criteria used by Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics to determine whether a household is urban or rural is based on political divisions and tot the build environment which may make the statistic slightly skewed.
A town is described as any seat of a district, which is the lowest political division, and city is described as the seat of a municipality. Today, Brazil has over fifty-five hundred municipalities and over seighty-one percent of Brazilians live in an urban area.
In all Brazilian states except Espirito Sanot and Santa Catrina, the capital of the state is the largest city in the state. Of course, in each state, there are also other metropolitan areas besides the capital. Most of the largest cities in Brazil besides the capitals are located in the states of Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, Santa Catarina and Parana.
Many of the principle Brazilian cities were planned cities, for example the famous city of Brasilia. This city represents the acme of the Modernist school of architecture and urbanism.
In Brazil, the populations of cities are based on the population of the municipality where the city is located as opposed to its metropolitan area. The top ten most populous cities in Brazil are Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Brasilia (Brazil’s capital city), Fortaleza, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Manaus, Recife, and Porto Alegre. The most populous city, Sao Paulo, had almost eleven million inhabitants in 2008.
In 2004, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics officially recognized fifteen major Metropolitan Regions where it was estimated that thirty-two percent of the Brazilian population lived, which amounts to fifty-five million people out of one-hundred and eighty million people. These fifteen Metropolitan Regions amount for about half of the Brazilian GDP and over seventy percent of Brazil’s annual industrial production. In 2006, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics measured the ranked the top metropolitan areas in Brazil. The top ten most metropolitan Brazilian areas are Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Salvador, Recife, Fortaleza, Curitiba, Campinas, and Belem. The largest metropolitan area in Brazil, Sao Paulo, had a population of twenty and a half million in 2006.
Because Brazil is such a vast country and covers such an expansive territory, it is extremely difficult to be constantly measuring the size of all cities; the exact estimates are generally influx. It is also more difficult to keep tabs on some of the lower socioeconomic areas. The large amounts of both domestic and international tourism, it is difficult to know the exact number of people in the country of Brazil in any given time. To be sure, the various cities of Brazil are fascinatingly diverse in their cultural offerings, largely a product of the diverse population.