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 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.