Brazilian metropoli: an analysis of the circuits of urban economy

Abstract

Over the last thirty years the modernization of Brazilian territory has been accompanied by intense processes of urbanization and metropolitanization. To understand the new metropolitan dynamics that have emerged, we discuss the conditions of the built environment and the different circuits of production. The activities linked to scientific-technological production, consulting the financial system and international trade constitute the upper circuit, which is also constituted by a marginal contribution of mixed forms. As an indirect result of this modernization, another set, of manufacturing, commercial and service forms with low degrees of capital, technology and organization, constitutes the lower circuit. The explanatory variables in the analysis, using empirical results, are location and the built environment, technologies, relations of employment, information, marketing finance and the connection with public sector power. The increasing distance between both circuits and the ways of overcoming this seem to be the most pressing problems of metropolitan dynamics and current policy.

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