This is a list of the largest cities in Brazil. Brazil has a relatively high reported level of urbanization, with 8 out of every 10 Brazilians living in cities. The criteria used by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) in determining whether households are urban or rural, however, is based on political divisions, not on the built environment. A town is any seat of a district (the lowest political division); a city is the seat of a municipality. By such criteria, Brazil has over 5,000 cities and 12,000 townscitation needed. It is estimated that, if a more traditional criteria (size of human agglomeration, cultural and economic institutions, regional centrality, paving and street lighting) were used, perhaps 65% of Brazil's population would be urban, rather than 80%.citation needed
Cities in Brazil, except for the state of São Paulo, are usually not arranged in a network, but rather on various "export paths" to seaside portscitation needed. Some geographerswho? have called this an "archipelago", and the most important cities are on the coast or close to it. State capitals are also each the largest city in its state, the exceptions being Vitória in Espírito Santo, and Florianópolis, the capital of Santa Catarina; there are also non-capital metropolitan areas in São Paulo (Campinas, Santos, Paraíba Valley), Minas Gerais (Vale do Aço), Rio Grande do Sul (Sinos Valley), and Santa Catarina (Itajaí Valley). Most of the non-capital large cities in Brazil are in the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Paraná.
Some of the principal Brazilian cities are planned cities; the most famous of these is Brasília, which represents, with Chandigarh in the Punjab, India, the acme of the Modernist school of architecture and urbanism.
Currently, as of 2004, IBGE officially recognizes 15 major RMs (Região Metropolitana; Metropolitan Region in English), where approximately 32% of the Brazilian population (55 million people out of 180 million) lives. These RMs are responsible for approximately half of the Brazilian GDP and more than 70% of the Brazilian annual industrial production.
1 Data of 2005. 2 Also known as Baixada Santista. 3 Though Vitória is Espírito Santo's capital, the largest city in the state and in this metropolitan region is Vila Velha. 4 Not defined legally.
