Organização Regional do Brasil

An understanding of the regional organization of Brazil has an evident appeal for whoever is engaged in the study of the various social sciences.There is: 1) the incentive to explore the evolution of Territorial Division in this country in differentiated units, a process which belongs to Brazilian development; 2) the interest in setting up a new system of regional (division, as a better implement for research; and 3) the fact that a knowledge of Brazilian regional organization is an indispensable background for planning. The region is not an independent or isolated unit, but a dynamically integrated part of a larger whole. With the development of a tendency to involve the entire surface of the globe in an integrating mechanism of an economic nature, a new form of regional differentiation is coming into promnence: the formation of modern economic regions, strictly so-called. Geographical regions, as forms of organization, are held to be “continuities and discontinuities resulting from the convergence of the present activities of a human group, the conditions linking it to the past, and the conditions of the physical environment” In the region, it is possible to descry the elemnts that confer unity to it and bonds that give it organic cohesion, reflecting aspects of the regional way of living in space and time. Brazil is the mixture of an old country and a new one; it is old, because when the great modern migrations took place, Brazil was already set in the framework of a traditionally agrarian society, batied on slave labor; the structures that have been organized since colonial times resist modernization and are stiffened with elements of underdevelopment; it is new, because the European migrations of recent times amounted to a kind of renewal, and the inflow was not simply dissolved into the midst of the established population. This gave rise to an overlay of new social forms on the old Portuguese Brazilian society. With 45% of the population in the towns and 20% of the active population engaged in industry, Brazil, by its satisfies of industrial production, shows itself to be a special type of underdeveloped country. The industries and the towns already constitute a domestic market, acting on the organization of agrarian activities and on regional organization in general. Industrialization, in the sense that activities of the secondary sector can operate the molding of economic evolution, is recent, and through it the present regional organization has cl