MEDIUM CITIES, COMMUNICATION AND REGION:

REGION: IDENTIFYING FUNCTIONAL URBAN AREAS IN REGIONS OF RIO GRANDE DO SUL – BRAZIL

Abstract

In the current context of economic globalisation and territorial fragmentation, the notion of polycentrism acquires importance in the analysis of regional development and territorial cohesion processes and policies. Medium-sized cities centralise, articulate and mediate these flows in regional spaces. The idea of polycentric, more balanced and cohesive regions gains strength both in international academic debates in the field of social sciences, in general, and
regional science, in particular, and in the governmental sphere, especially within the European
Union, as it is incorporated into public policies on land-use planning and regional development.
From a critical apprehension of these studies on polycentrism and its necessary adaptation to the Brazilian reality, we methodologically used the functional urban areas approach in the analysis of the centrality of medium-sized cities and their spatial interactions in their regions of influence, in the territory of Rio Grande do Sul, in Southern Brazil. We seek to verify how the constitution process and the dynamics of spatial interactions within functional urban areas are presented, as well as which are the relations and interactions that the respective medium cities centralize and establish with the other cities they polarize, in four functional planning regions of the state of Rio Grande do Sul (Regions 2, 7, 8 and 9), selected for analysis. Likewise, we seek to understand how the centrality of medium cities is presented in these regions, the territorial division of labour and its conditioning factors and reflections on the dynamics of urbanization and functioning of the regional urban network.