METROPOLITAN REGIONS IN BRAZILIAN NORTHEAST : REGIONAL DYNAMICS AND TERRITORIAL DISPARITIES
Territory management. Indicators system. Integrated region of economic development. Northeast.
The Metropolitan Region (MR) is a territorial planning strategy standardized by the states/Union that aim at regional “balance”. The geographical issue evoked in this thesis is to what extent RM has effective action as a region. For that, the objective was to analyze the MRs of the Brazilian Northeast under the Territory Management’s perspective, discussing the limits of its effectiveness based on its regional dynamics and territorial disparities. As a methodological course, the Regional Analysis Method’s fundamentals were adopted and, guided by a quantitative and qualitative perspective, the analysis system was built, structured in 10 indicators and 84 comparative variables of territory management. In terms of methodological procedures, the following were carried out: bibliographical research, based on Geography authors and themes related to MR, documentary research, with official institutions such as the State Legislative Assembly, data collection in 14 official databases, fieldwork in the MRs’ city- headquarters, in which interviews were conducted with managers and technicians linked to municipal and state institutions that work in territorial planning, in the laboratory stage cartographic work, data tabulation, construction of the indicator system and elaboration of business intelligence were carried out. The results show that in the MRs, regionalization as a tool is imposed and, by imposing itself, demonstrates that the RMs instituted, especially in Northeast interior, correspond to an instrument to regulate a group of municipalities that have not established mechanisms for planning and metropolitan management. These interior regions show themselves in a geographic fact crisis, both in the “regional” condition and in the “metropolitan” condition. The different levels of regionalization performed by the MRs allowed categorizing them into regions that: 1) regionalizes and metropolises; 2) regionalizes and partially metropolitanizes; 3) regionalizes but does not metropolize; 4) partially regionalizes and does not metropolize; 5) does not regionalize and does not metropolize.