GEO Brasil - UNEP

34 Industrialisation and Spatial Reorganisation
The transformations in the international production structure have caused the
rationale for the spatial distribution of industries and their complementary
operations to be significantly redesigned The new spatial order established at
global level causes major metropolitan areas and their traditional industrial
activities to become meaningless and substitutes them with a variety of services
that serve both the domestic and foreign plants
At the international level, the location trend imposed globally is the concentration
of enterprises in the subcontracting sector in metropolitan areas and the
dispersion of plants throughout moderate-sized cities or regions
Box 1 - Recent strategies for industrial location
A reduction of industrial production activities and an expansion of the service
segment in Brazilian metropolises are consequences of trends in the globalisation
of the economy As Geiger (2000) described, companies, particularly
transnational companies, have been relocating their plants from metropolises
to moderate- and small-sized cities in the wake of trends in developed countries
An illustration of this new territorial organisation of industrial activities is the
agglomeration of auto industries in the cities of Resende and Porto Real, in the
State of Rio de Janeiro; and the cities of Betim and Juiz de Fora, in the State of
Minas Gerais
The Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis reinforces the connection between two
service hubs through industrial activities in moderate- and small-sized
municipalities situated inbetween the Rio and São Paulo These undertakings,
however, have their administrative and managerial headquarters and their service
benchmarks in the metropolis
From 1980 to 1985, while Brazil grew
at an annual rate of only 127 percent,
the most part of the 13 metropolitan
cities and 16 regional cities expanded
at much higher rates: 9 capitals in the
“regional centres” category grew at
rates higher than 30 percent per year
and, in the case of “sub-regional
centres”, 13 of them reported a growth
rate above the national average for the
part 20 years (IBGE 2001)
At local level, new uses to the territory
have developed and, in order to be
competitive at global level, cities
required massive investments in
telecommunication informatics
infrastructure by reason of the demand
for the establishment of large
corporate conglomerates
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Industry and the
Environment:
a New Interface
As the economy goes global, natural
resources – a primary source of export
revenues for peripheral countries –
undergo a growing deterioration of
their exchange power due to
accelerated technological absorption
of industrialised services and goods
the state of the environment in Brazil
Although statistical data have failed to encompass these recent changes in
industrial locations as of now, specific studies show that the two largest cities in
Brazil, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, had their share of the GDP reduced from
386 percent to 317 percent during the 1975-1996 period (IBGE 2000)
Metropolitan Areas start to play a new role in this state of affairs by attracting to
their outskirts the establishment of transnational plants or service companies,
which either causes their value to appreciate or their shape to be altered in order
to meet the new requirements
In Brazil, transnational companies have been transferring their plants from
domestic metropolitan areas to moderate- and small-sized cities Large cities,
particularly state capitals, have taken up a national-level role in addition to their
regional hegemony, while they concentrate on educational and political decisionmaking
functions
Unlike the post-war industrialisation,
which consumed a substantial
portion of natural resources – raw
materials, commodities and power
sources – the new pattern of growth
is characterised by a strong demand
for information and knowledge; there
is a relative reduction in the
consumption of natural resources and
in the emission of polluting effluents
Though the industrialisation model
employed at that time in Brazil
included technological standards that
were admittedly advanced for the
domestic framework, it was not
matched by environmental protection
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