Demographic and spatial growth of a medium sized city: Angra dos Reis, Brazil

Abstract

The city of Angra dos Reis, located in the Ilha Grande Bay region, 150 km south of Rio de Janeiro, is one of the first colonial occupations of the Rio de Janeiro coast. For almost 400 years, it was characterized by a weak demographic dynamism until the middle of the twentieth century, from which the municipality shows an intense and regular demographic growth rate. Today the city has almost 200 thousand inhabitants, which makes it statistically an average city. The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the demographic growth of Angra dos Reis, its components and its impacts on the extension of the urban network. This dynamic is the result of strong immigration, although its role has been diminishing in recent years. The urban growth of the city has a fragmented aspect along the coast and underlines the uneven character of the Brazilian urbanization process, between general improvement of urban conditions and the expansion of subnormal agglomerations.