Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística

About the publication - 1968 Homogeneous Microregions

In the middle of the 1960s, the IBGE started to work on a Regional Division of Brazil in order to replace the Physiographic Regions, then considered obsolete in the face of the social, demographic and economic changes observed in the country. The new regional division called Homogeneous Microregions was based on the organization of the productive space and on theories about the location of poles of development, thus identifying the urban-industrial structure as an element that forms the regional space in Brazil. 

The resumption of the regional issue by the IBGE was caused by the participation of the Institute in the work group of the Decennial Plan of Social and Economic Development effected in March 1966. The commitment made with the recently-created Office for Applied Economic Research - EPEA, currently Institute for Applied Economic Research - IPEA, for the supply of subsidies for the Decennial Plan, led the IBGE to focus once more, in a significant way, on the regional issue, approaching it from new perspectives due to the bigger knowledge about the national territory and the new guidance resulting from the methodological evolution of geographic science. 

In Resolution no. 595, of 17.06.1966, from the 23rd General Assembly of the Nacional Council of Geography  (CNG), the Council's General Secretariat had the duty of establishing rules for a new  Regional Division of Brazil. In September 1966, geographers from the IBGE, in partnership with the EPEA, presented a report to the Congress of National Integration about the establishment of poles of development in Brazil, showing the connection with new methodologies. In this document, they highlight that the regional development politics of Brazil should consider the existence, of at least two basic levels: that of systems (or macroregions like the Amazon, the Northeast, etc.) and that of regions (or microregions like river basins, metropolitan areas, etc.) due to the fact that Brazil is a country of continental dimensions. 

In an article published in the Brazilian Magazine of Geography, in 1969, geographers Marília Veloso Galvão and Speridião Faissol, wrote about the (then) new Regional Division of Brazil and added that, from the geographic perspective, the spatial organization of a country would require the analysis of two types of ordering of essential phenomenon of space uniformity and, for that reason, a single division would not be enough. Two dimensions were privileged: homogeneity, represented as the organization around production; and functionality, relative to the phenomena of interaction and relationship life.

The Regional Division of Brazil into Major Regions and Homogenous Macroregions was made official with the approval of Resolution no. 1, of 08.05.1969, by the National Commission of Geographic-Cartographic Norms and Planning. The Regions were created by Decree no. 67.647, of 23.11.1970, revised in the Official Gazette of the Federal Republic of Brazil on December 4th of the same year. From that moment the Brazilian territory would be formed by 22 states, four territories and the Federal District besides 361 Microregions. Some adjustments were made in the 1970s and 1980s about the extinction, creation and change of category of some Federation Units. 

Recommendation no.1, of 30.03.1971, from the National Commission of Geographic-Cartographic Norms and Planning establishes the list of names to be used by the National Statistical System. After the 1970 Population Census, the IBGE would release census and continuous statistics by Homogeneous Microregions instead of by Physiographic Zones, defined in the Regional Division of Brazil of 1942.

In 1986, answering the demands from federal and state bodies, the IBGE revised, by means of the General Directorate Resolution no. 67, of 29.12.1986, the Regional Division into Homogeneous Microregions for the States of Rondônia, Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul. Internally, the update of the regional Division had been arranged since the theoretical-methodological formulation of Microregions of 1968 and also officially made formal with the General Plan of Geographic and Statistical Information, constituted by Decree no. 74,084, of 20.05.1974.

In fact, both the IBGE resolution and the decree at that time attested the obsolescence of the Regional Division of 1968, used by the National Statistical System, in relation to the institutional and socioeconomic transfromations that occurred at the time. That process was deepended by fast institutional changes such as the establishment of the Constitutional Assembly, in 1987, and the promulgation of the Constitution in 1988. 

The Map and Databases of Homogenous Microregions - 1968 were produced using the Municipal Grid Plan of 1970, in order to represent the Regional Divison of Brazil into Homogeneous Microregions - 1968, as released by the IBGE.