Brazil: Current Issues in Territorial Reorganization

Brazil: Current Issues in Territorial Reorganization is part of an editorial project that aims to renew the thematic content of Brazilian Geography. Its overarching goal is to offer an up-to-date, high-quality, and easily accessible and understandable national bibliography, without compromising the complexity required to address the topics.

At the same time, its content reflects the need to communicate new perspectives that have been gaining ground in geographical thought and that focus primarily on Brazilian space. It is, therefore, the product of a mature academic community that, having developed certain lines of thought, seeks to disseminate them not only among its peers but also to a wider readership interested in up-to-date information about the country.

Thus, all the articles in this volume investigate the dynamics that, directly or indirectly, influence the organization of space in Brazil. They are also, as a whole, the result of long years of research by academic groups and laboratories led by university professors, mostly from or alumni of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). They thus return public resources invested through the University and other research funding institutions, especially CNPq and FINEP, to their rightful owners, Brazilian society.

This is a significant dimension of academic research, especially in the current context of discussions on the university-society relationship, reinforcing the former's commitment to producing up-to-date, consistent, and useful information for the latter. Brazilian Geography, once again, fulfills its role of making visible the dynamics to which the national territory is subject.

Taken together, the works that comprise the book demonstrate the specificity of geographic science, which articulates different levels of analysis, enabling diverse interpretations of the same phenomenon—a fundamental epistemological attribute of geography. Since the geographic approach to reality faces the basic problem of size, which ranges from local to planetary space, and since territory is the axis of the problems discussed here, the notion of scale of phenomena contributes as a fundamental methodological resource in addressing these issues.

In this sense, the works gathered here constitute empirical material that allows us to reflect on some propositions useful for understanding the operationality of the scale of the phenomena studied, with the organization of the themes presented based on the already traditional approaches to geographical analyses, that is, global, national, regional and local, not to obey criteria of preserving a tradition, but as an operational mode of the geographical treatment of phenomena.

Brazil: Current Issues in Territorial Reorganization is a coherent collection of texts resulting from diverse research, whose central focus is the study of the new dynamics at work in restructuring the national territory. This book responds to the urgent need to rethink the country in light of the complex contexts forged by contemporary times.