Notes on the Ceará urban network: centrality, spatial interactions and economic dynamics

Abstract

This article aims to present some considerations on the urban network of Ceara compared to dynamic economic centers of the components of its hierarchy. It starts from the assumption that the process of urbanization reflects and affects both the structure and process changes, restrained in social relations and forms of production for specific conformation of a social totality. From this perspective, the spatial organization represents a form of understanding of this whole and can be represented by the urban network. The spatial pattern of cities, functional complexity and the degree of spatial interactions articulate the whole society into an urban network which guarantees its existence and reproduction. But in the context of new ways of exploiting diversity territorial resulting from the transformation of the capitalist regime of accumulation on a global level, the cities of higher hierarchical level of Ceará are concentrating the total GDP and GDP per activity? What role has played the cities of lower hierarchical level in the economic dynamics of Ceará? This movement has been captured by studies of the “Regiões de Influência”  of the IBGE? These are the questions to be treated in this article.