<Symposium Overview: Presentations' outlines>GIS Thematic Mapping as an Instrument of Analysis for Identifying Rural Areas in Complex Territories

Abstract

Currently, new economic and population dynamics formed in metropolitan areas – such as the case of the Macrometrópole Paulista (MMP), "macro-metropolitan region of São Paulo" – have established territorial, socio-economic and environmental transformations that impact urban and rural spaces. Over the years, the productive activities in this enormous network of cities – the MMP – has gone through important physical and functional changes in which many activities lost their regional economic importance as can be seen in the decrease of population engaged in agricultural activities of rural areas. In this context, spaces have become quite heterogeneous, where the highly developed agro-industry exists alongside low-density areas with local agricultural production that does not participate in larger production chains. This diversity in the MMP makes it difficult to define and distinguish between rural and urban spaces, and requires new cartography resources capable of adjusting to and representing such phenomena in which the boundaries between these spaces can be definitively settled. The Brazilian official territorial classification adopted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) is based on an administrative definition of district and urban perimeter. The lack of a single national criterion in Brazil has resulted in arbitrary boundaries of rural and urban spaces. This article aims to present the differences between the current Brazilian classification of urban and rural spaces with the research findings in "The rural in the São Paulo urbanization in a macro-metropolitan context", beginning with an exploration of the concept of rural and the variables that characterize these areas. Research has shown that in order to grasp the different aspects of the land it is necessary to find tools that can combine and integrate immense volumes of data on different scales and that came from various sources. The multivariate analysis of data associated with Geographic Information System (GIS) tools consists of a powerful set of instruments that can enhance the representations and analyzes so that further research can be developed on rural and urban boundaries in the context of intense urbanization. The cartography tools, presented in this article as a territorial feature on different scales and with varied complexity, allow research on public policies' definitions and also as a way of disseminating the results and its applicability through the use of GIS in the digital environment.