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Carolina Faccin
Carolina Faccin
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Dynamics and Morphology of Small Cities

Regional Development Urban Form & Land Use
Table of Contents
What role do small cities play in the regional urban network, and what are their own sociospatial and morphological dynamics?
Period
2021–2024
Location
Vales Region, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (case studies: Sobradinho, Rio Pardo and Encantado)
Partners
Mikripoli research network on small cities
My role
Network member: statistical and spatial data analysis, typologies, comparative case studies, maps and co-authoring; also teaching and workshops.
Data
IBGE REGIC (1966–2018) · IBGE censuses (2010, 2022) · DEE-RS · RAIS and CAGED · Landsat imagery · Google Earth · OpenStreetMap · Municipal data · Fieldwork
Tools & methods
QGIS · Statistical analysis · Typology building · Morphological analysis

The challenge
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Small cities are the majority of urban centers in Rio Grande do Sul, but urban research and planning tools are designed for large cities. Many small municipalities were created by successive emancipations and have little technical capacity. As part of the Mikripoli research network, I worked on describing them with data rather than assumptions.

Approach
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The work moved between three scales: the regional network over time, a typology of small cities, and the urban form of individual towns.

Three scales of analysis
  1. Network over time

    Regions of influence of cities, 1966 to 2018 (IBGE REGIC)

  2. Typology

    Small cities grouped by population, economy, services and centrality (IBGE, DEE-RS)

  3. Morphology

    Census tracts, satellite imagery and fieldwork in three towns

  4. Synthesis

    Inputs for planning adapted to small cities

Results
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  • Small cities form most of the regional network, providing basic services locally, while Santa Cruz do Sul and Lajeado gained centrality through public management and specialized services, supported by tobacco and poultry/pork agro-industry.
  • A typology of small cities based on how they take part in the regional division of labor.
  • A comparative morphology of Sobradinho (compact), Rio Pardo (dispersed growth, agricultural economy) and Encantado (fragmented expansion, diversified economy), with a clear center–periphery inequality in all three.
  • In 2024–2025, the same team analyzed the impacts of the floods on small cities.

Why it matters
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The work provides a baseline for planning in places that usually lack one, and brings small cities into debates on regional development and climate adaptation.

I later rebuilt the census maps of the three towns as an open, reproducible Python pipeline: code and figures on GitHub.

Publications:

Figures
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The census and neighborhood maps are produced by the open pipeline above.

Grid of nine maps: census tracts of Sobradinho, Rio Pardo and Encantado colored by residents per tract, residents per dwelling and mean income of the household head in 2010, with the highest incomes in the town centers
Population, household size and income by census tract (2010).
Three maps of the urban neighborhoods of Sobradinho, Rio Pardo and Encantado, shaded by number of residents and labeled by name, with main roads and rivers
Neighborhoods of the three case-study towns.