Did you know that poor people in Brazil live in places called Favelas, like poor places inside a big city? Urbanization, my culture element clarifies many things. Urbanization is a material culture element for a couple of reasons. First, it deals with people by helping people have a better place to live and by having certain people called urban-planners make urbanization happen. Second, urbanization deals with the world because urban-planners are changing the world to make it better. Third, we make urbanization by moving around to different cities to live somewhere else. Even though urbanization seems like a tough word it has an easy definition! Urbanization is when people move from the country to a bigger city.

You seem confused, do you need a better understanding about urbanization?  To make urbanization happen, people called urban-planners have to use urban planning, a method to plan the city. Urban-planners have to make the city better for the people living in it and for people moving in. They make better schools, fix the roads, make sure the sewers are working, make sure that food can get in the city and all that type of fixing to make things better.  Urbanization has been used a long, long time ago by ancient civilizations. There is evidence of that by archeologists finding maps of there planning and studying the population of there civilization. Urbanization helps the earth become a better place to live in, better education and a better place to have a community. When we use and make urbanization, we are helping the earth by changing for the best. Also, urban-planners have to have a good working system, agreeing and good ideas, to make urbanization happen while making it work well so people are happy.

I know that you want to learn more about Brazil’s urbanization. Let’s look at where the Brazilians settled and the change in where most of the population lives. First of all, Brazil is full of skyscrapers, suburban houses, poor places and favelas, so it is probably hard to make new things now. But, along time ago, around 3000 B.C., Brazil was just starting, so it was most likely easier! The first people in Brazil choose homes on the base of the hillsides, but they didn’t live in towns. Then, around the 1500’s, towns started to build up, and they choose to have there homes near water, for example, near seas or rivers for farm land. Pretty smart choice! Later on, the mineral mines out in the country started drying up around the middle 18^th century, so people living in Minas Gerais, which was near the mines, moved to different cities for jobs, for example, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Since the mineral mines dried up, the government wanted settlements to be around the Trans-Amazonian Highway, so Brazilians started moving there. The problem now is that urban-planners have to cope with early unplanned houses that were placed anywhere, so most of them are where the urban-planners want to build.

Do you want to know about the changes in different cities, and how Brazilians life’s changed? Second, I will tell you about the history of Brazil’s urbanization. In the 1950’s, 1960’s and the 1970’s, more that 20 million Brazilians moved from the country to urban areas. That’s a lot of people! That change of population was the largest in Brazil’s history. The urban population in Brazil is pretty large in big cities right now, for instance, Sao Paulo population is about 18 million! The population was 56 percent of what it is now in the 1970’s. It started growing a lot and soon became 75 percent in 1991. Per year, about 5 percent of people moved to urban cities. That seems like a little, but when it adds up, it can be a lot. In the 1980’s, an economic crisis started. People that moved to Brazil left because of many things. Three examples are money issues, food issues and job issues. This happened because urban-planners didn’t concentrate on the poor that much and many more reasons. Now, more than three fourths of Brazilians live in urban areas! Things changed a lot in those years!

So, how would you feel like if you were the first to settle in Brazil, or if you lived in the urban areas of Brazil now?

--AG