Abstract Brazilian municipalities simultaneously function as local administrative units, service providers, electoral districts, and the primary units for aggregating statistical, fiscal, and demographic data. Although their heterogeneity is widely acknowledged, the underlying structure of this heterogeneity is rarely examined. In this article, we argue that this heterogeneity should be understood as discrete, rather than as continuous variations of a single territorial form, and we propose a typology to explore these differences. The typology is derived from cluster analysis of Brazilian […]
