Urban sprawl and COVID-19: Discussions from the alto vale do Itajaí Region, State of Santa Catarina, Brazil

Abstract

The contemporary urbanization evolves around space-time processes that started in the 1960’s decade, including sprawl and clustering ones. Mostly studied in the metropolises, they also occur on intermediate cities. An approach together with health geography to study the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus dissemination in a Santa Catarina state’s (Brazil) intermediate city – Rio do Sul, Alto Vale do Itajaí region

– was proposed, seeking to identify possible combinations between disease cases and urban sprawl and clustering. Starting from the hypothesis that the municipalities clustered with Rio do Sul should have more relative cases of Covid-19, we did a research based on quantitative data analysis, applying simple descriptive statistics and spatial analysis with Geographic Information Systems to compare those municipalities to the others. The results point out to a partial denying of the hypothesis since that, even with the high values from the cities of Laurentino and Aurora, other small populated municipalities showed more cases per thousand than the regional urban cluster. The conclusion points out that the intense variation in case numbers is associated more with matters of “short space-time” like the public management measures, local population habits in relation to the virus and health services access than the urban structure, in spite of it having some influence.