Main Urban Centres in the Argentinian Republic

Abstract

The Argentinian Republic has a complex territory, unique and singular, divided into twenty-three provinces and one federal district, which is the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, the capital of the country. According to the 2010 census, there exist five hundred departments or municipalities. Argentina is home to approximately forty million inhabitants, distributed unequally since the seventy percent of the population lives in the cities, as the result of a rapid urbanization process that has led to an increasing environmental decay and a deficiency in the basic services. This research work has the objective of identifying the main urban centres in Argentina to establish a range of cities with higher population. The hypothesis is that there are two economic areas clearly differentiated based on the economic level and the characteristics of the farming areas: the pampeana region and the extra-pampeana region. The methodology involved searching, selection and analyses of bibliography and the processing of data collected by the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC, in Spanish) 2001-2010.