ABSTRACT
The Metropolitan Region of Recife presents an urban development process with incomplete networks of metropolitan public infrastructure, fragmentation and territorial dispersion, with a low level of integration, resulting in increasing environmental and economic costs. In addition to such issues, other challenges persist, although they are resolved in developed countries, such as environmental sanitation or housing deficit. All of this contributes to a disorderly, discontinuous, unregulated and incomplete urban expansion. The speculated scientific hypothesis is that the metropolitan urbanization of Recife, both continuous anddispersed and fragmented. It has its own characteristics and was induced, in its formation, by changes in the dynamics of urban growth and by the construction and expansion of its infrastructure networks. This article addresses the complexity and characteristics of the formation, expansion and urban structuring of the metropolis of Recife.
