read_urban_area: Download spatial data of urbanized areas in Brazil

In geobr: Download Official Spatial Data Sets of Brazil

Download spatial data of urbanized areas in Brazil

Description

This function reads the official data on the urban footprint of Brazilian cities. Original data by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) For more information about the methodology, see details at https://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/livros/liv100639.pdf

Usage

read_urban_area(
  year,
  code_muni = "all",
  simplified = TRUE,
  output = "sf",
  showProgress = TRUE,
  cache = TRUE,
  verbose = TRUE
)

Arguments

year	Numeric. Year of the data in YYYY format. It defaults to NULL and reads the data from the latest year available.
code_muni	The 7-digit code of a municipality. If code_muni = "all" (Default), the function downloads all the data available in the country. Alternatively, if a two-digit state code or a two-letter uppercase abbreviation of a state is passed (e.g. 33 or "RJ"), all data of that state are downloaded. Municipality codes can be consulted with the geobr::lookup_muni() function.
simplified	Logic FALSE or TRUE, indicating whether the function should return the data set with 'original' spatial resolution or a data set with 'simplified' geometry. Defaults to TRUE. For spatial analysis and statistics users should set simplified = FALSE. Borders have been simplified by removing vertices of borders using ⁠st_simplify{sf}⁠ preserving topology with a dTolerance of 100.
output	String. Type of object returned by the function. Defaults to "sf", which loads the data into memory as an sf object. Alternatively, "duckdb" returns a lazy spatial table backed by DuckDB via the duckspatial package, and "arrow" returns an Arrow dataset. Both "duckdb" and "arrow" support out-of-memory processing of large data sets.
showProgress	Logical. Defaults to TRUE display progress bar.
cache	Logical. Whether the function should read the data cached locally, which is faster. Defaults to cache = TRUE. By default, geobr stores data files in a temporary directory that exists only within each R session. If cache = FALSE, the function will download the data again and overwrite the local file.
verbose	A logical. If TRUE (the default), the function prints informative messages and shows download progress bar. If FALSE, the function is silent.

Value

An ⁠"sf" "data.frame"⁠ OR an ArrowObject

Examples

# Read urban footprint of Brazilian cities in an specific year
d <- read_urban_area(year = 2015)

geobr documentation built on May 20, 2026, 5:08 p.m.