World Tour: The Plazaopolis

 Brazil is big, it's in fact bigger than the Continental United States, though by the new Middle Ages much of it has reverted to widlerness, with only dashes of subsitience tribes dotting the Amazin Basin and Serrado. Indusrial Brazil was inordinately urbanized, its cities in the interior on precarious threads of thin concrete and recent road networks, and he high rises of major cities like Sao Paolo and Rio, when society colllapsed it became inordinately wilder.

But large concentrations of people do exist, but but unlike cities in most places like America, Europe, and Asia which see large stone buildings and walls as signs of urban development, Brazil's buildings are are and not elaborate. Except for a few temples and meeting houses, they live in general makeshift huts, but have directed their efforts to the ground. Here, boulevards and walkways are meticulously designed and maintained, with webs connecting important points, all directed to central urban plazas. Rio, Sao Palo, and Recife are known as the Plazaopolis. They're largely drawn from from the calçadões, like the Copcabana in Rio: Wave patterns evocative of the ocean, though as centuries have gone on other terrains and patterns have emerged, some fire, some the night sky. In general, the approach is not to have it blend too much with the fauna.

This has generally evolved from the Brazillian approaches to infrastructure over the decades. The weather is pleasant, but also rots woods faster, plants easily overgrow everything, and the Favela culture of the Industrial era has given the inhabitants a more utiliarian and makeshift view of residential housing.They're there to sleep at night, hide from the rain, maybe get some privacy, but otherwise houses are redundan heat boxes.

There's reason to create elaborate walkways. Shoes are generally speaking, uncomfortable and sweaty, and deniens like to avoid wearing them, having causeways and boardwalks that are clean, bright, and safe just seems more efficient. They're also a much more logical and evocative way to organize borders, jurisdictions, and well as expand the urban limits and networks. They also make it easier to povide map legends posed through the city. Many traders come to the ports, and even Brazillians travel themselves, it makes it so much easier to to have "You are here" signs dotting strategic points.

This has even become a sort of self-enforcing practice. The beauty of Brazil's plazas creates word of mouth, and tourists to visit its festivals, in turn necesseitating the need to have these visual guides.

Overall, this creates a Brazil with more informal networks and kinships, more similar to that of Africa, Southeast Asia, even Polynesia, than that of the Iberian peninsular their languages evolve from.

The phase away from them in cities to settlments with more masonry-intensive buildings, similar to Southern Europe's, actually marks the transition from the "pure" Brazillian cultural sphere to that of the Southern Cone.