  During the last years, the new science of municipalities has been established
as a fertile quantitative approach to systematically understand the urban
phenomena. One of its main pillars is the proposition that urban systems
display universal scaling behavior regarding socioeconomic, infrastructural and
individual basic services variables. This paper discusses the extension of the
universality proposition by testing it against a broad range of urban metrics
in a developing country urban system. We present an exploration of the scaling
exponents for over 6$ variables for the Brazilian urban system. As Brazilian
municipalities can deviate significantly from urban settlements, urban-like
municipalities were selected based on a systematic density cut-off procedure
and the scaling exponents were estimated for this new subset of municipalities.
To validate our findings we compared the results for overlaying variables with
other studies based on alternative methods. It was found that the analyzed
socioeconomic variables follow a superlinear scaling relationship with the
population size, and most of the infrastructure and individual basic services
variables follow expected sublinear and linear scaling, respectively. However,
some infrastructural and individual basic services variables deviated from
their expected regimes, challenging the universality hypothesis of urban
scaling. We propose that these deviations are a product of top-down
decisions/policies. Our analysis spreads over a time-range of 10 years, what is
not enough to draw conclusive observations, nevertheless we found hints that
the scaling exponent of these variables are evolving towards the expected
scaling regime, indicating that the deviations might be temporally constrained
and that the urban systems might eventually reach the expected scaling regime.
