Mobilidade urbana

The Brazilian city of Curitiba has long been recognised as an exemplary success in urban planning, particularly its sustainable urban transport, with modal splits strongly favouring public transit. Its success was achieved principally through rigorous and detailed planning, beginning in the 1970s, using policy tools that have been described, and sometimes criticised, as technocratic. After 40 years of a quite successful experience in transport planning and implementation, Curitiba, like many world cities, faces new challenges, particularly in the form of metropolitanisation and increased aspirations for citizen participation. In this paper we investigate which policy tools are being used to face these emerging challenges in Curitiba, whether they are the same as those used in the past and which led the city to be a recognised urban transport success case, or different, more flexible and participative tools presumed to be more in tune with the emerging context of metropolitanisation and increased demands for participation. The answer, coming from interviews within Curitiba transport representatives, current literature review and limited comparisons with other successful transport cities of the Americas, suggests a continuation of Curitiba’s proactive format, one which has led to its past successes, with some modest overtures to more interactive and participatory policy tools.

This paper presents the Relational Urban Mobility Injustice framework for analysing urban accessibility and mobility, aiming to uncover critical, often overlooked injustices in the mobility system. Through reevaluating transport outcomes, we distinguish regimes of (im)mobility and expose the oppressive interdependence among them that mirrors and reinforces injustices across social groups. Using empirical data from public transport in São Paulo as a proof of concept, we show how transport conditions in terms of fare costs and crowding are shaped by social markers such as class and race. Areas predominantly inhabited by white residents feature lower crowding (below six passengers/m²) and reduced fares (under nine Brazilian reals), whereas zones primarily occupied by lower-class, black residents endure overcrowding and higher fares (over 18 Brazilian reals), inadvertently subsidising transportation for upper class and white areas. These dynamics demonstrate how deeply entwined conditions of precarity and privilege may be within a public transport system. Our argument and findings advocate for a paradigm shift in urban transport research, emphasising the oppression between social groups within the urban mobility systems.

With about 12 million inhabitants, São Paulo, Brazil, is the largest city in South America. As in many other major southern hemisphere cities, this extreme concentration of people imposes a number of mobility and security challenges. The objective of this article was to investigate the space-time patterns of mobility and violent victimisation in São Paulo’s metro stations from a gender perspective. The methodology combines use of a Geographical Information System (GIS), statistical analysis through negative binomial regression modelling and hypothesis testing. Results indicate that mobility and the level of victimisation are gender dependent. Women are at higher risk of victimisation than men in São Paulo’s central metro station, while men run higher risk of violence at end stations – both notably during late night periods. The presence of employees reduces the risk of violence, except during the mornings. The article suggests that crime prevention initiatives need to be gender informed and sensitive to the particular spatial and temporal features of rapid transit environments.

This article contributes to ongoing debates on Southern urbanisms by arguing that taking money seriously—as a practical, moral and material issue and as an integral part of the production of infrastructures—can offer us new insights into the urban experience among the racialized poor in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Using an ethnographic methodology, I explore ‘fare money’ stories shared by poor black poets, revealing the ways they invent new socialities—ways of living and being—and reshape everyday formations of urban collective lives. I argue that the experience of obtaining transportation tickets among the racialized poor is necessarily a collective one. In their case, transportation usages are anything but stable or uniform. They involve transitory negotiations and calculated mobilization of relations, the conversion of money, moralities, timing and knowledge of infrastructural spatialities. Moreover, everyday practices to enact fare money engender values and order, positioning it as a materiality that mediates between the legal, illegal, formal and informal, all of which are intertwined in the production of infrastructures. This analysis reveals the quality of an urban experience that is persistently precarious, multifaceted and unstable.

This article explores the strategic importance of information systems for social control of networked services on urban and regional scales, and the nature of the information required for that purpose. The standard indicators of infrastructure coverage – by and large based on the number and encompassment of connections – no longer respond to the real conditions of supply and consumption. The technological and managerial innovations in flow control and dispatch, along with the effects of combined access to multi-mode networks, render the evaluation of services’ connectivity considerably more complex than it used to be in the past. Private domination over the supply structure of these services tends to make the political struggle for equitability more dependent on the technical reliability of information than it could have been under the model of state supply. Networked services’ management has evolved to a more demand-oriented structure, but this structure has so far reproduced the structural inequalities of Brazilian society in favor of powerful stakeholders, e.g. large consumers. The potential for more democratic control associated with this new balance between supply and demand in networked services can only evolve if more vulnerable social groups have access to sound technological and managerial information. To support this idea the article shows the importance of connectivity indicators in determining the effective access to networked utilities in the Metropolitan Area of São Paulo, in contrast to the traditional indicators of services’ coverage.

This article discusses the changes taking place in the Brazilian vehicle assembly industry of the 1990s with particular reference to the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It focuses upon a case study of Volkswagen’s bus and truck assembly plant, opened in 1996, and its workers at Resende. The experience of the `modular system’ of production has been presented as a major development in vehicle assembly. The article analyses the originality of VW’s new form of organization of production and the strategy of the firm to look for localities with weak labour unionism. It also argues that despite the difficulties the local union faced in its attempts to intervene in the process of wage bargaining and to influence the management of aspects of production, there has been a rapid process of mobilizing the new workers for effective labour union action.