Written by:
Pedro da Cunha Rego Logiodice and Mariana Giannotti
First Published:
27 Jan 2025, 10:50 am
Tags:
Written by:
Pedro da Cunha Rego Logiodice and Mariana Giannotti
First Published:
27 Jan 2025, 10:50 am
Tags:
Maria, a Black woman in her forties, wakes at 4:20 a.m., slipping quietly out of bed so as not to disturb her four sleeping children. By 4:45, she is already at the bus stop, standing in line with dozens of early risers under the dim, pre-dawn streetlights. The bus arrives 20 minutes late, packed as always, and Maria wedges herself into the tight space. There’s no room to sit and barely enough to stand as she clutches the handrail for the hour-long ride. When she transfers to the metro, the crowding only gets worse. Packed tightly among other passengers for over 15 kilometers, she is unsure whether the man beside her is taking advantage of the lack of space to harass her or is simply being pushed by the crowd. Her journey takes her toward São Paulo’s wealthier western neighborhoods, where she works as a house cleaner. Her daily commute: almost 5 hours round trip, at a cost of nearly 20 reais — equivalent to 30% of Brazil’s minimum wage for 20 days of commuting, a significant burden for her family on a shoestring budget.
Her workday begins at 7:30 a.m., scrubbing and tidying for wealthy, mostly white households. Ironically, these same people often choose to take the metro, despite owning cars, to avoid traffic. Yet, their experience is far more comfortable. Living in well-connected, central neighborhoods, they enjoy short, uncrowded commutes that cost less than half of what Maria pays in absolute terms and represent less than 3% of their wages for commuting 20 days a month. While she endures a violent, expensive, and inefficient transit system, they move effortlessly through the city, beneficiaries of a far more advantageous mobility experience.
Maria’s story is anything but an exception. In São Paulo and other cities across the Global South, countless others endure similarly grueling commutes from the peripheries. These are stories not only of resilience but also of structural injustice, woven into the city’s very transportation system.
This reality has always troubled us. Watching mostly Black people spend hours on overcrowded buses, drained both physically and financially, while wealthier, white residents ride comfortably in near-empty metro cars and buses, led us to question: how are precarious and privileged mobility connected? This question became the foundation of our research and ultimately led to our paper in Urban Studies.
Our analysis reveals that São Paulo’s transit system privileges wealthier, predominantly white neighborhoods with spacious, affordable buses, while lower-income, predominantly Black neighborhoods endure overcrowding and higher fares. Worse still, inflated fares from these marginalised areas subsidise the cheaper, more comfortable commutes of affluent residents. This stark inequality underscores systemic oppression embedded in the city’s transit infrastructure and policies, perpetuating Brazil’s enduring legacy of colonialism and slavery-based social hierarchies.
The strength of the proposed Relational Urban Mobility Injustice (RUMI) framework lies in its relational perspective, revealing how interdependent mobility regimes perpetuate urban injustices. We hope this paper inspires scholars and policymakers in urban mobility to consider the role of systemic oppression. By addressing the underlying social structures that sustain these inequities, people could drive a transformative shift where urban mobility challenges, rather than reinforces, entrenched injustices faced by Maria and millions others.
Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.