Transit Activism and the Urban Question in Belo Horizonte, Brazil
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- Published on Sunday, 22 May 2016 00:15
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1259 .... May 22, 2016
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Transit Activism and the Urban Question
in Belo Horizonte, Brazil
João Tonucci and André Veloso interviewed by Stefan Kipfer
The current conflagration of the Dilma Rousseff government notwithstanding, Brazil has been an inspiring source of debate for the global left over the last generation. This has been true for a range of initiatives, including the rise of the Workers’ Party (PT) in the 1980s, municipal socialist projects in the 1990s, and the movement of landless workers Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST). The demand for free transit has been an important starting point of more recent mobilizations, notably those that shook the whole country in the summer of 2013. This interview with local activists and researchers João Tonucci and André Veloso zeroes in on... transit organizing in Belo Horizonte. At the heart of the third largest metropolitan area in Brazil, the city of Belo Horizonte is also the capital of Minas Gerais, which, as the name indicates, is the state traditionally oriented toward extractive capitalism.
João Tonucci holds a bachelor's degree in Economics, with a Master's degree in Architecture and Urbanism, and is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). He was a visiting scholar at the City Institute, York University (2015).
André Veloso holds a bachelor's degree in Economics, with a Master's degree in Geography at UFMG. He was a member of Belo Horizonte's Urban Mobility City Council from 2013 to 2015, and is a member of Tarifa Zero -- Belo Horizonte.
Stefan Kipfer is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University.
