As redes da mobilidade urbana : concepções, políticas e o território de Santa Maria/RS.

Abstract

This thesis is based on the conceptions of mobility, its approaches, and analytical perspectives, focusing on its role as an essential tool in the elaboration and implementation of public urban planning policies. Its starting point is that research on mobility is still restricted, and cities have built important legal frameworks. However, they have faced several obstacles to implementation. Thus, there is a knowledge gap about the difficulties that Brazilian cities face in implementing their public urban mobility policies after the approval of the national legislation. This thesis is justified based on the resumption of the mobility agenda that still needs to be reviewed, revisited, and claimed. This need is clear due to the growing rates of private motorization, insecurity, and city violence, and the amplification of segregation, stigmatization, and social weaknesses in urban centers because of these failures in accessibility, social justice, and greater equity. It uses as a mediating element the Latin-American experiences and, more specifically, Colombian urbanism, which present significant gains in changing these indices. Based on such experience, it discusses mobility as accessibility, social justice, equity, and the building of cities’ capabilities and functionalities through the implementation phase, considered the most sensitive point in the evolutionary cycle of public policies. Thus, the aim is to understand, as the main objective of the thesis, how the network of actors acts and interferes in the implementation of this policy, having the urban center of Santa Maria/RS, Brazil, as the analytical territory. The justification for choosing this urban center is based on the relevance that the mobility and participatory experiences topic as an alternative for the development of the cities of the global south. In terms of methodology, it is epistemologically positioned between structural relational theory and the sociotechnical networks of the Actor-Network Theory, considered post-structural. It aims to understand how this network conforms and performs, analyzing the meanings of different human and non-human actors in the implementation of this public policy. Qualitatively, it describes this network through the interpretation of municipal urban evolution, the building of analytical cartography, semi-structured interviews, media news, imagery elements, and the approved legal frameworks. This research finds evidence that shows that the obstacles to implementation are rooted in factors deeply rooted in local culture, in the structural constructions of mobility, in the physiographic resistance of the territory, in the logic of external planning, in the maintenance of distribution patterns, in the organization and fragilities of the national legal framework. The thesis explores these urban mobility approaches, which are essential for the formulation and implementation of public policies, highlighting the difficulties faced by Brazilian cities in implementing these policies after the approval of national legislation. This exploration is based on an empirical analysis of Santa Maria/RS and Latin American experiences. Consequently, it finds that local policy implementation is hindered by the confluence of these influences, namely, the sociotechnical networks that have formed. Through more open, flexible, and multidimensional methodological frameworks, this thesis contributes to resuming the discussion of urban mobility and changing the narrative to understand the complexity of cities to build fairer, more inclusive, and accessible cities.