University Of São Paulo Research Shows Public Transport Can Be An Important Step In Reducing Urban Violence
Many factors lead to urban violence in large centers. Likewise, several agents can act to reduce this problem, which is faced all over the world. One of them is public transport. The relationship lies in the levels of social inclusion, according to Leonardo Agapito, a professor at the State University of Minas Gerais (UEMG) and member of the research group Agriculture and Urbanization in Latin America at USP. “If you look at the map of inequality in the city of São Paulo, you will see that, often, in regions with less urban mobility, there is less access to health, to the city’s cultural assets, to museums, public libraries, of theater and cinema”, he observes.
In fact, as shown by the 2022 edition of the São Paulo Inequality Map , produced by Rede Nossa São Paulo, the peripheral neighborhoods of the capital of São Paulo are the ones that suffer most from the lack of transportation. This is the case, for example, in Brasilândia, in the north zone, where no inhabitant lives less than 1 km away from a Metro, train or monorail station. The number reveals a reality that is the opposite of that of central neighborhoods with a higher concentration of income, such as Vila Mariana, in the south zone, which has less than half the population of Brasilândia, but where 65% of the inhabitants live close to stations of these transport systems. high-capacity audience. Comparing the same neighborhoods, while residents of Vila Mariana live, on average, up to 78.3 years, life expectancy in Brasilândia is only 62.8.
The distance between the two districts, then, goes beyond about 18 km in a straight line and involves a total of almost 16 years. This distance, therefore, becomes not only physical, but social. “With this, you reduce the possibilities of social life for populations and prevent them from participating in social life”, adds the expert.
From Marsilac to Medellin
Although overlooked in many ways, Brasilândia is closer to the central region than, for example, Engenheiro Marsilac. Known as the forgotten neighborhood of São Paulo, in the extreme south of the municipality, the district resembles a small town and has the smallest population in the entire metropolis: just over 8 thousand people. If, on the one hand, there is a certain bucolic peace in the region, surrounded by forests and waterfalls, the distance to the center is approximately 52 km. Without cinemas, theaters and a busy nightlife, the solution is to travel, sometimes for hours, to the closest cultural spaces. The Map of Inequality also brings another important fact: the distant Marsilac is one of the neighborhoods with the most homicides in São Paulo – there are 11.8 per thousand inhabitants.
But it is possible to change the reality of São Paulo. In Colombia, a notable case relates social inclusion and low violence. This is Medellín, the second largest city in the country, which had 380 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants during the 1990s and managed to reduce the number to 13.9 last year. It was the lowest number ever recorded in the metropolis, which has just over 2.5 million inhabitants. The mark was even below the Colombian average of homicides. Over there, an intense work to improve public transport has been carried out since 1995, when the first Metro line was inaugurated.
This means of transport was launched two years after the death of Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellín Cartel and one of the most notorious drug traffickers of all time. The war zone numbers recorded in the city previously were linked to organized crime activities, among other historical conflicts. To change the reputation of the region, Colombians, with an eye on foreign tourism, invested in transportation, as proof that it was a safe city, which connected some regions on the periphery to the central neighborhoods and vice versa.
“Mainly the cable car was created because the city’s main tourist area was the center. With the cable cars, which are very similar to those in Rio de Janeiro, you can access new areas and, with that, expand the tourist regions of the city, such as the communes, the possibility of visiting the graffiti of these communities”, emphasizes Agapito, who despite comparing Medellín to the Cidade Maravilhosa in tourism, he sees a greater similarity, in general terms, with the capital of São Paulo. “I really like the comparison with Medellín, because I think the story is very similar to that of the city of São Paulo, including the irregular occupation of peripheral territories”, he adds.
Not everything is flowers
The Colombian city is supplied by, in addition to the Metro tracks, an integration of trams, cable cars, buses and spaces for bicycles. This, for Fernando Velázquez, Master in Transport Engineering from USP in São Carlos and director of the company Smartvias Engenharia e Mobilidade, is a fundamental issue to assess the quality of transportation. According to the professional, “transport talks a lot with security. Therefore, intermodality and the massification of public transport are important, because you end up taking a significant number of vehicles out of the street, reducing the exposure to accidents, incidents, etc. So, it is important to invest not only in increasing the offer of public transport, but in the integration between them”.
However, even with intermodality and having been elected the most innovative city in the world in 2013, in a competition held by the American NGO Urban Land Institute, Medellín is not an example at all. According to Professor Agapito, the city still has several problems, many of them common on Brazilian soil and even related to transport, such as traffic jams, and public safety, which proves that just connecting a city helps but does not completely eliminate urban violence. In this way, it is important not to place the metropolis of the neighboring country as an example, but as “a city in which we need to dialogue to think about sustainable alternatives”.