How Curitiba, a city from an emerging economy, changed what we know as the bus-rapid transit category?
This project is a sequence of my doctoral dissertation work, in which I aim at understanding category change in the context of institutional complexity. The BRT in Curitiba brings along with an operational efficacy the social, environmental, and aesthetic logics. Thus, investigating how each logic played key roles in transforming the BRT as a category from the 1970s until the 2000s in the city of Curitiba drove my research in the past five years (from 2016 now).
“BRT [bus rapid transit] in Curitiba has become a cultural touchstone, the city’s answer to the freewheeling carnival spirit of Rio and the fast-paced, business-dominated lifestyle in São Paulo.” - The Guardian
This research is currently manuscript preparation stage. The project is a research collaboration with Andréa Segatto and Luiz Virtuoso. I’ll be posting updates on this project here as it develops.