Cumulative (and self-reinforcing) spatial inequalities: Interactions between accessibility and segregation in four Brazilian metropolises

Abstract

The inequalities that mark global society have been deepening worldwide. They materialize in cities, putting pressure on public transport systems for spatial and temporal supply, at the same time as mobility itself generates multifaceted inequalities. From empirical evidence of four socially and spatially distinct Brazilian cities — São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, and Fortaleza — we explore how differences in scale, geography, class, and race are related to spatial segregation, leading to different levels of access to jobs by public transport in the global peripheral context. These juxtaposed and combined inequalities create highly unfair and strongly cumulative effects on some social groups, contributing to the reproduction of inequality. Based on public and open data and combining methodologies of spatial analysis to enhance comparability and reproducibility, we explore different areal units, time thresholds, and metrics in order to examine transport inequalities in different urban contexts and refine our results. Upper classes have higher accessibility than lower classes, whites have higher accessibility than blacks, and large cities are more unequal than smaller ones. However, racial inequalities combine and overlap with class and city inequalities, changing these dichotomic notions when multiple dimensions are considered. The groups that polarize social hierarchy also polarize the urban space, since the white upper class and the black lower class are more segregated, but the way segregation interacts with accessibility is not straightforward and varies according to the socio-spatial structure.

TD 2673 - Tendências e desigualdades da mobilidade urbana no Brasil i: o uso do transporte coletivo e individual

“…Presume-se que o menor gasto das mulheres em relação aos homens possa ser explicado em parte pela menor participação feminina no mercado de trabalho, pela menor posse de automóveis e pela maior predominância de padrões de viagens mais curtas relacionadas a maior responsabilidade por atividades domésticas e de cuidado (Uteng e Cresswell, 2008;Silveira Neto, Duarte e Páez, 2015;Macêdo et al, 2019). Por sua vez, o maior dispêndio relativo dos negros é explicado, ao menos em parte, pelo fato de que a população negra tende a apresentar renda menor do que a população branca e a morar em zonas mais periféricas com menor acesso a oportunidades (Pereira et al, 2019;Bittencourt, Giannotti e Marques, 2020; Valente e Berry, 2020). 6.…”

Assessment of the socio-spatial effects of urban transport investment using Google Maps API

“…In Santiago, Tiznado-Aitken et al (2018) used OpenStreetPlanner to calculate walking distances to access the transit network, while Gibson et al (2016) used smartcard data to estimate the travel time gains of a median busway, data that were complemented with OSM by Kickhofer et al (2016) to compute the so-called MATSim scenario for Santiago. In Brazil, Bittencourt et al (2020) have used data from local transit agencies to study the relationship between accessibility and segregation in different cities. In Chile, actual in-vehicle transit travel times (stop to stop) can be estimated using ADATRAP (DTPM 2020).…”

The impact of transit monetary costs on transport inequality

“…Previous studies on transport accessibility in the city, however, have overlooked the role of monetary costs in their accessibility estimates (e.g. Bittencourt et al, 2020;Carneiro et al, 2019;Pereira, 2019). This is particularly troubling in Rio, where the fare structure has such a big impact on the travel behaviour of its citizens and where, as in many other low-income contexts, transit affordability is one of the main topics in the political agenda (ITDP Brasil, 2020).…”