Demonstrations about the public transportation in Brazil: A different reading from the great Florianópolis case, in Santa Catarina State

© 2016, Universidad de Barcelona. All rights reserved. The problem relating to collective public transport, in the Great Florianópolis region, became evident with recent demonstrations in June and July 2013, as one of today’s major social demand in the country. However, the issue’s prominence was not accompanied by analyzes positioning the problem within totality, that is, by considering social relations, power structures and governance conditions at different scales. It was possible to analyze the existence of severe contradictions among the city space, object’s systems and actions that compose it, and also, conditions for mobility and transport. The article’s aim is to associate these contradictions to the absence of public institutions qualified to serve as catalysts of progressive social forces wanting more and better mobility. In addition, the absence of social “concertation” about that problem has hampered the breaking of tangible bottlenecks to the mobility. They range from lack of intermodalities and public transport networks with regional and metropolitan connectivity to policies favoring the integration of land use, transportation and urban proximity. The methodology combines quantitative and qualitative strategies, providing analysis of services performance and public transport infrastructure; however, there is also a discourse analysis of different stakeholders involved in its production.