Neoliberal urban reorganization and the bus companies in the city of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

In 2010, the municipal government of Rio de Janeiro granted the private concession of the entire system of bus transportation in the city. Historically, entrepreneurs of the sector have constituted a major force in the coalition of interests in urban policy. In this paper, we work with the hypothesis that the reorganization of the transportation system is embedded in a context of intensification of neoliberalization in the urban scale in Brazil that would be disorganizing / reorganizing the previous spatial coherence, producing changes in political coalitions and in their relations with the State. The modernization of modes of urban accumulation tends to establish a regulation of public services that is close to the logic of a self-regulated market.