Marcelo Lopes de Souza
Marcelo Lopes de Souza is a professor at the Department of Geography of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Rio de Janeiro. He founded and coordinates a research group whose main focus is the relationships between social relations and space and particularly the spatiality of social change called The Center of Research on Socio-Spatial Development (Núcleo de Pesquisas sobre Desenvolvimento Sócio-Espacial/NuPeD).
He pioneered the study of spatiality and social production of space from an 'autonomist' perspective (mainly inspired by Cornelius Castoriadis’s political-philosophical work) as early as in the 1980s. Marcelo Lopes de Souza regards himself as a 'libertário' (left-libertarian). From his viewpoint, the libertarian thought and praxis encompasses not only anarchism (or, as he prefers, 'classical anarchism') - from the second half of the 19th century and first half of the 20th century - and neo-anarchism - from the second half of the 20th century onwards (for instance, Murray Bookchin) -, but also 'autonomist' thinkers (such as Cornelius Castoriadis) and movements (such as Mexican Zapatistas, a large part of Argentine 'piqueteros,' and so on).
His research projects cover themes such as: the socio-spatial impacts of drug trafficking in Brazilian cities; urban violence and the ‘militarization of the urban question’ in different countries; potentialities, limits and problems of ‘participative urban planning and management’; and the spatial practices of emancipative social movements in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and South Africa.
He studied geography and urban sociology in Brazil in the 1980s, and received his PhD degree in geography (Nebenfach [minor]: political science) from the University of Tübingen (Germany) in 1993.
He acted as a visiting researcher at the Geography Department of the University of Tübingen (1996 and 2000/2001) and at the Geography Department of the Royal Holloway College, University of London (1999), as well as a visiting professor at the Habitat Unit of the Technical University of Berlin (2005), at the Graduate Program on Latin American Studies of the Universidad Autónoma de México/UNAM (2008) at the Facultad de Geografía of the Universidad Autónoma de México/UNAM (2012) and at the Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt [Oder] (2009-2010).
He received the first prize of the German Society of Research on Latin America/ADLAF in 1994 for his PhD thesis (which was published in Germany) about the urban question in Brazil, and the Jabuti Award (this prize is given every year to Brazil’s best literary and scientific works by the Brazilian Book Chamber) for his book O desafio metropolitano (The Metropolitan Challenge) in 2001. His book Fobópole: O medo generalizado e a militarização da questão urbana (Phobopolis: Generalized Fear and the Militarization of the Urban Question), published in 2008, was nominated for the Jabuti Award in 2009.
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