ABSTRACT
In May 2000, John Urry was in Rio de Janeiro as an invited panelist at the international seminar, “The Limits of the Imaginary,” organized by Candido Mendes University in partnership with UNESCO. Instead of going for the recycling of celebrated ideas, however, John turned the Rio event into an opportunity to test arguments which would be developed from the early 2000s on, and for which, later, he would create the term “New Mobilities Paradigm” (NMP). The “obscene” socio-economic inequality, that in a nutshell defined Brazil for John, was to be experienced on even more radical terms on his following visit to Rio in September 2011. In the writings of John Urry, even the concept of society appears “under erasure”: a concept that is no longer serviceable for present challenges, but that has not yet been superseded by an entirely new idea.
