ABSTRACT
The Global South contains some of the largest metropolises in the world, with major urban mobility issues, such as lack of traffic planning, pollution, and violence. Among its largest urban centers, Rio de Janeiro has witnessed in the last ten years the considerable diffusion and adoption of apps focused on helping people navigate its complex and sometimes chaotic urban space. Increasingly, location-based apps are being used to manage urban mobility, or as we put it, as interfaces to networked urban mobility. As such, location awareness is progressively integrated into transportation networks, including cars, airports, and shared vehicles. From location-based taxi hailing apps like 99taxi, to crowdsourcing traffic apps like Waze, these apps are promoted as supporting more efficient and sustainable ways of navigating the city. In particular, micromobility apps, such as the ones used to rent bikes and scooters, promise to support a cleaner and greener way of moving around. However, as smartphone ownership increases in the Global South, so do mobility issues in the world’s megacities. Rio de Janeiro, for example, has the third worst traffic jams in the world – just behind Mexico City and Istanbul. This scenario begs the question: what does sustainable networked urban mobility mean in large Global South metropolises (such as Rio de Janeiro) with the growing use of location-based transportation apps? In this chapter, we review how micro-mobility location-based apps are integrated with forms of urban mobility in Rio de Janeiro. We discuss how these apps may (or may not) support sustainable urban mobility in Global South regions by focusing on key issues of security, physical accessibility, and economic status. We conclude by connecting the analysis with a discussion of creative appropriation of technologies in situations of hardship.
