Os novos cidadãos da metrópole: um estudo sobre a experiência moral dos cicloativistas na cidade do Recife

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to analyze bike activism as a moral experience by undertaking fieldwork in Recife, a city that currently presents all the typical urban mobility symptomatic problems. In order to do so, it was necessary to explore how is the bike activist experience constructed in a city dominated by the automobile culture, paying special attention to how they articulate their values while fighting against a „car-o-cracy‟ in search of building a fairer society with „more love and less engines‟. Changes in modes of transportation is presented as an alternative to the transit problems as well as an alternate behavior for citizens compromised to maintaining the values that where lost in the metropolis: respect, love and freedom. Therefore, through interviews and participant observation of a group of bike activists, the examination will focus on the process of building a moral code that reinvents the experience of the city and transforms transportation into a form of virtue, especially regarding the types of actions this new code requires from its participants.