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After the first days of adjustment to São Paulo, its time to get in contact with people and groups in the next few weeks, in order to finally find out where to conduct the field work for this thesis.

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/yesterday we were downtown for some buzzyness
(actually no buzzynessness for me but for a great, critical and
interesting fest that is organized by a group of lady bugz, more on
that soon). /one blatant difference between there and other parts of
the city is the high occurence and density of bikes, no conventional
bikes but super nice bakfietsen.
/this is interesting because the city usually seems to provide many
challenges for the ambitioned cyclist who wants to use his or her bike
just for normal transit.

/the main factors that
make cycling an adventure, as mentioned by cyclists and as one can
imagine if one strolls on the sidewalks, are: the hills and mountains
in the city, sometimes monster steep, no mountainbike – no fun; the
lack of bicycle lanes: there are some at the aerport Garulhos and Avenida Paulista and it is
said that the city offers altogether only 30km of bicycle lanes; the nortorious car, bus, truck and motorbike traffic, for whom cyclists are just no traffic and invisible; only limited access to the metro lines with bikes
– during the week from 20:30h until the last train – on Saturdays from
14:30h until the last train – on Sundays and holidays the whole day –
bikes can only be transported in the last waggon of the train, which is
suitable for a maximum number of just 4 bikes.

/coming
back to the bakfietsen: one of the reason of their high occurence in
the city center, one could imagine, could be the high concentration of
businesses and shops there, and the relatively flat ground which favours
the use of cargo bikes for fast and cheap transport between the various
spots in the center./now I wonder who constructed them coz I want to make one as well. /this could also mean that in a city with such
unfavourable bike attributes, one can find specialized usage of bikes
in small areas but normally not in the whole city.

/last but not least some words about the brave non-specialized cyclists: São Paulo seems to have a regular roling Bicicletada (Critical Mass)
on every last Friday of the month. /the next one takes place on Friday
the 28th of May. /in São Paulo exist a womens bike movement as well,
called Pedalinas. They
make technixx workshop and form their critical mass evey first Saturday
at 14h. Among biking, there exists an equal important discourse about the roles of men and women bikers.

On the weekend of my arrival, the city`s biggest cultural mass event took place in the center. Virada Cultural – once a year, culture for free on the streets and places of Sao Paulo, for everybody. This attracted an estimated 3 million people (just estimates), the streets and metro and the whole center were packed with not-drunk people, drunk people, stoned people (weed was legalized this day, at least judging from the smell), queers, homeless, from the periferia of the city, young, old, gangstas, streetvendors. The periferia has normally no reason to come to the center, because public transport is expensive (one bus ride – R2.70; one metro ride – R2.65), takes long, and all culture is just for sale.

"Culture for the whole city, the whole year" 

Some theater, djs and projections in the sky

Somewhere

Here are some impressions from the German to Brasil translation with intermediate losts in Lisbon and o Porto.

 Lisbon: roofs

 Lisbon: "legal or illegal, world citizen"

 Lisbon: antifascist zone

 Flight screens

… São Paulo

looks like the empirical work of my thesis is going to happen here, which I think is massive :D. The next weeks are going to show what is possible and in which place in the city. For the moment everything is cool, I’ve got a nice place to stay, with nice people, and need some days for mental adjustment.

In order to give some impression of the daily buzzyness here, this blog has a new section called DIARY where I try to put photos and corresponding information as often as possible. Here is the first real view of the city, taken from the plane just before landing. 

A friend told me about an autonomous and self-organized social center in São Paulo. Its the Espaço Ay Carmela! which serves as collective space for groups and indiviuals in the city, like the indymedia collective of SP or Movimento Passa Livre which carries out direct actions for a just public transport system in the city.

Mapping/Cartography and social/urban struggle are some of the topics of the events happening there and the struggle of the groups is also related to questions such as urban reformation and the right for the city. I will try to get in contact with some people in order to find out if there are some similarities between their struggle and the idea of this thesis.

One part of theoretical part of this thesis is the examination of initiatives and (social/political) activism that utilizes mobile communication. Conclusions about their aims, applied technologies & methodologies and more can be drawn from these examinations. This may give an insight on how these initiatives are organized and realized and in how far the underlying principles vary or coincide with the principles of this thesis and its concepts.

In order to start some mapping experiments, a new page is available on this blog which embeds all maps to be created for this thesis. The first available map visualizes Mobile Activism Worldwide.

information about the practical part of my thesis are currently a little underrepresented. thus its time to write a bit about possible places where the reallife mapping of the urban environment with mobile phones could take place. I currently wrote emails to a number of urban movements and groups in various cities where people are organized mainly around housing issues. The cities are São Paulo in Brazil, Nairobi in Kenia and Durban/Cape Town in South Africa, where the following movements and groups are based:

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licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany License.

its a long time since I updated this blog but now its time to work on it more frequently. here comes a short overview of what have been done so far:

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