Marcelo Lopes de Souza

Rio de Janeiro

Marcelo Lopes de Souza is a professor of socio-spatial development and urban studies at the Department of Geography of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro/UFRJ, where he co-ordinates the Núcleo de Pesquisas sobre Desenvolvimento Sócio-Espacial/NuPeD (Research Centre on Socio-Spatial Development). 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 Nacional Autónoma de México/UNAM (2008), at the Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt [Oder] (2009-2010), at the Colegio de Geografía of the of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/UNAM (2012) and at the Departamento de Ciencia Política y Relaciones Internacionales of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2014). 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. Marcelo Lopes de Souza has published ten books and more than 100 papers and book chapters in different languages (Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish and Turkish) covering subjects such as spatial theory, popular participation in urban planning, social movements theory (focusing especially on the spatial dimension of urban social movements) and urban ‘utopias’/alternative visions. His books include, besides the ones previously mentioned, Mudar a cidade (Changing the City, 2002, 8th edition 2011) and A prisão e a ágora (The Prison and the Agora, 2006), among others. He is one of the editors of the prestigious Brazilian urban studies journal Cidades, and is associate editor of the international journal City (published by Routledge) as well. He also belonged (2011-2014) to the Advisory Board of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography (published by Wiley-Blackwell).