{"id":54236,"date":"2019-09-03T06:58:04","date_gmt":"2019-09-03T09:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=54236"},"modified":"2020-12-08T22:47:54","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T01:47:54","slug":"pedala-queimados-biking-to-transform-a-city-and-change-the-zip-code-of-opportunity-profile-sustainablefavelanetwork","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=54236","title":{"rendered":"Pedala Queimados: Biking to ‘Change the Zip Code of Opportunity’ [PROFILE]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Initiative<\/strong><\/span>: Pedala Queimados (“Cycle Queimados”)
\nContact<\/strong><\/span>: Facebook<\/a> | Instagram<\/a> |\u00a0Email<\/a>
\nYear Founded<\/strong><\/span>: 2016
\nCommunity<\/strong><\/span>: Queimados (Baixada Fluminense)
\nMission<\/strong><\/span>: To stimulate the use of cycling as a means of transportation, democratize land use, integrate movements fighting for active and sustainable transit, and debate and propose public policies to improve the quality of urban mobility.
\nPublic Events<\/strong><\/span>: Pedala Queimados holds frequent biking excursions and talks, and participates in relevant events across Greater Rio. Check out their Facebook page<\/a> for more information.
\nHow to Contribute<\/strong><\/span>: Participate in events, volunteer, and financially support the initiative.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carlos Leandro de Oliveira has lived his entire life in Queimados<\/a>, a city of roughly 150,000 located 50km north of downtown Rio de Janeiro in the Baixada Fluminense<\/a>. He was there before the city\u2019s official inauguration in 1990<\/a>. He was there before the roads were paved and the sewage pipes put in the ground. He was there before thousands migrated to Queimados in the 2000s and 2010s as a result of displacement and purported economic opportunity<\/a>. He was there before the city bore the morose title it does today: the most violent municipality in all of Brazil<\/a>\u2014registering the highest homicide rate in the country, according to the 2018 Atlas of Violence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One could say that to live in a favela in Queimados is to live in the periphery of the urban periphery. In light of wide regional economic disparities and the lack of integration of the metropolitan area<\/a>, many residents of Greater Rio commute several hours each day\u2014for three million of the region’s residents the average commute is two hours and 21 minutes<\/a>\u2014to commercially-active areas like Rio’s South Zone<\/a> and city center<\/a>. Unemployment, poverty, violence, illiteracy, inequality, and a lack of public services and adequate housing are among the issues and obstacles they face.<\/p>\n

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Growing up in a situation of poverty, Oliveira put his education by the wayside to support his family from a young age. \u201cBy age seven, I was hawking goods on trains,\u201d says Oliveira. Work kept him from graduating from middle school until his mid-twenties.<\/p>\n

At nearly 30 years old, Oliveira finished high school and set out to enroll in a two-year environmental program at a local university. Working simultaneously, he took five years to complete the program. At the time, he was working at GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals in Jacarepagu\u00e1<\/a>, in Rio’s West Zone<\/a>, and would wake up at 2am in order to arrive on time and prepare for class afterward.<\/p>\n

Midway through the program, Oliveira was chosen for a highly selective internship and found himself teaching environmental education in Japeri<\/a>, a municipality adjacent to his hometown of Queimados. There, he began to see the value of the academic knowledge he had acquired at university and also the positive impact that locally-based initiatives can have on a community.<\/p>\n

When Oliveira finished his environmental studies program in 2014, his internship ended as well. With several months left until his degree could be processed, Oliveira was left without a source of income. Unable to afford costly inter-municipal public transit<\/a>, Oliveira describes: \u201cI grabbed my bike and biked to Rio until arriving at the capital four hours later. I left my bike there, returned by train, got off the train, and then went back again by bike. I started to do this every day.\u201d Supported by family and friends, he did this to show to the people of Queimados there were alternative modes of reliable and affordable transportation. \u201cMany people in Queimados did not see bikes as a viable mode of transit, only as a leisure activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was during this period that Oliveira met Ricardo Martins<\/a>. Martins had recently finished biking across all of South America on a bike he himself had built out of bamboo. He gave Oliveira his book, Roda Am\u00e9rica<\/a><\/em>, about his experience and his philosophy. After reading the book, Oliveira says: \u201cI thought to myself, if this guy biked all of South America starting out with R$385 ( US$100), then I can bike to S\u00e3o Paulo!\u201d Oliveira made the five-day, 400-kilometer ride to S\u00e3o Paulo and many more trips have followed. Slowly, he gained recognition for his activism, becoming affectionately known as “Carlos GreenBike<\/a>” for his socio-environmental advocacy. Martins now serves as director of institutional relations at Pedala Queimados.<\/p>\n

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By 2016, \u201cthings had gotten bad [in Queimados],\u201d Oliveira admits. The city had received thousands displaced in the lead-up to the World Cup and Olympic Games<\/a>. \u201cThese people were taken from their land, their culture, their families, their friends and were thrown in Queimados.\u201d Consequently, so came the militia<\/a>\u2014vigilante off-duty police mafias\u2014and intense conflict between militia members and drug traffickers. In response to this new reality, Oliveira organized a seminar: “We got everyone together and had a meeting to talk about where we would want to be 25 years from now. From this meeting came the idea of Queimados biking into the future, for a more humane city.\u201d Oliveira would later spearhead this idea as “Pedal for the Future.” Pedala Queimados is the embodiment of this idea.<\/p>\n

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Since then, Pedala Queimados has grown from a one-man initiative to one with around twenty core members. On top of joining and supporting Oliveira on his biking endeavors<\/a>, many members of Pedala Queimados teach and assist in a bamboo bike course taught by Dutch craftsman Klaus Volkmann of Art Bike Bamboo<\/a>, who is based in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. The course is carried out with financial support from the CASA Cidades<\/a> program, the CASA Socio-Environmental Fund,<\/a> and the Dutch Cycling Embassy<\/a>, and is organized in partnership with several organizations, including AmeCiclo<\/a>, Transporte Ativo<\/a>, Bike Anjo Rio<\/a>, AMPARA<\/a>, and Casa Fluminense<\/a>.<\/p>\n

During this nine-day workshop, selected community youth are taught to build their own bikes out of bamboo\u2014as Ricardo Martins did. For ten hours each day, the youth work together to construct six bikes. \u201cThey cut the green bamboo, treat it, mount it, and design it. [The bamboo bike] is made the way they want,\u201d Oliveira explains. \u201cWhen we get a kid who was recently released from jail who has the freedom to do as he likes and he makes a bike of bamboo\u2014then stays to teach others how to make these bikes\u2014the very people who criminalized him now see him in a different light.\u201d Of the twenty youth who have completed the new program, sixteen have participated free of cost, largely thanks to a Dutch organization purchasing one of the original bikes<\/a> for \u20ac1,500 (US$1,685). News of the program’s success has spread: Pedala Queimados was featured in an article authored by Martins in April’s edition of Revista Bicicleta<\/a>, <\/em>a major national cycling magazine, and similar initiatives are being piloted in Porto Alegre and in Peru.<\/p>\n

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Oliveira, a man of prolific speech and action, regularly attends and speaks at sustainability conferences, leading biking events all over Greater Rio and beyond. After attending the 2018 Velo-City Conference in Rio<\/a>, the largest assembly on biking and the urban environment in the world, Oliveira was awarded sponsorship to attend Velo-City 2019<\/a> in Dublin, Ireland.<\/p>\n

The goal of Pedala Queimados is \u201cto transform our reality through the bicycle,\u201d Oliveira says. This includes destigmatizing<\/a> Queimados. \u201cThe media says that [we are] violent; we say that [we are] violated. <\/em>When you say ‘violent,’ it’s a reflection of the people. [Anyone who visits Queimados] sees that people here are not violent,\u201d he says. He aims to change this narrative by telling his story around the world and bringing visitors to Queimados. “From the bicycle, mainly the bamboo bike, we have been able to change some of the most closed-off people because the bicycle opens up space.”<\/p>\n

Pedala Queimados will continue to fight to guarantee basic human rights for their community and improve urban mobility throughout the Rio Metropolitan Region. \u201cWe want a healthier city\u2014a more humane city. A city where people get to see more.\u201d<\/p>\n

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*Pedala Queimados is one of over 100 community projects mapped<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Catalytic Communities<\/a> (CatComm), the organization that publishes\u00a0RioOnWatch<\/em>, as part of our parallel \u2018Sustainable Favela Network<\/a>‘ program launched in 2017 to recognize, support, strengthen, and expand on the sustainable qualities and community movements inherent to<\/a>\u00a0Rio de Janeiro\u2019s favela communities. Check out\u00a0all the profiles of mapped projects here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas Initiative: Pedala Queimados (“Cycle Queimados”) Contact: Facebook | Instagram |\u00a0Email Year Founded: 2016 Community: Queimados (Baixada Fluminense) Mission: To stimulate the use of cycling as a means of transportation, democratize land […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":187,"featured_media":54706,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1288,1271,1284,1503,329,452,1869,1329],"tags":[549,460,522,986,988,258,474,385,913,1197,1298,203,569,1709,2049,1900,996,33,2679,876,409,1698,1011,1403,453,471,3186,2124,200,1385],"writer":[2933],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-54236","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-highlight","8":"category-favelaqualities","9":"category-interviews-profiles","10":"category-opportunities-to-support-favelas","11":"category-solutions","12":"category-rio20","13":"category-transit","14":"category-by-international-observers","15":"tag-regiao-dormitorio","16":"tag-baixada-fluminense","17":"tag-bicycle-friendly","18":"tag-bicycle-use","19":"tag-clean-transport","20":"tag-community-solution","21":"tag-environment","22":"tag-environmental-education","23":"tag-free-transport","24":"tag-greater-rio","25":"tag-green-space","26":"tag-inequality","27":"tag-jacarepagua","28":"tag-japeri","29":"tag-long-commutes","30":"tag-media-narrative","31":"tag-metropolitan-region","32":"tag-militia","33":"tag-narrative-shifting","34":"tag-poverty","35":"tag-public-transportation","36":"tag-queimados","37":"tag-right-to-come-and-go","38":"tag-solution","39":"tag-stigma","40":"tag-sustainability","41":"tag-sfn","42":"tag-sustainable-favela-network","43":"tag-transportation","44":"tag-violence","45":"writer-ben-bildsten"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/187"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/54706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54236"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=54236"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=54236"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=54236"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=54236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}