The Impacts of Bus Corridors on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Socio-Territorial Inequalities in São Paulo: From Scenario Assessment to Serious Game Design

Bus rapid transit corridors are frequently promoted as a straightforward climate solution -reducing car dependency, cutting emissions, and improving urban mobility. This lecture challenges that assumption by examining the planned expansion of bus corridors in São Paulo through the lens of decolonial ecology and socio-territorial analysis, revealing how the same infrastructure can simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions and entrench existing patterns of racial, income, and age-based inequality. Drawing on scenario assessment and serious game design methodologies developed at ETH Zurich, it demonstrates that where infrastructure is built -and for whom -determines whether climate policy decarbonizes or excludes. The lecture issues a direct challenge to carbon-centric planning frameworks that treat social equity as a secondary consideration rather than a prerequisite for just urban transformation.