[1][2] He received the first prize of the German Society of Research on Latin America 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: Generalised Fear and the Militarisation of the Urban Question), published in 2008, was nominated for the Jabuti Award in 2009.
[3] He pioneered the study of spatiality and the social production of space from an ‘autonomist’ perspective (mainly inspired by Cornelius Castoriadis’s political-philosophical work) as early as in the 1980s.
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 Technische Universität Berlin (2005), at the Graduate Programme on Latin American Studies of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2008), at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) (2009–2010), at the Colegio de Geografía of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2012) and at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2013–2014).
Since the mid-1990s, Marcelo Lopes de Souza has acted as a coordinator or co-coordinator of a number of research projects, which have covered themes such as: urban violence and the ‘militarisation of the urban question’ in different countries; potentialities, limits and problems of ‘participative urban planning and management’; the spatial practices of emancipative social movements in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and South Africa; and environmental (in)justice and urban-environmental struggles in Brazil.