Outras economias no espaço: metodologias de mapeamento e sistematização de experiências de economia popular nos territórios

Abstract

Since the 1970s, a vast Latin American literature has been produced to debate the emerging phenomenon of the informal economy. This literature has managed to show that informality, far from being the result of an incomplete dynamic of modernization or the expression of an unsuccessful development process, was, in reality, a fundamental part of the capitalist dynamic in the periphery and in the Global South (Oliveira, 2014). From then on, a series of concepts and theories sought to address the role played by these activities, replacing the concept of ‘informal’ with other more appropriate terms. In Latin America, the ideas of popular economy, marginal pole and economy of popular sectors (Razeto, 1993; Coraggio, 1994; Quijano, 1998) seek to account for this phenomenon and its functioning within Latin American urban economies. The methodological instruments are based on a bibliographic review and secondary data on the açaí economy in the Belém Metropolitan Mesoregion, aiming to characterize the profile of its agents, the nature of the work, the level of employment and income, participation in the state's GDP, local, national and export production and marketing. With this, we seek to identify how the activity is positioned in the urban system – economic circuits – of the RMB. The investigation is also guided by qualitative field research, which proposes to characterize the productive levels, the forms of relationships between agents and social groups, the production distribution process, the short and long marketing flows and the destination of final consumption. Through the socio-spatial diagnosis of the açaí economy in the RMB, it is possible to obtain an analysis of the forms of socioeconomic relations, the mapping of the elements of the circuits in the production process, the production flows in the space, as well as understanding the main limitations for the açaí economy to become a path for the endogenous development of Pará.