Author: Joaquim Falcão

Source: Jornal do Commercio - PE, 04/01/2009

Everything indicates that Boa Viagem will continue on the agenda in 2009. The themes in 2008 were: boardwalk and Portuguese stones, Oscar Niemeyer and Parque Dona Lindu, and robberies and ostensive policing. The boardwalk is done. It works quite well. The park opened. Assaults and violence, despite efforts, will likely continue. At the end of the year, the city government signed a new decree regulating the use of public space more strictly: food preparation, commercialization, sound equipment, placement of advertisements. Perhaps this is the year to invest more in human resources than in physical works.

In 1981, Hélio Beltrão, our greatest specialist in public administration, upon receiving the Homem de Visão award, said that Brazil would need to “assume its poverty in order to develop”. Boa Viagem needs to assume its poverty, educate and train, to balance itself. The beach is an open-air factory, generating thousands of informal jobs. This summer, how many people there will work without a formal contract, without collecting taxes and social security, especially on weekends? Thousands, probably. How many families will be supported? How much money will circulate? Boa Viagem is a highly visible invisible economy, which contrasts and dialogues with the highly visible civil construction and leisure industry.

This factory, without a defined boss, time clock or accounting, works almost 24 hours a day, in three shifts, on weekends. In the first, in the morning until after lunch, the factory floor is the sand on the beach, an informal open-air mall. Everything is sold and everything is eaten. In the second shift, the factory floor moves in the afternoon and at night with its informal workers to the boardwalk: bars, music, lounges, barbecues, dominoes, parking lots ... The third shift is at dawn. The factory floor is transferred to road signs and hidden corners of prostitution, drugs and robberies. The first two shifts economists call informal. The third, illegal. Those create jobs, this one creates criminals.

Disciplining this informality of survival with new laws, intensification of municipal inspection and fiscal repression is necessary, but insufficient. We are not facing a legal phenomenon. It's economical. Judges, authorities and police cannot be asked or blamed for what macro-economists cannot produce: popular employment.

One way to be explored would be an innovative urban education program, in order to make informality for and not against the city. Before giving permanent education to the informal, it is necessary to give instant education. Instant professional and urban education. So that they can, when exercising survival, collaborate with the city, its consumers, and with themselves.

Formal education in schools is indispensable, but long-term. Hardly reaches the informal beach worker, many middle-aged. The challenge is to imagine an instant, informal, mobile, temporary and diffuse education for these workers, many potential entrepreneurs. What is the curriculum? Where is the classroom? In the gym spaces on the beach itself? And what time? It will have to be practical, simple, direct education, and for volunteers and solidarity. City hall task alone? From companies too? NGOs?

An instant education to preserve Recife's greatest raw material: nature, beaches. Professional and urban training to combat pollution, plastics, cans, glass, food debris, newspapers and papers. Combat noise pollution on the boardwalk and bars. Training and a minimum of information on public health and hygiene, to protect not only drink and food consumers but also the sellers themselves. Even a minimum of information, and why not, training on packaging, marketing, entrepreneurship. This is a good path.

In 2009 we will probably have an economic crisis of unknown size. Nothing more appropriate for innovation and invention in human resources, in poverty, in the small entrepreneur. Crisis means the erosion of public and market policies to generate development. You can't get out of it doing more of the same: more works to be used with less urban education.

20 years ago, for example, no one talked about health workers. Today Brazil does not live without them. Perhaps it is time to invent the city's agents: educating, reorienting, informing, promoting, encouraging discipline and the progressive legalization of informal workers. Starting on the weekends in Boa Viagem. In 2009, browsing, or inventing (it’s the same), it’s necessary.

»Joaquim Falcão is director of the FGV Law School