This article starts off from the tensions involved in the process of removing the street Market from downtown Porto Alegre/RS, Brazil, and moving it to a popular mal built through a Public-Private Partnership (PPP). We gave preference to an ethnographic approach based on over three years of insertion if the field, which allowed us to capture the process from a diachronic perspective. The transition from the streets to the mall was closely followed by the construction company, that demanded a change in commercial sensibility from a pedagogical perspective with the aim of creating new profiles for the shopkeepers, something that was essential for the economic success of the investment. As a consequence, new conflicts emerged daily from this strategy, since not all street vendors became the prototype of shopkeeper idealized by the PPP. The tensions around this process allowed us to reconstruct the connections between economy and politics, micro and macro, agents and institutions that shape the social.
Informal Market; Street vendors; State.Ethnography; Public-Private Partnership