The informality downtown of the city of Rio de Janeiro: the “camelódromo” of Uruguaiana Street

Abstract

In the present article will be studied the legalization of the street traders, specially the ones in the “Mercado Popular da Uruguaiana”, downtown of the city of Rio de Janeiro, which has as it’s essence the informal activity that was regularized by the municipal government in the begging of the 1990’s. The “Mercado Popular da Uruguaiana”, popular known as “Camelódromo”, characterized as the local reflex of options made in the political and economic levels, in different scales of power (between the local and the global), and of the work’s and technology’s transformations. For that, we observe the decades of the 1970’s, the 1980’s and the 1990’s focusing on politic and economic characteristics and work activities; helping building new ways of work. The “Mercado Popular da Uruguaiana” is inserted in the context of public politics to receive a huge part of the unemployed population, but it remained active in the informal market (and many times illegal) where the most clear goal, but not only, was to unflood the mess of sidewalks filled with the street traders transferring them to three storage sheds build specifically to this commercial activity.