This paper makes an analysis of the dynamics of the Metropolitan Area of Salvador (in Portuguese, RMS) starting from the implantation of Ford, discussing the perspective of the 'local' (the metropolitan periphery), inside of an asymmetrical relationship with global businesses in the age of flexibility. The Ford Automotive Compound is caracterized in the first part of the paper from its productive reestructuring and changes in the organization and work of territories, and, in the second part, from its impact on the the metropolitan periphery from Salvador. In its conclusion it demonstrates that the same circumstances that allowed the arrival of the automotive maker in Camaçari constrain the original ambitions of better ratio between economical growth and social progress: the flexibility of the new automotive production methods, making peripheric spaces strategic, compromises on the permanence of the investments; and the "streamlined production", easy on job production and hard on job flexibilization inhibit social benefits.
productive restructuring; job market; automobile industry; metropolitan periphery; socioespatial segregation