Taking as a guideline situations found in the periphery of cities in the State of São Paulo, this article tries to redefine the notions of informal, illegal and illicit. If it is true that the interchange between legal and illegal, formal and informal has always been part of the history of our cities (and society), today the challenge is to build another kind of conceptual space, distant from the usual framework of the so-called incompleteness of Brazilian modernity.
City; Economy; informal markets; ilegalisms