Rooted in ethnographic findings, this article wants to show that structuring forces are still present among the changes observed in the poor territories of São Paulo, even when invisible, modulated by the mix between the processes identified as global changes and its local developments, like the impact of the so-called "Chinese cost" in work relations. In a European context, the global processes may have the meaning of porosity and traffic among frontiers, international migrations, trade means crossing formal and informal poles of circulation and consumption. In the east of São Paulo it is possible to observe other modulations of these processes. Part of them have taken place with a silent and invisible transformation of urban territories, mixing the so-called "world of housing" and the "world of work."
Work; Productive circuits; Housing; Poverty