In this guest post, Dr Felipe Rangel Martins discusses the findings of his research on experiences and conflicts surrounding traders’ uses of city spaces, specifically in a night market in the city of Sao Paulo (Brazil). He also introduces Feira da Madrugada, a podcast he developed with support from a USF Knowledge Mobilization Award.
In August 2022, we began to take the first steps of the project ‘Memories of an urban market in dispute’, supported by the Urban Studies Foundation under the Knowledge Mobilisation Award (KMA). We are now launching its result in the form of the Feira da Madrugada Podcast.
The project consisted of producing a podcast aimed at recovering the formation, development, contemporary conflicts, and dynamics of the so-called Feira da Madrugada (which means night market in Portuguese). This market is located in the city centre of São Paulo and is one of Latin America’s largest urban informal markets.
It was on this urban market that I carried out my PhD research, which was dedicated to understanding the work experiences and conflicts surrounding the uses of city spaces by traders. Discussing these dynamics was also the subject of the International Fellowship project I developed at the University of Chicago, supported by the Urban Studies Foundation.
Drawing from these research experiences, the podcast aimed to address the gap in public knowledge about the origins of the Feira da Madrugada. Forgetting its historical context risks further marginalizing both the market itself and the people who depend on it.
The memory of the vendors and the few historical records indicate that the origin of this market dates back to the nocturnal occupation of the streets of the Brás neighbourhood in the early 2000s. The neighbourhood is an old industrial district degraded by the productive restructuring that affected São Paulo in the 1980s, with the closing of factories and the abandonment of buildings in the region. Little by little, small producers of clothing items began to sell their goods on the empty streets during the night.
The establishment and development of this night market were important for the dynamisation of commerce in the region, as, due to its creation, there was an intensification of the flow of people who travel to the place seeking to buy goods and resell in their regions of origin, including other countries in South America. From the growth of the Feira da Madrugada, several commercial buildings emerged in the region, which took advantage of the commercial potential promoted by the informal traders. Since then, workers have faced rising rent costs, uncertainties and evictions from the best commercial spots.
The Feira da Madrugada Podcast was conceived to document the social and economic importance of this marginalised market for working-class groups in São Paulo and different regions of Brazil, as it is a distribution node for low-cost goods throughout the country and even beyond national borders. In addition, the production of the podcast was intended as a channel to increase the visibility of the current conflicts surrounding this market, which, after gaining notoriety and appreciation through informal commercial activities, has attracted the attention of the state and private investors, leading to “modernisation” projects that make it impossible for the poorest vendors to remain.
To capture and share these stories, we produced the podcast in a storytelling format, in which, in dialogue with the voices of workers, we narrated the main events that involved the occupation of the abandoned streets at night, the conflicts with public authorities and other social sectors, the stabilisation of this market, and the contemporary process of gentrification. We conducted interviews with traders who were involved in this urban market at different times.
To support the podcast, we created the website https://podcastfeiradamadrugada.com.br/, which, in addition to hosting the episodes, features photographs, maps, and some documents and texts used as references for the scripts. The episodes are also available on the main audio platforms, such as Spotify. The podcast’s access channels have been widely shared with traders and their political associations, as well as with professionals from the mainstream Brazilian media and academic institutions. The aim is to reach as wide an audience as possible.
It is important to register that the production and dissemination of the podcast had the essential support of the UFSCar Open Interactivity Laboratory (LAbI), UFSCar Radio, the UFSCar Postgraduate Programme in Sociology, and the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). Above all, the participation, engagement, and exchanges with the Feira da Madrugada vendors were fundamental, as they generously shared aspects of their daily lives, struggles, and hopes with us.