ILPC 2026

This paper aims to discuss how the control of practices in public spaces is elaborated in Belo Horizonte (state of Minas Gerais, Brazil), which is part of the urban surveillance. It is about a social control system which focuses on the regulation of street vendors activities, considered as one of the main "social problems" in a context of "urban order" promotion. This urban space govern system counts on outsourced low-wage employees - so called "assistants" (auxiliares de fiscalização) or "field agents" (agentes de campo) - who work daily on city streets in direct contact with the street vendors (interacting with other people, like other professional groups) in different fronts of street vending regulation process. They are typical street-level bureaucrats doing the organization's "dirty work". This model of governing counts on the masculine disposition of these workers in the front to participate on the conflits. There are two main complementary activities: the plantões (teams assigned for street monitoring) and the Apoio (teams assigned for the seizure of illegal items).In both categories, workers face situations of violent conflict and constant pressure. In general, the labor practices of these assistants anticipates the participation of their bosses: the city hall officers (fiscais integrados) and other authorities, reducing as an effect their workload in field. However, at the same time, these assistants actively participate of the situational production of references of differentiation (between formal /informal, bearable/unbearable) and social control as a whole. The research effort was to come up, in an interrelated manner, the various aspects that make up the street surveillance as a social construction. The research effort was to come up, in an interrelated manner, the various aspects that make up the street surveillance as a social construction. Therefore, I analyzed the strategic and managerial aspects enrolled in practical work of these agents in different working arrangements and environments, giving a focus on how the regulation is produced in a negotiated manner, although it is constantly rationalized as a tool for public space management. The research prioritized the data collection "from inside", from an relational and ethnographic point of view.Qualitative research techniques (interviews and observation) were operated in order to keep the subjects working practices as the main reference for descriptions and analyzes. By placing the focus on the continuities and discontinuities between the private life aspects and the work aspects, the analysis was enlarged from the reconstruction of trajectories of some of the research subjects, the assistants. Through this perspective, it was possible to work out with some different social aspects (such as class and gender) in order to observe, from the point of view of the assistants, and describe the labor practices that reveal the main basis and senses of this social and relational control. All this conjugated analysis dimensions demonstrate how this particular control is produced. The research was developed between 2013 and 2016, under the scope of the master´s degree.