Spatial Governance and Everyday Agency in Brazil’s Rural–Urban Transition: The Case of Piracicaba’s Open-Air Markets

This study investigates how smallholder farmers and vendors in Piracicaba, Brazil, navigate the tensions between standardized spatial governance and heterogeneous livelihood strategies in the rural–urban transition. Based on 25 semi-structured interviews with participants in municipal open-air markets (varejões), we analyze how policies implemented by the Municipal Secretariat of Agriculture and Food Supply (SEMA), including rigid price controls, mandatory MEI registration, and inflexible infrastructure rules, clash with the realities of organic, family-based, and mixed production systems. The findings reveal that SEMA’s one-size-fits-all approach fails to account for real production costs, quality differentiation, and informal cooperation, thereby penalizing innovation and marginalizing vulnerable producers. Rather than passive recipients, vendors actively resist and reshape governance through income diversification, informal cooperatives, direct sales, and ethical redefinitions of agricultural work. We argue that effective spatial governance must move beyond technical standardization and instead recognize productive heterogeneity and local agency as central to sustainable rural–urban transitions. This Brazilian case offers a critical counterpoint to top-down models and underscores the need for flexible, participatory, and context-sensitive policy design.