Unknowing São Paulo: life beyond capture in the economies of small clothing businesses and the fragility of the urban

Based on extensive engagement with interlocutors in the small-scale garment industries of São Paulo, this article builds on the notion of the radical unknowability of urban life as developed by AbdouMaliq Simone and Vanesa Castán Broto to discuss urban processes that make cities dynamic and ever-evolving. Through considerations and experiences from varied actors within small garment businesses, the article examines how urban life in São Paulo is conceived and lived in uncertainty. By tracing the everyday routines of garment workers and entrepreneurs, the article uncovers contingent and ephemeral practices that resist stabilization or definitive categorization. It questions the impulse to fully ‘know’ the urban, encouraging instead an approach grounded in an epistemic modesty that attends to relationality and what remains elusive. The article in this way argues that by acknowledging these urban processes as fragile, the ephemerality of urban life can be glimpsed in its unanticipated potentiality.