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The informal urban sector seems on the face of it to point to an obvious reality: practices carried out on the fringe of regulations and opposed to a ‘modern’ production of the city. More often than not urban studies about Algerian cities have merely observed the distortions existing between rules and practices, sometimes opposing the desired city and the actual city in an incantatory way, and denouncing the incapacity of the state to control an urban planning that breeds a plague of social curses. In fact, this production takes a contrary position and poses in a totally direct way the question of social legitimacy as opposed to institutional legitimity. We intend here to step out of the purely normative frame and examine these practices from the angle of their relationship with the social structure and the current urban dynamics. The point is to grasp the urban informal sector in its evolutions, expressions, spheres of activity, and the identity of its actors.