Poverty and alliances: an analysis of the relations between a "life and alliance within the Holy Ghost" community and the city of São Paulo. This dissertation examines the mutual construction of religion and the city. More specifically, the analysis is focused in how catholic activities, houses and beliefs conceive and are related to urban spaces and actors, articulating circuits, patches and turfs in São Paulo. On the other hand, this approach also analyses how the city, as a social reality historically constructed, framed formatted the establishment, as well as how it reflects on the catholic activities, houses and beliefs observed. The empirical object of this research consists of a religious organization usually classified as a life and alliance within the Holy Ghost community, called Mercy alliance, anthropologically analyzed by means of the ethnographic theoretical and methodological resource (method). The Mercy Alliance is constituted as a religious actor, which establishes its houses and activities, therefore relating itself to the city, by means of a broad notion of poverty. This Christian notion of poverty is responsible for the making of several alliances, on which the observed community legitimates and supports its actions in different urban domains. Finally, the notion of poverty developed by the Mercy Alliance engenders the demonization of certain urban spaces and actors, classified as poor in a material sense, thus articulating a definition of the city as hell that shall be evangelized by new and different methods.