Why have the Consortial Urban Operations (CUOs) done little for the city of São Paulo, in terms of producing more fair, democratic and pleasant places to live?In order to contribute with this debate and, more broadly, with the research agenda on politics and urban policies, this work seeks to analyze the main political and institutional aspects in the making of São Paulo's consortial urban operations. By placing the scale of analysis at the level of government and its bureaucracies -instead of focusing on the macroeconomic perspective often adopted by the studies in this field -this work offers an alternative theoretical framework to the subject. From the perspective of public actors, the CUOs are considered as regulatory-financial instruments mobilized by the city for budgetary purposes in an institutional context of scarcity of resources in the urban policy sector. This framework suggests the relevance of reinserting the State, government and bureaucracies in the analysis in order to understand how the allocation of resources for urban operations is decided. From the empirical analysis of the implementation trajectory of a specific CUO -the Água Espraiada CUO -this work demonstrates the relevance of elements such as: multi-level resource flows; intra-bureaucratic disputes; judicialization of politics; government agendas; territorial interests; and corruption in order to understand how the territory associated to CUOs is produced. In summary, if these instruments have done little for the city, this cannot be explained by the existence of a robust institutional arrangement that benefits only private interests, nor by the strong presence of the paradigm focused on the financialization of the land within the state apparatus. This is a fragmented, ad-hoc and improvised process of territory production in the city.