Through excerpts from conversations with the Collective Innovation Plant, this article reconstructs an experience of ephemeral urban transformation in the old Mercado Modelo in Montevideo, Uruguay. The intervention carried out, where the actions and programs gain weight compared to outright constructions and allow us to imagine new possibilities for infrastructures in disuse. The interdisciplinary proposal arises from the maxim of generating communities, citizen laboratories and between-times in the face of the dynamics of private management that increasingly haunt these types of spaces.