This research examines the everyday survival strategies of street vendors in Ahmedabad’s Law Garden market—a contested urban space where informality is simultaneously celebrated, criminalized, and co-opted. Through ethnographic fieldwork including participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and spatial mapping, the study traces how vendors such as pheri-walas, thela-walas, and baithak-walas navigate a fragmented regulatory terrain marked by licensing, eviction, and extortion. Their practices ranging from jugaad and strategic concealment to relational negotiation, reveal a sophisticated system of placemaking rooted in material improvisation, spatial calibration, and collective infrastructure. Drawing on theories of informality (Anjaria, 2006), southern urbanism (Bhan, 2019), and systems of survival, the study argues that vending is not merely economic but a form of adaptive planning, relational, embodied, and deeply attuned to the city’s rhythms. Law Garden emerges as a living site of resistance and reinvention, where vendors do not just survive but actively remake the city from below.