In the current context of disputes around the project of the city, in which privatist and democratic prospects are fighting against the other, the works of urban and social infrastructure of the PAC becomes an important stage of these clashes. Social Work - as an obligatory component of these projects - assumes a mediating role between the deployed services and their appropriation by the population beneficiary, being a sociocupacional space which incorporates the social worker who prints a social direction in this process. The purpose of this research was to analyze the inclusion of social services in these developments and identify the possibilities and limits to materialisation of critical social direction. Delimited as a study field sanitation projects of PAC, in water supply and sanitation arrangements in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Thus, we seek to identify the institutional expectations regarding work from desk research, literature and discourses present in an evaluative and prospective seminar of Social Work; and faced with its materialization in daily life, from questionnaires and focus groups. Through the research it was possible to learn that under the reorganization, both institutional expectations, as its objectification, have limits to the strengthening of the democratic project of the city. However, despite the clear gap between what is expected of work and historical, cultural and institutional social conditions for its realization, it was possible to identify similarities between the Social Work and Ethical-Political Project of Social Work.