In 2019, the Egyptian ministry of housing estimated that 40% of Cairo’s population lived in informally-built units and 75% of urban areas across Egypt were unplanned. Informal housing supply used to primarily cater to low-income groups (el-Kadi,2009: 84,29). However, this pattern changed since the early 1990s, with private developers undertaking larger-scale housing supply in middle-class neighborhoods building units without permit and selling them to final consumers (Shawkat,2021). Taking Egypt’s middle-class informal housing market as a case study, this article raises the question: how socio-economic actors shape the market fields in which they operate? I build on Bourdieu’s “habitus” but also depart from it. I argue in ongoing market-based capitalist transformations, such as Egypt’s since infitah, a few socio-economic actors have been endowed with kinds of habitus: dispositions and access to tangible and intangible capital from past relations and experiences, that enabled them to become simultaneously market-actors and market-makers. In doing so, they shaped and sometimes created from scratch, the market rather than just got incorporated into an already demarcated field. These socio-economic actors became entrepreneurs in a double-sense: economic entrepreneurs seizing or creating opportunities for lucrative gain by exchange and; institutional entrepreneurs who formulate, instill and observe practical rules that govern the field in which they operate (Biggart & Beamish, 2003:448). Using Luhmann’s system theory, these market-makers are first- and second-order actors at one and the same time (2010:185). The collapse of both actions into one is a sharp theoretical break with all the strategic-action assumptions in the neoclassical institutionalism that derive from rational choice (Bourdieu, 2005:193; Callon,1996:22). It also critiques the overstated role of states in MENA in shaping their economies despite rampant informality and weak regulatory capacities, which ignores the agency of socio-economic actors (Adly, 2020). This article aims at developing a new conceptual framing for understanding the social dynamics behind bottom-up processes of market-making in MENA. I attempt to engage critically with a broad body of literature in economic sociology, economic anthropology and new institutionalism, while examining empirically a local process of market-making for informal middle-class housing in a Cairo neighborhood using relational ethnography. The local market is treated as a microcosm for the process of market-making or as a paradigmatic case using Carlo Ginzburg’s expression, with the hope of conceptual generalization into other contexts of MENA and beyond. I aim to bridge regional studies with the bigger body of economic sociology and political economy literature.