When social relationships escape from confinement within a particular geographical area, local communities lose their capacity for social control. The responsibility for public safety then passes to the State, which organizes it through a hardening of the distinctions between public and private space. This model is currently being weakened by new tendencies towards deterritorialization of social relationships, as well as by a weakening of the distinctions between public and private space, and national and international territory. At the same time, in urban areas in which marginalized populations are concentrated, there are further relocalization initiatives which are creating for the State other problems of social control. Notes, bibliography