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We assume that, in the last 20 years, changes in the phenomena and representations relating to criminal urban violence have resulted in changes also in the cartography of civil organizations and collective action in the city and at its margins. Not only are the positions and meanings of existing associative organizations shifting, but new groups and figures are emerging in the public space.
Over time, this research has been systematically following dramatic occurrences (prominent among them chacinas) and events surrounding these situations. In these processes certain organizations and personages are observed to recur in interaction, and one purpose of this study is to identify them sociologically. The snowball method is used to identify events and agents. Some of these situations are the object of ethnographic work.
The situations mentioned include the presence of established organizations active on other issues (NGOs, trade unions, neighbourhood associations), which have now come to introduce the issue of violence and public security in their repertoire. Moreover, new emerging organizations and agents are being created on justifications related to the reaction to urban violence. Many are territorial in nature and located at the periphery; others, their domain offices "abroad", construct access to, and relationships of intimacy with, these locations and transit their conflicts and dramas through specific activists, functioning as multi-mediators among a diversity of institutional spaces. New actors – the “victims”, for instance – come to play sui generis roles in bringing new conflicts, political grammars, and forms of legitimacy for action on violence and public security into the public space.