ABSTRACT
The bail-out of the international financial system and international banks responsible for the ruin of entire economies and the life perspectives of hundreds of thousands of persons meant the decoupling of capitalism from any ethical preoccupation with the consequences of the highly deterritorialized and financially driven model. The new social configurations of social protection, although still formally administered by public bodies, factually respond to the new logic of privatization and commodification of individual and collective security. In many cities of the world not only the urban poor but also the middle class increasingly face the daily task of having to reinvent again and again some fragile, often legally informal and nonetheless institutionalized (McFarlane 2012) form of security.
