ABSTRACT
The last 20 years have seen dramatic changes in the social response to conflicts that often appear in urban public space, straddling the line between madness and dangerousness. Among these changes are the appearance of poorly defined problems, responses by new categories of professionals, and new intervention strategies developed in the heat of the action. Intervention to deal with ‘boundary’ problems crosses fields of expertise, normative frameworks, and symbolic universes, as witnessed by the numerous hybrid classifications for disorders (eg, the antisocial personality, in which correctional and psychiatric aspects are intertwined); ‘catch-all’ psycho-social nomenclature (social maladjustment; social dysfunction; lack of cognitive, behavioural or emotional skills, etc) (Otero, 2000, 2003); and even collective urban representations of risk (the homeless former psychiatric patient, the junkie, the street kid, etc).
