Social Control of Space is a non-compulsory and non-official supervision of the territory aimning to comply with the public interst. In other words, it relates to the capacity of a social group to regulate their members through compelling principles sustained by collective goals and common good.

Informal Social Control of Space is related to the way in which the community monitors children and teenagers' games and where residents are eager to intervene in the prevention of misdemeanors or confronting whoever disturb or exploit public spaces (such as drug dealing, prostitution or vagrancy). Therefore, residents' capacity to control grupal processes and visible signs of social disorder represent a key mechanism to impact on the existing  opportunities to engage in criminal activities.

It is worth noting that individual as well as collective efficacy are inmersed in particular structural contexts, as well as in greater political economies which stress disadvantages concentrated in some communities, intensifying the social isolation of marginalized inhabitants (low-income, from disfunctional families, without basic services) from key resources to maintain an effective social control of the territory.

In Cuernavaca FORUM we stress the importance of informal social control, even when this does not imply the substitution of formal agencies of public control (such as the police forces), or by any means infere that collective efficacy could overcome existing structural inequities.