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Since the demise of the apartheid regime, local security initiatives are blooming in Cape Town and Johannesburg, relying on heterogeneous forms of partnerships between public authorities and non-state actors. The State is reluctant to legislate on these initiatives, and holds unstable, not to say contradictory, positions towards them in metropolitan space and in time. This raises questions concerning the nature of state’s control of the city. We hypothesize that it reflects « flexible governance », the state’s political adaptation to a complex and contradictory relationship with metropolitan space: instability of local politics, debates around the legitimate scale(s) of urban governance, and increasing territorialisation of urban policies in a neo-liberal context.