In present-day South Africa, urban development agendas have inscribed doctrines of desirable and undesirable life in city spaces and the public that uses the space. This book studies the ways in which segregated city spaces, displacement of people from their homes, and criminalization practices are structured and executed. Sara Dehkordi shows that these doctrines are being legitimized and legalized as part of a discursive practice and that the criminalization of lower-class members are part of that practice, not as random policing techniques of individual security forces, but as a technology of power that attends to the body, zooms in on it, screens it, and interrogates it.

Sara Dehkordi is a lecturer at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin. She teaches postcolonial and decolonial theories, on colonial genocide, the Negritude and Black Consciousness Movement, neoliberal urbanism, and critical peace and conflict studies. She has received the German Tiburtius Prize for outstanding research for her work leading to the book 'Segregation, Inequality, and Urban Development'.