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Nearly two decades after the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa, how different does the nation look? In Cape Town, is hardening inequality under conditions of neoliberal globalization actually reproducing the repressive governance of the apartheid era? By exploring issues of urban security and development, Tony Roshan Samara brings to light the features of urban apartheid that increasingly mark not only Cape Town but also the global cities of our day—cities as diverse as Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Beijing.

Cape Town after Apartheid focuses on urban renewal and urban security policies and practices in the city center and townships as this aspiring world-class city actively pursues a neoliberal approach to development. The city’s attempt to escape its past is, however, constrained by crippling inequalities, racial and ethnic tensions, political turmoil, and persistent insecurity. Samara shows how governance in Cape Town remains rooted in the perceived need to control dangerous populations and protect a somewhat fragile and unpopular economic system. In urban areas around the world, where the affluent minority and poor majority live in relative proximity to each other, aggressive security practices and strict governance reflect and reproduce the divided city.

A critical case for understanding a transnational view of urban governance, especially in highly unequal, majority-poor cities, this closely observed study of postapartheid Cape Town affords valuable insight into how security and governance technologies from the global North combine with local forms to create new approaches to social control in cities across the global South.

What happens when people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds come together to live and work in the same neighborhood? Unlike other examinations of this question that focus on one group, this book looks at the interaction of both old and new immigrant populations in three Philadelphia neighborhoods.

In this ethnographic study, which is a result of the Ford Foundation-funded Changing Relations: Newcomers and Established Residents in Philadelphia Project, the authors consider five primary groups—whites, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Koreans, and Eastern Europeans—in Olney, Kensington, and Port Richmond. Focusing on the interaction of racial, ethnic, and immigrant communities in schools, organized community celebrations and social events, the workplace, shopping areas, and neighborhood politics, the authors show that the contradictions of individual beliefs, actions, and strategies of power are not easily resolved.

By examining the local, citywide, and national economy and government, previous human relations efforts, changing immigration patterns, community-level power structures, real estate turnover, and gentrification, the authors evaluate current strategies to create harmony in communities with an ever-changing mix of established residents and newly arrived immigrants. Through their findings, Judith Goode and Jo Anne Schneider develop better alternatives that will encourage understanding and cooperation among different racial and ethnic groups sharing their lives and neighborhoods.

Film offers a powerful witness to the historical effects of segregation. Twentieth-century American urban policy favored “white flight” to the suburbs while confining other racial and ethnic groups in urban cores. Mainstream cinema, in turn, perpetuated racial stereotypes that justified this confinement. Amy Murphy revisits this history via six independent films, each mapping a distinct urban geography at a particular moment in the century. Murphy’s analysis reveals that certain veins of postwar independent filmmaking grew out of specific policy failures of the American city. With increased access to media production, such filmmakers created new cinemas from within the segregated city that expanded avenues for self-representation. Informed and insightful, The Divided City and Its New Cinemas, 1920–1980 examines how often-raw independent films pioneered cinematic exploration of identities impacted by space and time, and by geography and history.