City of extremes is a powerful critique of urban development in greater Johannesburg since the end of apartheid in 1994. Martin J. Murray describes how a loose alliance of city-builders – including real estate developers, large-scale property owners, municipal officials, and security specialists – has sought to remake Johannesburg in the upbeat image of a "world-class" city. By creating new sites of sequestered luxury catering to the comfort, safety, and security of affluent urban residents, they have produced a new spatial dynamic of social exclusion, effectively barricading the mostly black urban poor from full participation in the mainstream of urban life. This partitioning of the cityscape is enabled by an urban planning environment of limited regulation or intervention into the prerogatives of real estate capital. Combining insights from urban studies, cultural geography, and urban sociology, Murray suggests that the "global cities" paradigm is inade quate to understanding the historical specificity of cities in the Global South, including the colonial mining town turned postcolonial megacity of Johannesburg.