This book argues that the apartheid division of Cape Town into an affluent, secure, and largely white centre and poor, crime-ridden, and largely coloured (mixed race) and black townships has been reproduced under democracy and neo-liberal governance. This reproduction has been informed by local factors (such as the city's history and demographics) and by trans-national factors (such as pressure to become a ‘world city’ like New York). Samara points out that the governing African National Congress's (ANC's) initial Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) offered the prospect of progressive urban development but was replaced in 1996 with the neo-liberal Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy which emphasized privatization and a police-oriented ‘war on crime’.

The book is divided into a number of thematic chapters. The first chapter explains how a series of ‘quality of life’ laws copied from cities in the United States were used to expel street children and the poor from Cape Town's Central Business District (CBD) as they discouraged tourism. Turning to the impoverished Cape Flats, the next chapter looks at how gangs generated by the dislocation of apartheid forced removals, were exploited by apartheid security forces against liberation movements and how they expanded with the post-apartheid penetration of international criminal syndicates. In the late 1990s, the state's failure to deal with township crime and violence led to the formation of the vigilante group People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (PAGAD) which fought a low-intensity urban war against the police and gangs. The subsequent chapter discusses the police response using overwhelming force – including the deployment of the military – and the subsequent decentralization of gangs making them harder to control. The imposition of American-style anti-gang laws came to define almost every young male township resident as a gang member. Township communities' distrust of the police is fed by perceived police corruption, incompetence, complicity with gangs, and the continued dominance of apartheid-era officers.

The last chapter focuses on how the neo-liberal state and its security-first development strategy has contributed to further insecurity and to the absence of development in peripheral areas. In the Cape Flats the absence of the state provides openings to gangs; this has prompted a heavy handed ‘war on crime’ that sends many young men to prison where they are further marginalized and criminalized. The neo-liberal privatization of municipal services led to water shut offs and evictions, provoking mass protest and clashes with the police. The decline of clinics, sports, libraries, and schools has resulted in the integration of gangs into the community as they provide material needs, recreation, and a masculine identity to hopeless young men.

Samara maintains that the militaristic police ‘war on crime’ provokes a masculine militaristic response from township gangs. The book recommends that the ANC government replace its police-oriented urban development policy in the townships with a multi-faceted approach centred on youth in and out of gangs. In the conclusion, Samara states that urban renewal has been a success in Cape Town's CBD but a failure in the Cape Flats; gangs and crime have come to stand for the urban poor in a way that allows elites to ignore the issues of race and class. The security-first approach will provide no more security for the post-apartheid city than it did for the apartheid city. While neo-liberal governance throughout the world has created divided cities, in South Africa it has allowed the continuation of apartheid divisions. Hinting at a return to the 1980s' ‘state of emergency’, Samara predicts that marginalized people will challenge the defenses of elite spaces and ultimately ‘render the neoliberal city ungovernable’ (p. 195).

Although this book represents an important study of urban security after apartheid, it has two deficiencies. First, the implication that the ANC, once in power, betrayed its progressive liberationist roots in favour of privatization and an authoritarian security agenda ignores some of the organization's history. Like many African nationalist movements, the ANC was led by mission-educated elites who sometimes opportunistically adopted revolutionary rhetoric to obtain Eastern Bloc support during the Cold War. While in exile they developed a disciplined military structure complete with internal security and detention camps. The current ‘war on crime’ may be less a departure from ANC history than an extension of it that fits into the global neo-liberal context. Second, the book is based on extensive interviews with township youth workers and gang members but the voice of police – particularly the rank-and-file – is conspicuously absent.