City of Extremes examines how urban design in Johannesburg since the fall of the Apartheid regime in 1994 has not only failed to reverse over a century of segregation and disenfranchisement, but even exacerbated race and class rifts. Author Martin J. Murray, an urban design professor at the University of Michigan who taught in South Africa in the 1970s and has dedicated his study to Johannesburg for more than a decade, examines how the planning process has been hijacked by the real estate industry, which has an invested interest in secluding middle- and upper-class Johannesburgians in distant suburbs and self-contained, sealed office complexes, while poor urbanites are left in shanty towns and blighted downtown office parks without services and outside the protection of the law. Murray examines the ways in which Johannesburg's urban design privileges people of means while further disadvantaging its poorest residents. Notably, because of the city's massive sprawl and the political and economic importance of its fringe suburbs – and, circularly, contributing to these same problems – Johannesburg's transportation infrastructure heavily favors automobile-bound travelers, leaving pedestrians practically stranded. Because of what Murray calls “leap-frog” suburb development, a process driven by land speculators who encourage white, upper-class residents to seal themselves off from the impoverished denizens of the inner city, pockets of lavish development including massive single-family homes and shopping centers with ever imaginable amenity are accessible only by freeways and separated from the inner city and each other by tracts of “dead space” with no development at all. Johannesburg is largely devoid of public spaces, a phenomenon that Murray examines primarily from the perspective of the post-Apartheid era. This design trend likely dates from the Apartheid regime, as truly public spaces – as in, open to both whites and blacks – are practically an invitation to protest and civil disobedience. Looking across the globe at the current political situation, one can see that most regime-threatening protests began and have stayed anchored in public spaces, from Tahrir Square in Cairo to the Maidan in Kiev, where the politically disenfranchised have forced themselves into political visibility by inhabiting, often for weeks and months on end, central public areas. Since Apartheid, despite the rhetoric of openness and inclusion, the new government has little reason to encourage an urban design feature that would allow its subjects, most of whom are still poor and politically invisible, to force regime changes or check the power of political elites. Real estate developers, who, according to Murray, have been placed in charge of urban design and redesign through “public-private partnerships,” have even less incentive to open the door to popular revolt, since they are monetarily invested in the current political system and in their ability to charge for access to urban space. In order to “colonize” the urban space, inner-city developers have, as Murray describes, resorted to what he calls “siege architecture.” The design of the buildings themselves, in addition to the layout of the urban space, reflects a sense among middle- and upper-class whites that they are constantly under threat from the poor blacks in the surrounding city. Where companies, particularly major South African banking institutions, invested too much in the inner city before the end of Apartheid to abandon it once it was no longer a whites-only area, they have created buildings designed to ensconce residents and office workers in a protective bunker. These buildings have only a few passage points into and out of the anxiety-ridden landscape of urban poverty that surrounds them. In fact, according to Murray, many of these buildings save their residents from having to brave the unsegregated cityscape even to travel between regulated “citadel” office buildings, instead offering them use of elevated skyways and underground tunnels. In this way, Johannesburg is, like Dubai, profoundly interior-focused, rendering the outdoor streetscape practically invisible to the upper-class users for whom the city is designed. The sum of these design trends is to privilege middle- and upper-class residents as the city's intended users, while rendering the poor in both the inner city and shantytowns invisible. His argument is perhaps echoed in the 2013 dystopian film Elysium by South African director and screenwriter Neill Blomkamp, in which the human race is divided into two worlds: the natural world, inhabited by the poor, trapped in a state of squalor and oppressed but not protected by law enforcement. The wealthy live in an artificial, immaculately manicured and picturesque space station to which access is strictly controlled. Johannesburg, as portrayed by Murray, is increasingly becoming such a divided dystopia. While I believe Murray that these design decisions by real estate developers and architects have purposefully segregated social classes and races since the fall of Apartheid, I think he ignores the agency of urban space users in his descriptions. Architects and designers may have envisioned perfectly sealed and regulated buildings, but spaces are rarely used precisely as their creators intend. I believe his study could be enhanced by an examination of whether and how the poor do in fact gain access to and use of some of these segregated spaces, as they have throughout Apartheid and I'm sure have continued to do since. While the argument effectively elucidates the intent of designers, I wish to see the response of users in this book.