A large daily newspaper in Toronto, where I live, has run several stories on South Africa, all of which focus on the country as a world-class tourist destination. The most recent story is about Cape Town and surrounding areas as a kind of food and wine mecca with foraging tours of local beaches, 5 star hotels, picturesque vineyards, colourful neighbourhoods and farmers' markets. These are not the kind of spaces that feature prominently, if at all, in criminological accounts of post-apartheid transformation. Yet they should, Christine Hentschel suggests in Security in the Bubble, as they offer important insights into emergent security regimes in South African cities and elsewhere across the globe.

Hentschel uses the empirical site of post-apartheid (2006–2009) Durban to develop a set of analytical tools for investigating new, softer, more affective, aesthetic and inclusionary strategies for managing crime and producing security in the city. Readers should note that the book's focus is theoretical and Hentschel does not provide a comprehensive analysis of the realities of crime control and urban living in Durban, something she makes very clear. Her stated aim is to conceptualise how crime is managed in and through space in contemporary Durban: the spatio-temporal production of, on the one hand, stationary bubbles of security (e.g. parks, bars and luxury developments), and on the other hand, mobile bubbles that facilitate the safe movement of urban residents through a crime-ridden city. The bubble imagery and other conceptual devices are set out in Chapter 2. This is preceded by a discussion, in Chapter 1, of how crime and space have been rendered governable (i.e. thinkable and actionable) in South Africa past and present. The remaining two substantive chapters focus on the emerging regimes of governing security in and through what Hentschel terms ‘handsome space’ (stationary bubbles of safety that ‘outcharm’ crime – Chapter 3) and ‘instant space’ (mobile bubbles that ‘outsmart’ crime thus enabling residents to avoid ‘bad’ spaces – Chapter 4).

This book certainly provides interesting and important details on, and tools for understanding, spatialised strategies for governing security: the production of aesthetically pleasing places that appeal to the positive emotions of desire and happiness; but also the information communications that create protective bubbles enveloping residents as they journey though the city. These new affective strategies are, as Hentschel observes, quite different from apartheid spatial practices. In contemporary Durban, the politics of security implicate, as they call into being, a wide range of subjects – not just the wealthy but also the racialised poor can enjoy security in the bubble. This raises questions about the conceptualisation of the city, urban fragmentation, citizenship, and security, all of which the book carefully addresses.

The emergent affective, more inclusionary strategies have been little studied in criminology which has concentrated on armed response units, gated communities and other manifestations of harder, more coercive and exclusionary strategies for governing through space. However, Hentschel is mistaken that this is because criminologists are blind to such developments. Rather, we have chosen to focus on techniques and strategies that she herself acknowledges are widespread. And while she notes that the new affective strategies co-exist alongside more coercive ones, she does not address how these interact or intersect, though they clearly do: the luxury waterfront development she discusses is policed by the Enforce private security firm; Business Against Crime is described as offering crime avoidance advice to residents but it also advocates for harsher, more punitive police and military responses to crime. My main concern, however, lies with her discussion of race. All too often race is treated as a character trait rather than a social process: the term racialisation appears fleetingly in Chapter 2 but its meaning and relevance left unexplored. This seems curious in an otherwise theoretically astute book and is probably due to the adoption of a governmentality approach which critics have long noted pays insufficient attention to the racialised and gendered relations that structure subjectivities, space and rule. The book, it seems to me, is a fine example of the insights generated by adopting a Foucauldian analysis as well as the lacuna.