In 1996, against the backdrop of Alberto Fujimori s increasingly corrupt national politics, an older woman in Lima, Peru part of a group of women street sweepers protesting the privatization of the city s cleaning services stripped to the waist in full view of the crowd that surrounded her. Lima had just launched a campaign to revitalize its historic districts, and this shockingly transgressive act was just one of a series of events that challenged the norms of order, cleanliness, and beauty that the renewal effort promoted. "The City at Its Limits" employs a novel and fluid interweaving of...