In Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, death and the way in which it is managed by urban youth, has generated radically new geographies of proximity and distance, of inclusion and exclusion. The growing cultural rift between young and old, and the ongoing efforts at rephrasing existing notions of gerontocracy and authority that accompany these new fractures, are also played out along other vault lines, such as between public and private, modernity and tradition, politics and morality, between those who have a right to the city and those who don't, or between conflicting notions of citizenship and law. De Boeck's ethnography of youth's dealings with death, therefore, highlights ongoing efforts to reconceptualise the use of public urban space, the meaning of the public sphere, the content of citizenship, and the efforts of urban youth to generate a new moral ground from which to formulate alternatives to official ideologies as defined within the frameworks of state and church.