Every FIFA World Cup begins with a promise. Host cities will be transformed. Streets will be repaved, transit systems expanded, public squares renovated, stadiums constructed. The city will become cleaner, safer, and more beautiful. But what makes a city beautiful, and which bodies are permitted to embody that beauty?

The beautiful body is a body that can be read as belonging to a nation's aspirational image of itself. To a kind of future the city wants to claim. The body marked by poverty, addiction, illness, or labour disrupt the image the city wishes to project. Their presence threatens the fantasy of prosperity and must be disappeared.

The unhoused body sleeping on a bench. The street vendor selling fruit outside a stadium. The migrant worker resting after construction, (the construction of the very stadium that will now exclude them). The disabled body that moves differently through the city. The elderly body asking for spare change are all cast as contaminants within the logic of beautification. Their bodies threaten the health of the urban landscape and the city must purge itself of undesirable elements before it can present to the world.

Cities are "cleaned." Streets are "cleared." Neighbourhoods are "revitalised."  The language of beautification borrows heavily from the language of sanitation. It makes the violent displacement of certain communities legible as municipal hygiene, as though poverty were a form of contamination rather than a consequence of political and economic inequality.

These people have not been failed, they are cast as the failure itself. Not the symptom, they are the disease. To be labelled a contagion is to be pushed beyond the boundaries of the human and into the category of the pathogen. The thing that spreads, that corrupts, that must be contained. Evictions become “renewal”. Forced removals become “regeneration” and social exclusion is transformed into a public good. Beautifying a city is, at its root, a choice about whose life matters, and which bodies are permitted to occupy public space.