The study of postwar US cities is often organized around a sequence of epic moments: mid-century urban renewal giving way to crisis and abandonment and, in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, to gentrification. In The Roots of the Urban Renaissance, Brian Goldstein offers an alternative, and compelling, interpretation, suggesting that changing attitudes to urban development were “more gradual than abrupt” (155), and explaining the current US enthusiasm for urban living as “the product of a long history” (11), beginning with the radical organizing and imagining of the 1960s. Where other scholars have insisted that urban renewal “collapsed” in the 1960s, or that a “new” phase in urban policy emerged in recent decades, Goldstein's study of Harlem, not unlike Sylvie Tissot's work on Boston's South End, shows how ordinary people, and the groups they created, redirected urban renewal (20), sometimes questioning the “method,” but seldom the need for such interventions (29).

As well as tracking changes to Harlem's built environment across the longue durée, from the 1960s through to the early 2000s, The Roots of the Urban Renaissance widens the usual vantage point onto this neighbourhood by moving beyond the fabled Central section, to also encompass East and West Harlem. Across six prodigiously researched chapters, it describes the work done by scores of activists and ordinary people, including urban homesteaders, such as East Harlem's Renegades Youth Gang, and members of the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood, both of which took control of crumbling apartment blocks, and used “sweat equity” to repurpose vacant buildings, and the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), which was set up in 1964 to bring design expertise to the community. Under the leadership of J. Max Bond Jr., ARCH proved a forceful voice for “people-centered urbanism” (79), opposing New York's modernist planning establishment, much in the vein of Jane Jacobs, and advancing proposals to retain, rather than demolish, Harlem's existing features. Through myriad actions, ARCH fostered the claim that Harlemites had a right to determine their community's built landscape, and worked to preserve Harlem as a space for black people – a position that echoes and extends the “community-rights” stance that historian Shannon King has argued attended the community's interwar activists.

A crucial strand of Goldstein's study concerns the emergence of community development corporations, or CDCs, from the late 1960s on, whose number only expanded as the federal government's presence in urban affairs diminished. These were the “major players in urban development” (236) in New York, indeed everywhere, controlling large parcels of land, and amassing significant assets, including, in one instance, a Caribbean hotel. It was the “metamorphosis” (138) of such groups, through their reliance on public bodies; their need for funding and, later, investment; and their embrace of commercially oriented strategies, and autocratic leadership that is the stem of Goldstein's argument – such influences tempered their political insurgency, and left only the husk of a “pragmatic approach” (279) to development. By the mid-1970s, “CDCs simply built” (236). In time, urban historians might look at CDCs as a similar type of linkage in the chain from urban liberalism to neoliberalism that political historians have begun to see think tanks providing for US politics more broadly.

If the gentrification of US cities is often understood as an external force, acting against local interests, Goldstein counters that many of the agents of Harlem's transformation had “very local roots” (279), including institutions that have often professed to protect its historic blackness. Middle-class African Americans, including professionals, like Bond, and those raised to its ranks through groups like ARCH, as well as church leaders and some congregants, occupy a key place in this history, and were responsible for associating community revitalization with the return of the middle class. Goldstein is excellent in showing how the idea of a “mixed-income community” (199) became commonsensical among planners, even if, through groups like the Harlem Tenants Council, vestiges of the collective-control ideal for Harlem's poorest residents were never totally eradicated. Goldstein traces how the mixed-income logic was expressed in residential projects that balanced upscale and so-called affordable housing, and in efforts to bring national and global commercial chains to Harlem to connect it to metropolitan markets. In recovering how these projects took shape, and in emphasizing the role that indigenous groups played in their formulation, it is surprising that The Roots of the Urban Renaissance does not say much about Harlem's cultural institutions – especially the Schomburg Center, the Studio Museum of Harlem, and the revitalized Apollo Theater, whose trustees have broadly shared and acted on such assumptions, particularly when deciding their own institutions’ locations and built environment. Such institutions, and the web of heritage attractions and businesses catering to tourists that have emerged in recent decades, have been crucial in feeding media commentaries about a “Second Harlem Renaissance,” and in amplifying what John L. Jackson calls Harlem's “wasness,” or a sense that the neighbourhood's contemporary allure rests on its former stature during the 1920s. The Roots of the Urban Renaissance reminds us that such visions, foregrounding this romantic conception of Harlem's past, are not the only ones to have anchored a certain outlook as to what type of place the neighbourhood could and should be, while the work also makes clear the value that historical approaches can bring to the study of gentrification.