The title of Richardson Dilworth's edited book suggests a conversation between two sets of scholars who have not much spoken with each other. Students of cities seem adamant in their resistance to engaging methodological and theoretical advances in the study of politics. There are exceptions. Long-standing institutional constructs of machine and reform have been rethought; scholars of voting behavior have made immeasurable progress away from the hoary concepts of private-regarding and public-regarding voters. That said, few if any are formal theorists, only a scattering of scholars are in the American political development (APD) camp, and concepts introduced to improve qualitative research are not much in evidence in writing about cities. For their part, students of APD seem almost unanimously uninterested in urban politics.

The essays in The City in American Political Development join the two subfields in a variety of ways. Two authors recast and broaden our general understanding of city politics by linking familiar narratives about city government to the language of APD. Clarence Stone and Robert Whelan offer the best remapping of urban scholarship since Robert Salisbury posited, in 1964, a “new convergence of power” in city hall. Salisbury recognized systemic changes in urban governance attendant on urban renewal. Stone and Whalen see those changes as a durable shift in governing arrangements across many cities, involving multiple orders—government institutions, political coalitions, relations between economic and political elites, racial hierarchy, and the boundaries of civil society and politics. Similarly, Michael Jones-Correa shows that although observers long claimed that urban riots were without consequences beyond the damage they inflicted, riots are better understood as critical junctures. The riot reveals social and political maladies with new clarity and force, and so provokes medium and long-term changes in policy and public institutions.

Clarissa Hayward explains the importance of geography within the city. She argues that space is not simply the location of events; rather, space “significantly shapes social and political relations of power” (p. 141). Space is a material reality, a legal and political presence, and finally, space is “common sense.” This trajectory powers the “racialization of space” as an organizing concept. The path from location to common sense both shaped black identities and made of the ghetto the causal scapegoat for an urban crisis that originated in other social and economic transitions. Readers learn from Jessica Trounstine that democracy is fleeting in city politics, not because politicians lust for power, as citizens in the 13 colonies thought, but because politicians seeking reelection are likely to find that their chances are greatest if they govern with narrow supporting coalitions and institutions that insulate them from public sentiment. The same arrangements inspire their demise. Considering the fragility and transience of two-party competition in cities, scholars of APD (and American politics more broadly) might not take that competition as a state of nature, but search for what secures it in national politics.

Several authors place city politics in larger contexts. Neil Brenner makes a persuasive argument against localism. Growth machines are not simply agreements among local elites but, rather, responses to a national legal and economic context. Nationally specific practices (e.g., in land use or property law) define the city's “most basic political parameters.” Thus “the politics of local growth machines are derived as much from nationally entrenched institutional structures … within the U.S. state apparatus as from the … activism of place-entrepreneurs” (p. 130). Robert Lieberman constructs a database to explore the shifting fortunes of cities in national politics. Phil Ethington and David Levitus present American political development as a series of national regimes (e.g., the New Deal), each dominated by a particular regional regime (for the New Deal, the industrial Northeast/Midwest). It is in the regional regimes that metropolitan leaders exercise leadership, and so contribute to defining a national agenda. Jason Kaufman and Jerome Hodos argue that urban politics are better understood in larger contexts of international comparison.

Two authors find ways in which the city has contributed to the course of US politics. Alethia Jones finds an ancestor for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in the city, the creation of postal banks. Postal savings banks were the consequence of an opportunity created by growing immigrant populations, on the one hand, and a shaky banking system, on the other. Immigrants used postal orders to send money to their home countries, not only to share their earnings but also to secure a safe haven for their savings. The postmaster general oversaw the postal orders and recognized immigrants' motivation; he added his weight to long-standing support for postal savings from farmers. More than keeping money ashore, the postal savings bank granted government an authority, insuring bank deposits. In this way, the immigrant presence in the city created a durable shift of authority.

Matthew Crenson provides another example, the creation of Baltimore's distinctive pattern of managing race relations. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Baltimore has exhibited a peculiar silence on questions of race. Crenson attributes the lack of public debate to the city's location on the Mason-Dixon Line. Baltimore housed Anglos from both North and South; so any public conversation about slavery or race was likely to be ill-tempered or violent. Rather than pursue an inevitably inflammatory campaign against slavery, Maryland's citizens seized the middle ground of supporting the Union. Subsequent generations continued the pattern. Baltimore produced “two vital leaders to the national struggle for racial equality” in the middle of the twentieth century, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Mitchell (p. 219). In respectable Baltimore style, one practiced litigation and the other negotiation and compromise.

In the book's concluding essay, Ira Katznelson suggests a new task for scholars of city politics and APD. John Rawls's question is asked every day: How can a democratic community with extraordinarily varied ascriptive characteristics, values, and principles create and maintain “a stable and just society of free and equal citizens?” (p. 249). Of equal importance is how, in the face of intolerance and evil, to create and maintain a liberal constitutional order. To answer these challenges, neither “multiple traditions” (which we may think of as a restatement of the problem) nor reflexive references to Locke will suffice. Rather, Katznelson enjoins a deepened conception of liberalism, drawing on the work of theorists and philosophers that we have neglected. What better historical site to serve this project than the city? Urban politicians have in practice begun to answer Katznelson's questions. Essays in Culture Wars and Local Politics (1999) relate challenges with which we are all too familiar, of deeply held differences not subject to empirical rebuke. To resolve those differences, local politicians have drawn on liberal values on which there is widespread agreement and so, sometimes, successfully avoided Armageddon.

Each of these essays contributes to the joining together of two quite distinct scholarly projects, yielding greater insights for each of them. The essays discussed here offer observations concerning urban developments of national importance. The boldest of them suggests that urban priorities become regional realities that provide agendas for national politics. The same argument ties city politics to concepts and methods of APD. Similarly, the “critical juncture” explains why the riot was, as we remember it, a national rather than a local event. Tracing the path from party competition through large-party coalition to monopoly, to narrow support, and to narrow distribution of services in cities is a rethinking of two-party politics that should raise questions and pose agendas for the study of state and national parties. Tracing the influence of theories of city politics with large theoretical claims (slack in the system, for example) to the study of U.S. politics more broadly suggests that again it may be useful to see if our understandings of how cities work have purchase in other arenas. Altogether, this edited volume is an ambitious beginning to a welcome project.