The first quarter of the twenty-first century has witnessed rapid urban growth, which has transformed the scale and character of the world’s largest cities. Delhi’s population, for instance, has more than doubled from 15.7 to 34.7 million, while Lagos has gained over 10 million new residents in the same period. Today, more than 4 billion people – over half of humanity – live in cities. This expansion has been accompanied by the proliferation of neighborhoods marked by substandard housing and inadequate access to basic services, both of which leave residents highly vulnerable to climate shocks and other urban hazards. This process has produced the kind of fragmented urban landscapes in which class boundaries harden, cross-class coalitions weaken, and the very notion of an urban commons erodes.Footnote ¹ In this context, rapid urbanization amid deepening residential inequality threatens not only social cohesion but also the democratic potential of urban life.

In his book, Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in São Paulo and Johannesburg, Benjamin H. Bradlow provides an alternative to the doomsday predictions offered by many scholarly and popular accounts. Drawing from the “positive” case of São Paulo, Brazil, Bradlow documents how the city has reduced inequalities in its built environment. In the past twenty-five years, the percentages of São Paulo residents with security of tenure (housing), flush toilets in their homes (sanitation), and relatively cheap and accessible collective transit options (transportation) have dramatically improved. The puzzle is further magnified when São Paulo is compared to Johannesburg, South Africa, the “negative” case – a city that also experienced intense social mobilization for democracy and put in place a solid legal framework to extend socio-economic rights after democratization, yet which has not made the same progress in reducing urban inequalities. This paired case comparison motivates the book’s research question: why are some cities more effective than others at reducing inequality?

Bradlow argues that cities like São Paulo, which are characterized by high levels of urban power – defined as “the coordination of formal and informal social relations that produce governing institutions that manage the distribution of public goods across the space of the city” [4] – are better equipped to reduce inequalities in the built environment. Cities with strong urban power can integrate the very neighborhoods that have historically been excluded from the provision of public goods. Two factors underpin this capacity. First, embeddedness refers to the strength of ties between local government and civil society, particularly the housing movements active in the city’s poorest areas. Second, cohesion denotes the coordinating capacity within the state itself, linking the municipal, state, and national institutions that together shape metropolitan governance.

While embeddedness and cohesion have long played a role in sociological studies of the state, Bradlow provides a conceptual innovation: they are interconnected and directly shape developmental outcomes, especially at the city level. This is because “the embeddedness of the local state in a sphere of movements in civil society helps build the cohesion of the internal coordinating capacity of the local state” [169]. State power is necessary to reduce inequalities (cohesion), but the only way that state power can be harnessed to do so is if civil society movements are integrated into the state apparatus (embeddedness). Thus, the book offers an important lesson for urban social movements by demonstrating how to generate state capacity for societal change.

To substantiate his argument, Bradlow employs a paired case comparison of São Paulo and Johannesburg—two major cities with long histories of housing and pro-democracy mobilization, high levels of residential segregation, and urban trajectories not reducible to national-level factors. Between 2015 and 2018, he conducted 225 interviews with politicians, activists, bureaucrats, planners, and residents to understand urban governance and the distribution of goods and services. He uses this evidence to uncover the sequences of institutional change shaping urban inequality. To that end, he traces political and institutional developments from 1990 to 2018, paying particular attention to mayoral administrations and their successes and failures in reducing or deepening inequality. The analysis highlights the strategies and tactics of political parties and underscores the author’s claim that “sociologists cannot ignore the role of parties in shaping their strategies for generating policy change at the urban scale” [11]. Although Bradlow did not rely on participant observation, his five years of work with Slum Dwellers International has imbued the research with a clear ethnographic sensibility that runs throughout the study.

Bradlow’s argument is best supported through the case of housing in Chapter 3. In São Paulo, priests, urban planners, architects, and neighborhood organizations began working in poor and peripheral favelas during the early democratic period, forging durable ties with state bureaucrats, political parties, and mayoral offices. Although policy priorities shifted across administrations, housing activists consistently found institutional openings through which to engage and influence municipal governance. This early embeddedness of the housing movement within the local state laid the groundwork for major institutional innovations, including the passage of the City Statute in 2001, the adoption of Master Plans in 2002 and 2014, the creation of the Federal Ministry of Cities in 2003, and the expansion of mechanisms such as participatory budgeting. These developments fostered coordination across municipal, state, and federal levels, strengthening the cohesion of Brazil’s housing governance framework. As Bradlow notes, “São Paulo had the capacity—through embeddedness and cohesion—to challenge the power of national real estate interests” [56]. While informal settlements persist, they are now better serviced and represented within government structures, yielding improved living conditions – particularly in the areas of sanitation and affordable transport.

The situation in Johannesburg was markedly different. Here, hidden resistance by white property owners and developers led to the ring-fencing of local tax revenues—keeping resources within wealthier areas—and to venue-shopping for development incentives across different levels of government. These dynamics concentrated investment in formal urban zones while further marginalizing informal settlements, effectively reproducing apartheid-era spatial and racial inequalities. Politics compounded these structural divides. As Bradlow observes, “The ANC made an ideologically motivated decision that movements should demobilize, and the lack of party competition meant that this decision became a reality… Electoral politics were a critical background condition” [93]. In practice, the ruling ANC undermined the housing movements that had once been central to its legitimacy, as they no longer served its electoral purposes. Consequently, struggles for public services shifted toward neighborhood-level mobilization, bypassing citywide municipal reform.Footnote ² This fragmentation of peripheral areas and housing movements diluted their collective power and severely limited their capacity to achieve substantive change.

The chapters on transportation and sanitation provide particularly revealing windows into the internal workings of urban politics. Bradlow shows that the formal regulation of previously informal sectors– such as transport – is a deeply contentious and often conflictual political process. In São Paulo, municipal officials held numerous meetings with informal minibus operators, known as perueiros, “to explore ways of reorganizing the informal sector” [106]. Many of these operators were family-run businesses with long-standing ties to specific neighborhoods and close relationships with politicians. Bradlow underscores the political skill required to bring these actors into the fold, noting that “it was Tatto’s [São Paulo Deputy elected in 1998] streetwise sensibility, built on strong links to informal operators in São Paulo’s peripheries, that helped facilitate the bus sector’s institutional reorganization”. In contrast, Bussinger, the secretary of transportation, “carried the swagger of an experienced bureaucrat, skilled in the behind-the-scenes lubrication of highly formalized institutional settings such as São Paulo’s interscalar municipal–state relationship” [110]. Such vignettes, woven throughout the book, offer rare insights into the micro-politics of reform and the everyday workings of Brazil’s urban democracy.

Though the book is empirical, it rests on a normative view that recognizes the social value of property. Without theorizing the city as such, the study is consistent with the view that city-making requires reconceptualizing cities as commons, where insiders and outsiders make decisions over the rules and procedures of daily life and can extract social and economic value from the city.Footnote ³ Urban Power, therefore, offers three important insights into a citizen-centered city-making, or the process through which residents respond to state power and make space their own through claim-making, contention, and creating the commons.Footnote ⁴ But it is also in these three areas that more work needs to be done to provide a holistic picture of city-making outside the context of Bradlow’s focus on state power.

First, the book highlights the mobilizational power and political creativity found in the poorest, most under-resourced, and peripheral neighborhoods. Drawing inspiration from scholar-activists like Marielle Franco,Footnote ⁵ Bradlow underscores the ingenuity that emerges within Brazil’s favelas. Rather than treating these areas as marginal to broader political projects, he shows how their inventive practices in development and design can make cities more equitable and functional for all residents. Yet the voices, strategies, and lived experiences of favela residents and movement activists remain largely outside the book’s analytical frame. While other scholars have richly documented these struggles,Footnote ⁶ the next step in theoretical development lies in explaining how—and under what conditions—social movement strategies succeed in gaining a foothold within the local state.

Second, the book rightly foregrounds the political struggles that shape urban inequality. Contention, as Bradlow demonstrates, was central to this process in the cases he examines. He concludes that “key bureaucratic officials and political principals used their embedded ties with peripheral neighborhood brokers to facilitate negotiations with private minibus operators to integrate them into a citywide, formal system of bus-based collective transportation” [169]. The study effectively highlights the importance of political deal-making, competition, and elections in shaping urban reform. Yet it leaves underexplored the dynamics of clientelism, voting behavior, and mobilization power that sustain these political arrangements. Deeper engagement with political science scholarship on these themes could help illuminate the coalitional foundations of inclusive city-making—and the constraints that continue to hinder citywide reform.Footnote ⁷

Third, the book makes a valuable contribution by conceptualizing the local state through the lens of infrastructural power. Bradlow convincingly demonstrates that state capacity is unevenly distributed across urban space, showing that the state is not a uniform presence throughout the city. Yet beyond the broad core–periphery distinction, the spatial distribution of state power remains underexplored. This gap is important: place-based and territorial struggles over infrastructure are often both the subject and the arena of urban politics. Although Bradlow addresses NIMBY-ism and white flight in Johannesburg, more work is needed to unpack how these localized conflicts shape collective action and political mobilization. Ultimately, resolving debates over who the city is for hinges on understanding why some residents feel more attached to their neighborhoods and city than others – and how these attachments influence the politics of public goods distribution across the city as a whole.

Urban Power performs an essential service by bringing the city and its political institutions back into the study of democracy and development. The implication is clear: cities are in states, but states are also in cities. Bradlow’s book offers valuable lessons for activists seeking to influence state power and achieve meaningful reform. His insights point toward a vision of citizen-centered city-making, one in which all residents are able to derive social and economic value from the urban spaces they inhabit. Yet as the case of Johannesburg makes clear, such transformations depend on more than grassroots mobilization, political turnover, or legal reform. They require urban power.