Ken Livingstone, John Prescott, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair – the people who most need these three volumes, all 979 pages, plus several hundred tables, graphs and footnotes – are the ones least likely to read them. They given an incomparably nuanced portrait of how a democracy responds to disaster. The immediate social response to the attack is covered in Foner's volume, Mollenkopf addresses of politics of recovery, and Chernick examines the economic costs.

Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, the project was largely completed before the elections in November 2004. At that time the broad outlines of rebuilding were still deeply mired in contention. By April 2005 the logjam was broken. Alarmed that his legacy was being throttled, the governor and the mayor – who had been explicitly sidelined by the governor from the rebuilding process, for fear that a Democrat might the mayoral election – ganged up on the third leg of the dysfunctional troika, the tenacious real-estate developer Larry Silverstein, who held the lease for the World Trade Center, and was paying $10 million a month to maintain his rights. Silverstein surrendered control of the $2bn Freedom Tower to the Port Authority, and accepted a halved developer's fee. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, charged with overall control of redevelopment, was terminated. With the Silverstein problem fixed, the LMDC removed from the board, and with the resignation of Gretchen Dykstra as chair of the 9/11 Memorial Foundation, Pataki alone remained standing. It is going to be his legacy after all. None of this could have been anticipated while the researchers assembled under Foner, Mollenkopf and Chernick were completing their work. Their conclusions are important, but the circus has moved on.

The attack, its courageous aftermath and the way the city engaged in the process of rebuilding has opened a very unique window upon the reality of a great metropolis. New York City, with all its “hyperdiversity” (Mollenkopf 166) and political culture of fierce partisanship, is the capital of “blue” America. In a poll taken after the election in November 2004, President Bush received a 24:71 approval–disapproval rating (Mollenkopf 18). But it is the culture of partisanship within the city has, for a century and more, made planning “wars” a notorious staple of democratic urbanism. The aftermath of 9/11 confirms the universal applicability of what Mollenkopf calls Newton's third law of political dynamics: “any action produces an equal and apposite reaction” (Mollenkopf 14). The capacity of the stakeholders to create planning paralysis was predictable.

The process of public consultation burst onto the city landscape in 2002 with hundreds of meetings and a resurgence of civic involvement. Democratic hopes of a debate about alternative futures for the city were comprehensively finessed by “the system” (the mix of property interests, bond-holding banks and the political establishment) so as to allow alternative visions of the city's development to be ignored. The issues can be clearly stated: the attack on 9/11 destroyed 10 percent of the city's inventory of class-A office space (Chernick 9). Should the city rebuild that lost office space in lower Manhattan, or seek to diversity the rebuilding by increasing the amount of housing downtown, or shift the focus of development away from offices altogether in favour of housing, transportation and infrastructure needs across the city?

The reconstruction process was dominated by the governor, who controlled the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and (with the governor of New Jersey), the Port Authority. The PA owned the land, had build the World Trade Center in the 1960s, and had privatized the development in 2001. Silverstein's lease with the Port Authority, and the increasingly commercial outlook of the PA, combined to narrow the terms of the debate. The inner politics of the rebuilding process lie in the struggle between the legal and commercial interests of the PA, the LMDC and Silverstein Properties. The people of New York City, and the mayor of New York, “have had little impact on the decisionmaking process” (Mollenkopf 17). “The system” defined the debate, and thus determined the outcomes. Rebuilding the WTC has been a democratic setback of magnitude. If an equivalent disaster befell London, would the outcomes have been very different?

One of the themes which runs through all three volumes is the Blitz-like resilience of the city. New Yorkers were “particularly resilient at the time of the attack” (Foner 50). With an economy so strong and a concentration of capital so immense, little dispersal of financial institutions took place. The overall economic impact of 9/11 was relatively small. The Clinton Wall Street boom and the good times of the late 1990s largely offset the negative fiscal and economic consequences of the attack.

Foner has a less upbeat story to tell about he social impact of 9/11. Although in 2002 over 80 percent of New Yorkers rated the city as a good to excellent place to live (up from a approval rating of 60 percent in 1997), Foner reports a “dispersed tragedy” (11) which left large numbers of New Yorkers experiencing health problems and an even larger number reporting symptoms of anxiety and mental health concerns. There were sharp differences in response, and the close and intelligent fieldwork in Battery Park City, Tribeca, Chinatown, Belle Harbor and Jersey City, and fascinating analyses of he impact of 9/11 on taxi drivers, garment workers, artists, gallery-owners and mental health professionals, makes Wounded City as richly detailed and as insightful as any novel about contemporary New York City. Jennifer L. Bryan's study of the impact of 9/11 on Arab Moslems in Jersey City deserves particular praise. The eight hundred Arab men detained after the attack, and the widespread hostility towards Moslems generally, drove this thriving community back upon traditional values (women wearing the hijab, and renewed study of the Qur'an) which had been uncommon in a community which had been aspirational and assimilationist before 9/11. Paradoxically, the attack greatly strengthened group cohesion, and made the Moslem community less tolerant of diversity.