Hunter's Black Citymakers provides a socio-cultural, socio-political and socio-economic extension of the community that was the focus of W.E.B. DuBois’ late nineteenth-century work, The Philadelphia Negro. Hunter brings this work to life throughout his examination of the community and its contribution to Philadelphia by situating the observations and conclusions of the seminal study within the ‘lived history’ of the residents of the twentieth-century Seventh Ward. Hunter deftly illustrates the interdependent relationship between the political agency of black Seventh Ward residents, the racial geography of the city and the shifts in power within and around the city's political processes and institutions. While this agency did not always have the intended impact on the structural conditions that necessitated political action, Hunter's careful analysis shows the myriad of ways in which black working-class residents shaped the nation's urban centres.

Using four critical junctures, Hunter examines the struggles over black inclusion and participation within Philadelphia's political, economic and cultural institutions. The first two cases document the intraracial struggles that emerged following the financial collapse of two black banks preceding the Great Depression and the physical collapse of a tenement building just before the passage of the 1937 Housing Act. Using archival data, Hunter constructs a rich narrative of the tensions between older and middle-to-upper-class black ‘middlemen and middlewomen’ (p. 174) and the growing migrant and working-class population as they worked to achieve consensus on the community's political interests. Hunter accurately concludes that the political and personal interests of the former superseded the inclusion and consideration of the latter's interests.

The next two critical junctures study the periods of urban renewal and urban decline and disinvestment. Here, the cases examine struggles over a proposed highway construction project that would demolish the Seventh Ward, and the election of the city's first black mayor, W. Wilson Goode in 1983. These chapters emphasize the formation of bi-racial coalitions through framing the aforementioned events as cross-cutting issues that united the interests of Philadelphia across race and class. The nuance produced in the earlier chapters fades ever so slightly here in an attempt to construct a narrative demonstrating the effects of community-based black political agency. Hunter admits that much of the inclusive and co-operative action between white elected officials and black community groups was the result of federal funding requirements. However, the text considers the construction of affordable housing by a black housing activist and the preservation of the community as the site for the annual Odunde festival as successful structural changes produced by working-class black political agency. Hunter ends his discussion with a cursory glance at the effect more contemporary expressions of black political agency have on the landscape of the current spatial boundaries of the black Seventh Ward. The Seventh Ward was folded into the Thirtieth and Eighth Wards during the Supreme Court-mandated redistricting of the 1960s, and currently is a white middle-upper-class neighbourhood.

Using theories from urban sociologists, political scientists and planners, and engaging the works of critical race and gender scholars, Hunter interprets black political agency through the expressions of framing community issues, voting, mobilizing and migrating. Migration, both to Philadelphia and within the city (secondary migration), is an important driver of the narrative, illustrating the shifting political power of first the black population in the city, as well as specific black neighbourhoods in the latter half of the twentieth century. The pre-war case-studies emphasize the importance of framing issues and mobilizing, while the post-war case-studies examine the strength of the black electorate to place black Philadelphians in local, state and eventually federal offices through mobilizing and voting.

The strengths of this work lie in the methods and careful data collection that produce varied frameworks across disciplines that enrich the archival materials and Hunter's conclusions. His treatment of agency is nuanced, and engages the more problematic aspects of the structure versus agency debates: ‘Here, then, agency is not situated as more important than or superior to structure. Rather, agency is situated as an empirical and analytic lens to gauge the range of attitudes and actions of black residents as they came up against structural changes over time’ (p. 15). A methodological appendix makes a strong case for historical ethnography, particularly as a means of engaging understudied perspectives, and drawing conclusions that contribute to general socio-historical theories.

Hunter's larger conclusions add to the growing scholarship on the political agency of the disenfranchised. The examination of a marginalized population in an understudied city has surprisingly broad implications for other North American cities. The text contributes both theoretically and empirically to the field of urban sociology, demonstrating through careful historical ethnography that ‘the truly disadvantaged be also seen as citymakers’ (p. 214). Students of housing, political science and urban sociology will find this text as useful as the urban historian. The rich narrative and strong theoretical foundation make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students alike.