Justice and the American Metropolis brings together a wide array of scholars to explore the normative, economic, social, political, and management challenges confronting contemporary American cities. Framing the volume around the decisively normative concept “thick injustice,” Clarrisa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom trace the analysis of urban politics and policy from the period when the Urban Politics field was in its heyday, and establish a broad framework for a variety of scholars to reflect on the state of urban America. The book, clearly designed to reach across many fields within and outside of political science, thus generates a deep understanding of the challenges American cities have faced. That urban regions are sites of human absorption, integration, acculturation, economic innovation, and production has made them exciting, frustrating, and dangerous repositories of many unresolved aspects of American public life. At the same time, globalization, the rapid rise of economic competition from what used to be called the “third world,” new forms of public-private partnership, gentrification, and many other changes have led to the contraction of the power that previously resided in American cities. These changes have made it increasingly difficult for American cities to compete because their relative costs have increased as their infrastructures have atrophied. At the same time, rapid innovations in electronic communications and information technology have also minimized the distinctiveness of specific areas, while they have also enabled others to extend their reach. These developments have made the achievement of justice, and even the ability to keep justice on the political agenda, a matter of some considerable complexity. As the volume makes clear, justice remains an elusive ideal in the American metropolis.

The book covers a wide variety of topics. Part I, “The Roots of Injustice in the American Metropolis,” includes a number of political theorists who “ask foundational questions about what justice requires in American cities today” (p. 20). Stephen Macedo's “Property-Owning Plutocracy: Inequality and American Localism” explores the economic basis of democracy in the American system of property ownership. Important elements of inequality are folded into that legal and economic structure. Macedo contrasts beliefs about the breadth of equality and property ownership with the impact of class divisions. Seventy-six percent of high-income students complete college compared with 4 percent of low-income students (p. 49). Democracy has increasingly been shaped by the greater concentration of wealth, as has been shown by journalists such as Kevin Phillips and political scientists such as Larry Bartels.

In “Public Reason and the Just City” Loren King considers the Rawlsian notion of public reason which, she argues, “may help us to distinguish cases of thick injustice from reasonable disagreement over the demands of justice” (p. 59, emphasis in original). Racial segregation in housing was sustained through a variety of “explicitly racist practices” (p. 60) associated with property ownership. The Supreme Court's 1948 decision Shelley v. Kraemer, declared state intervention in restrictive covenants unconstitutional based on the Fourteenth Amendment. King turns to urban renewal programs and highlights how their implementation violated her standards of reasonableness. While she focuses on Flint, Michigan, there are many other cities across the country in which black communities, so carefully constructed in the face of thick injustice in the early decades of the twentieth century, were decimated using state authority in the post-World War II decades. King's analysis highlights the obstacles facing “public reason” in the metropolitan context in which those subject to the challenge of economic inequality and the exercise of power are unevenly spaced.

Margaret Kohn's “Public Space in the Progressive Era” contrasts Frederick Law Olmsted's vision of public space with the vision of urban progressives such as Jane Addams and John Dewey. She argues that while Olmsted's spaces were locations that reified the social and economic hierarchy of his day, and introduced the lower classes to appropriate social and cultural behavior, Addams and Dewey invented locations for empowerment, acculturation, and exchange between the classes. Kohn cites Addams's beliefs that recreation would “help undermine the rampant bossism and political corruption of urban political machines” (p. 88). But many of the electoral reforms of the period, such as at-large and nonpartisan elections, had the intent and the impact of weakening the power of ethnic groups—especially Southern and Eastern Europeans—who had arrived in American urban areas in large numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ironically, the famous settlement house that Jane Addams created, Hull House, recently declared bankruptcy and closed, symbolizing the decline of Progressivism. The decay of social welfare institutions is a matter of considerable concern in central cities, but also in suburban areas where the density of historical experience, and the numbers of such institutions, are much weaker.

Part II, “Rethinking Metropolitan Inequality,” includes chapters by Douglas Rae and Clarence Stone, senior scholars in the field of urban politics. Rae's “Two Cheers for Very Unequal Incomes: Toward Social Justice in Central Cities” makes a somewhat unexpected argument, that higher levels of inequality in cities are actually a good thing. According to Rae, low inequality indicates that the high-income population has exited the city and that it resides primarily in homogeneously high-income suburban jurisdictions. Metropolitan competition over high income earners is increasingly important. Rae classifies cities according to their left and right biases, and suggests that competition for population at local levels, or redistribution at the local level, won't be sufficient to solve the economic resource challenges facing cities. He argues that resource mobilization from state or national governmental levels is preferable to what can currently be accomplished by local governments alone.

Clarence Stone's “Beyond the Equality-Efficiency Tradeoff” offers intriguing case studies of San Francisco, North Carolina and Boston that demonstrate the possibilities of political mobilization and coalition across a variety of types of sectors in the polity. In San Francisco's successful creation of a children's amendment, leadership “was created in the nonprofit sector, but program responsibility was housed in the government sector” (p. 136). North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt worked at creating day care as a foundation of a stronger workforce; in this case, leadership originated “in the government sectors, but program responsibility was housed in the nonprofit sector.” In Boston, police, probation officers, and Black Church leaders collaborated successfully to reduce gang violence. Stone challenges the notion that efficiency is of greater value than equality, and argues that social investment is a way to reframe debates about how to value social policy.

Part III, “Planning for Justice,” features chapters by Susan Fainstein and Thad Williamson. Fainstein's “Redevelopment Planning and Substantive Justice in the American Metropolis” presents a challenging portrait of over a half-century of city planning. Fainstein argues that the “unjust treatment of disadvantaged populations was consistently rationalized as being in their own long term interest” (p. 149). She periodizes twentieth-century planning into four eras: the Directive phase (1950–64), the Concessionary phase (1965–74), the Conserving phase (1975–1981), and the Privatized Redevelopment phase (1982–present). In none of these was there a commitment for significant housing construction to replace the slums cleared. Consultation with local residents was structured briefly during the Concessionary period through the values introduced by civil rights social movements and the Johnson administration's War on Poverty. But in the Conserving and Privatized periods, both community consultation and federal support for renewal and redevelopment ended, to be replaced by private market-driven projects. In her review of redevelopment and distributive outcomes, Fainstein argues that policymakers equate improvement of physical property with social well being. Policies based on private investment favor developer interests. Democratic input is blocked when development involves private-public partnership. And redevelopment planners' actions are framed by complex sets of variables, including market factors, federal laws, and local political agendas. She argues that equity, diversity, and democracy are required for a just urban policy, although if projects are to favor the lower income, popular mobilization is also required. Fainstein concludes with detailed guidance for policymakers that will be useful to have, but will be difficult to implement. Since not many of these democratic goals were reached even at the height of the social mobilizations of the 1960s and early 1970s in the American south and urban north, the likelihood of their success in this considerably less mobilized era is quite low.

Thad Williamson's “Justice, the Public Sector and Cities Realigning the Activist State,” addresses the issue of reinvigorating the “public interest” and discusses the case of Richmond, Virginia. The concept of public interest is one of the volume's central concepts. Deciding how to define and then pursue the public interest is a considerable challenge even in small towns and cities. The complexity of large metropolitan areas such as St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and virtually every other major US city, makes the design of cooperative structures even more difficult. Williamson, like Stone, takes on the notion that public entities are inefficient because they aren't market-based. He centers his account on the decision of Richmond Mayor L. Douglas Wilder to give the city's Community Planning Director Rachel Flynn the discretion to develop public space along the James River in consultation with the city's diverse constituencies. Private interests challenged this development plan, calling instead for the construction of condominiums targeted at the upper income of the housing market. Williamson argues, curiously, that Flynn's efforts to draw the average citizen as well as the African American community into the policy process were unsuccessful. The city was led by an African American mayor, L. Douglas Wilder, elected in 2004, who had previously been elected in 1990, as the state's first African American governor. While mayors had previously been elected from the city council, in 2004 the city changed to a Mayor-Council form, in which the mayor is elected at large by a majority of voters in at least five of the city's nine council districts. While Wilder was not the first Black mayor, he was the city's first mayor elected by popular election. A point untouched by the author is that Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Virginia's Governors serve only one term, so the relatively limited control over the state and the previously weak role for the Richmond mayor meant the state's main leaders were highly constrained. African American voters may still have been adapting to the notion of popular control over the city's well being.

Part IV, “Justice and Institutions,” explores voting and political boundaries in the American metropolis, laying out another layer of difficulties confronting those interested in achieving justice in US cities. Gerald Frug's “Voting and Justice” outlines a framework that sharply distinguishes access to the franchise from the barriers to participation typically identified preceding and following the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Noncitizenship, felony disfranchisement, and place of residence (i.e., homelessness) are vital criteria that determine ballot access. Urban noncitizenship ranges from 15 to 32 percent of cities' populations. While some might assume that this is a legitimate basis for exclusion, Frug argues that it is questionable, and identifies alternative policies in both American historical experience and international settings. Even more striking is his discussion of the role of the state in determining “what the city is and whose interests it represents” (p. 205). The category of the noncitizen is of course a central aspect of the deep contemporary hostility expressed toward immigrants, especially Latinos, in states such as Alabama and Arizona, which have strongly discouraged their presence in recent legislation. The definition of resident, specifically those without a domicile, raises greater concern in light of the continuing recession that has destabilized the American housing market, and has led to the loss of homes by portions of the population. Cities such as Las Vegas have reported rapid rises in homelessness, and North Las Vegas reports close to “a third of all homes are in foreclosure” (Jennifer Medina, “In Nevada, a City Hall is a Reminder of Flush Days” The New York Times, November 19, 2011). Frug's chapter challenges what we think we know about voting access by adding a number of other important elements to the participatory democracy agenda.

“How are we to define the limits within which majorities rule?” asks Richard Thompson Ford in his “The Color of Territory: How Law and Borders Keep America Segregated” (p. 225). The question is often decided in the courts, specifically the US Supreme Court. Ford argues that segregation arises from “territorial practices,” and that political jurisdictions are themselves “a set of social practices” (p. 227). The background rules of public law—including taxation and funding, land use planning, residency rules for voting and for access to most local services—determine inequalities, whether economic or racial. Ford argues that these rules constitute a “fail-safe recipe for racially segregated neighborhoods” (p. 231). He tracks the Supreme Court's unwillingness to challenge these jurisdictional boundaries and their impact on segregation, school quality, and school segregation in legal cases in Detroit, San Antonio, and Arlington Heights. And he concludes that American cities are characterized by “racism without racists” (p. 235).

Margaret Weir's concluding chapter, “Creating Justice for the Poor in the New Metropolis,” addresses the new American city in which there is no longer a “Chocolate City and Vanilla Suburbs.” (Chocolate City was the name of a 1975 album by the popular music group Parliament in which the musicians contrasted Washington, DC, as a Chocolate City [filled with Black people] with its then all white suburbs. Some of the lyrics include: “We got Newark, we got Gary, somebody told me we got LA and we're working on Atlanta…. God Bless DC and Its Vanilla Suburbs … ”). Weir notes the “new geography of need” and reviews past, less than successful efforts at metropolitan reform. Her review of past policies overlaps with Fainstein's, but Weir explores the demographic, socioeconomic, and social network implications of these changes. In her view, efforts at metropolitan-wide innovation in tax sharing and in addressing racial and economic segregation have not only been disappointing, but also “either have been indifferent to low income communities or have actually harmed them” (p. 240). Regional revitalization has recently been attempted by promoting sports venues and convention centers, addressing racial and income reintegration through programs such as HOPE VI, and also by private-driven gentrification. As Fainstein noted in her earlier summary, program reforms usually demolished housing in which the poor were living, but failed to provide enough to replace what was destroyed. Weir shows that similar patterns played out under the HOPE VI program. She also provides extremely useful summaries and analyses identifying the forces that have remade metropolitan areas in recent decades: immigration, demographic inversion, and job sprawl. Weir's final section identifies racial patterns of settlement and the perils of social service institutional networks in urban and suburban environments. Her analytical framework for types of suburban settlement—inclusion, urban containment, segmented inclusion and extrusion—is especially provocative. Extrusion describes suburbs where “immigration, job sprawl and demographic inversion produce extreme disconnection from the rest of society” (p. 251). Weir's chapter makes for an especially rich conclusion to the volume, but also sets a weighty agenda and marks the enormous array of tasks required for achieving justice in the American metropolis.

Justice and the American Metropolis is an important contribution in part because it refocuses much needed political science attention on cities. Urban politics was once an important locus of scholarship within American political science. With the creation of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics organized section in 1995, younger generations of scholars reframed work that in many cases might otherwise have been framed as “urban.” Urban and REP are clearly not the same fields, but the locus for much of racial-ethnic politics has occurred within the geography of American cities; the fields have much to offer each other, although they have not yet done so. Even this volume, exciting as it is, doesn't explicitly address the increasing presence of the new immigrants that have arrived in very large numbers since the 1965 immigration reform. To some extent there is asymmetry in the organized sections, with Latinos and especially Asians settling to a large extent in the west and southwest where Urban Politics does not have as strong a focus. There is no part of the country that has been untouched by this new immigration. Urban tends to focus on the older industrial cities, on the politics, policies, and planning associated with the development of physical, legal, and economic infrastructure. Hayward and Swanstrom and their associates failed to link their analysis to the new human cohorts that have arrived in the American polity in the last half century, and to the challenges of incorporation and justice these new populations present. There is thus much work to be done.