Like many great cities, Chicago has provided abundant source material and inspiration for scholars, writers, and popular culture. Particularly in the realm of literature and popular imagery, Chicago has taken on iconic status as the City of Big Shoulders, the setting of the film The Untouchables, and the home of the last great political machine in urban America. While grounded in genuine historical experiences, these images bear only a limited resemblance to contemporary Chicago.

In The Third City, Larry Bennett takes on the task of describing and understanding Chicago in the twenty-first century. The title reflects one of his central points, namely, that Chicago has gone through three different phases since achieving its status as a major American city. The First City was an industrial colossus that began to take shape during and after the Civil War, growing rapidly and continuously until the Great Depression. This was followed by a second period of gradual economic decline and eventual civic strife (especially over issues related to race) that extended to about 1990. The still-developing Third City is described by Bennett (p. 189) as “a postindustrial business and cultural node,” anchored by a strong business services economy, major cultural institutions, and public destinations like Navy Pier and Millennium Park.

While no single volume can capture the varied ways in which Chicago is and has been understood over its history, Bennett covers a lot of ground. This is most evident in the (lengthy) second of his six chapters, “Renditions of Chicago,” where he begins by describing how the city has been understood by urban scholars, beginning with the famous Chicago School work of Louis Wirth, Robert Park, and others and extending to the present. This is followed by a discussion of successive efforts by city planners to describe and prescribe urban patterns, from the 1909 Plan of Chicago to the most recent “Chicago Central Area Plan” of 2003. Bennett then turns to images of Chicago in literature by authors ranging from Theodore Dreiser to Sara Paretsky to Mike Royko. The chapter concludes by noting both the themes and images presented in these diverse sources and the ways in which these reports and books fail to capture fully the reality of contemporary patterns within the city.

This second chapter embodies both the strengths and weaknesses of the book. On the positive side, Bennett displays a mastery of a vast body of work; the footnotes to this chapter could form the backbone of at least three graduate seminars in urban studies. It is not an easy task to develop common themes from so many different approaches to urban life spanning nearly a century, but the author succeeds in his central task in this chapter, which is to trace the evolution of images and models of urban life through the works of these authors, while identifying how their legacies obscure a clear understanding of contemporary life, both in Chicago and in other modern American cities.

On the negative side, both this chapter and the larger book do not coalesce into a well-integrated single story with a clear take-away point. At times, such as in Chapter 3, “The Mayor among His Peers,” the book is a fairly straightforward historical account of how Mayor Richard M. Daley, whom Bennett identifies as the chief architect of the Third City, promoted policies to develop the current economic base, particularly in his investments in parks and neighborhood redevelopment. This account is, for me, one of the best parts of the book. It is clearly written, it connects Daley's actions to his big-city contemporaries, like Rudolph Giuliani and Richard Riordan, and it tells a story about life in contemporary Chicago that is not widely known outside of the city. Bennett also follows the path of many of the scholars he has cited by drawing important conclusions about how this Chicago story has relevance for understanding developments in cities throughout the country.

This, however, is followed by Chapter 4, “The City of Neighborhoods,” which is partly an account of changes in the structure of neighborhoods over time, but is primarily an essay about the concept of neighborhoods in urban theory and whether these neighborhoods ever really existed in Chicago, even as they appeared regularly in fictional and popular portrayals of the city. Chapter 5, “Wresting the New from the Once Modern,” discusses the transformation (and often elimination) of Chicago Housing Authority public housing projects, both in a historical sense and from the perspective of understanding these projects as functioning communities. These two chapters address thoroughly valid subjects, but, as presented, bear little relationship to either the historical account of Daley's mayoral policies or to the extensive discussion of images of Chicago in Chapter 2. These four central chapters are bookended by beginning and ending chapters that delve deeply into the models of urban life of Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs (especially the latter), a motif which reappears occasionally throughout most of the book.

In the Acknowledgments, Bennett credits discussions with a wide array of colleagues, loosely organized into several reading and discussion groups, as contributing to the ideas developed in the book. It is easy to imagine that these discussions took many directions: Chicago in popular literature, the validity of Jacobs' ideas, Daley's legacy, gentrification, and the New Urbanism, among others. A bit too much of this has found its way into the book, making it a challenge for the reader to understand if this is a history of contemporary Chicago, an attempt to develop a new model of urban life, a literary analysis, or something else. The answer is probably “all of the above,” which is why the book's strength is also its weakness.

A flawed effort does not mean a failure, however. The Third City brings together a lifetime of observation, reading, and discussion about Chicago, theories of urban life, and the relationship between the two. The readers are better-off for having encountered them here, even if they are left to sort out what it all means. I know that I will refer back to this book often when studying any of these topics. While somewhat challenging for a typical undergraduate course, the book would be a good choice for an honors seminar or graduate course. While my own preference is for the parts describing the evolution of contemporary Chicago, others will be drawn to the discussions of urban theory that are less Chicago based. Every reader will find something of value, although many will also be challenged by the lack of a single focus. On the whole, however, Bennett should be applauded for advancing our understanding of this great city and for challenging us to move urban theory from the past to the future.