What unites these books, diverse in their period and approach, is New York City as a terrain for social activism. Recchiuti writes of the social scientists and settlement workers of the progressive era, from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. Sze, who began Noxious New York while working in an environmental-justice organization, offers a classic participant-observer account of the ecological social activism of the 1980s and 1990s. Taken together, these books greatly illuminate the dilemmas of reform in the American city.

Recchiuti writes of “public intellectuals, civically engaged.” They entered the public sphere in the late nineteenth century as social scientists and experts, administering a new kind of knowledge which claimed to be untainted by corruption and partisanship. These progressives were respectable and persuasive, and offered bold alternatives to a local government deeply corroded by “boodle” and marked by corrupt and unblushing partisanship. It is hard not to feel nostalgia for their hopes about renewing American public life. Recchiuti shows that theirs was an unstable alliance of small-government laissez-faire conservatives, advocates of the Social Gospel, socialists, feminists and liberals, for whom, with few exceptions, the city was a great magnet, “the greatest social science laboratory in the world.” The nexus of reform linked the United Charities Building on 22nd Street and Columbia University, with its influential School of Political Science, on Morningside Heights. (Columbia was the largest university in America in 1910.) An informal alliance of “downtown” activists and “uptown” academics formed a powerful phalanx of reform-minded men and women, who directly confronted politicians who were deeply suspicious of their interventions. The fragile unity of reformers and radicals is perhaps best symbolized by the “X” Club, a dinner and discussion society which met regularly until the club, and the political linkages it embodied, was blown apart by irreconcilable disagreements about the decision to enter the First World War in 1917. Mixing cool institutional and intellectual analysis with lively thumbnail portraits of the leading individuals, Recchiuti's Civic Engagement makes a very interesting companion to Thomas Bender's New York Intellect (1987). Recchiuti gives a fuller and more nuanced portrait of the contribution of female social scientists and activists than does Bender, and has valuable things to say about the tensions between the great foundations and the social scientists. The conflict between the Bureau of Municipal Research and the Rockefeller Foundation, set against the context of the industrial violence (the “Ludlow massacre”) at the Rockefeller-owned coalmines in Colorado in 1913, is an important reminder that nongovernmental funding never comes without conditions attached.

The story of the settlements in the lower East Side has been told and retold so many times. It was the place where women reformers exercised their greatest influence in a male-dominated world. Their attitude towards the poor was idealistic, but seldom naive: they wanted to empower the poor, but to retain control of the settlements and their funding, and to prevent them from being taken over by forms of social activism which they believed would discredit the settlement movement as a whole. Later activists in New York have sometimes lacked that worldliness, and watched in disillusionment as they lost control of reform in the slums.

Sze tells the story of street-level ecological activism in West Harlem, South Bronx, Sunset Park and Williamsburg, neighbourhoods marked by racial and poverty demographics. NIMBY campaigns against noxious facilities (incinerators, sludge treatment, sewage treatment) gathered momentum due to a short-fuse anger and distrust of the government, and a belief that political and planning decisions were sullied by “environmental racism.” Sze defines this as policies which resulted in disproportionate impacts upon racial minorities.

The prime villain in Noxious New York is Rudolph Giuliani, who as mayor was an aggressive opponent of slum activism, and who belittled the health and environmental concerns of the activists. This was, and is, the response of the Bush administration to environmental justice campaigns. New York firemen have been attacking Giuliani in the past three years for his lack of interest in the health dangers to first-responders and rescue workers at the World Trade Center site after 9/11. He was, Sze notes, the mayor who enthusiastically supported energy deregulation in New York, and the privatization of solid-waste management. Sze sites her account of contemporary ecological campaigns within the history of public health in the city, and has very striking things to say about the tactics of the activists. They soon learned that vivid “personal testimony” about the rise in asthma rates in connection with an incinerator in the Bronx proved less effective than an independent scientific report which challenged the operator's and the government's claims about the safety of the facility. Overall, her report card on the movement is mixed, with local victories but little sustained impact upon the process of government itself. Marginalized by the Bush administration, the movement seemed to disappear from the public sphere. But activists, not least in the UK, will find much to think about in Sze's picture of neighbourhood activism and governmental unresponsiveness. The organizations she writes about were likely to be regarded within the political establishment as dangerous, subversive and potentially terrorist. They were thus, we can assume, targeted by the New York police and the FBI. Were they penetrated? It is hard to imagine that they were not. I wish Sze had raised this question.