The book's theses are prosecuted in eight chapters. The first two chapters, respectively, outline the central social and economic crises facing urban America and tally their costs. This review emphasizes especially the complementary nature of the costs of concentrated poverty imposed on citizens of the urban core and the burdens of sprawl weighing on those living on the periphery of metropolitan areas. Chapter 3 then provides a cogent review of the history of urban policy in the United States, demonstrating how contemporary metropolitan institutional arrangements are more than an accident or a simple aggregation of individual choices. Indeed, federal urban policy is found to be deeply complicit in getting us to where we are today. Chapter 4 considers the very limited range of policy options now available to cities for addressing the twin problems of concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, given current institutional arrangements. In the last three chapters, the authors assess the regionalist alternative. Chapter 6 examines the history of regionalist solutions to metropolitan policy problems, while Chapter 7 outlines and evaluates a range of incremental steps that should be undertaken to implement regional governance of metropolitan areas and, thereby, regional solutions to metropolitan problems. In the last and perhaps most interesting chapter, the authors directly challenge the widely prevailing pessimism about the prospects of building a political coalition capable of implementing regionalist solutions. They argue that a close examination of President's Clinton's success in building an electoral coalition crossing the urban core and suburbs, while rarely used by Clinton to address urban problems per se, demonstrates well the potential of a new urban politics based on a regionalist metropolitan vision.

Place Matters has a number of important strengths. First, and unlike prior works emphasizing regionalist themes, it provides a solid context within which to assess critically the evolution of urban policy problems and their solutions. Its cogent reviews of the history of federal urban policy and the pace of demographic change in America are especially useful. Authors Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom also introduce a comparative context by occasionally contrasting American cases with their counterparts in Europe and Canada. Second, without overwhelming the text, the full panoply of theories employed by urban scholars—regime theory, the city-suburb dependence hypothesis, the growth machine model, and the Tiebout model—are linked to regionalist themes. Just as usefully, the exceptionally thorough notes provide a solid guide for students to pursue the scholarly literature on these topics. Third, without being preachy, the book couches its analysis in a strong normative concern about the role of government in providing economic and social opportunities for its citizens and venues for exercising democratic citizenship. Finally, the authors provide us a nicely written, seamless text, one that continually weaves in short examples of individuals illustrating well how urban politics really matters for real people.

While I very much enjoyed reading Place Matters I also wish that it had spent a bit more time on two issues. First, the intellectual case of metropolitan fragmentation is given relatively short shrift in the authors’ efforts to outline the regionalist perspective. The public choice perspective, while discussed, remains something of a caricature. But the regionalist and public choice perspectives are best understood when contrasted with each other. And second, while the authors note the recent success—after decades of failure—of efforts to consolidate the City of Louisville and Jefferson County (misidentified at one point as Richmond County), Kentucky, they do not fully explore the case. This is unfortunate given their claims about the potential for developing a regionalist political coalition. The Kentucky case provides a superb example of constructing such a coalition in the face of many obstacles. A more detailed examination of it would have strengthened their optimistic assessment of the future of regionalism.

Still, Place Matters will make an excellent addition to advanced undergraduate and introductory graduate courses on urban politics, especially if paired with one of the many available books exploring the public choice case for metropolitan institutional fragmentation. It is highly accessible without sacrificing theory or ready reference to the scholarly literature. It is also a relative inexpensive work, one that will provide students and faculty considerable bang for their buck.