In Constructing the Patriarchal City Maureen Flanagan chronicles how decisions made by powerful men in Anglo-Atlantic cities constrained and shaped the lives of women. She argues that the norms followed during the birth of planning in the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century were created by ‘expert’ men based on patriarchal ideas of the city as divided into domestic residential spaces for women and larger public worlds devoted to men and economic activity.

Constructing the Patriarchal City is organized into two parts, framed by an introduction setting out the concept of ‘public patriarchy’ and a conclusion bringing public patriarchy and city planning into the present. The first part, ‘The unplanned city’, consists of four thematic chapters on nineteenth-century cities. The first brief chapter introduces Flanagan's four case-study cities, while the two following address housing in general and the particular problem of housing single women and men. The fourth chapter addresses modern planning ideas as practised by urban reformers. The second half of the book, ‘Creative destruction of the diseased organism’, focuses primarily on the first half of the twentieth century and consists of one chapter devoted to each of Flanagan's four case-study cities: London, Dublin, Toronto and Chicago. Throughout, Flanagan focuses primarily on the decisions made by male planners, politicians and other decision-makers, contrasting them with female activists who had more inclusive models of the ideal city.

Housing is a central theme. Flanagan argues persuasively that attempts to address the problem of inadequate and low-quality housing in industrial cities were largely ‘quasi-public’, dominated by the interests of real estate finance. Those projects that were built were paternalistic, designed to reform the poor by closely policing their behaviour. Housing was also typically organized around the nuclear family, particularly disadvantaging single women. When more housing was built in the early twentieth century, it was typically used as a mechanism to move poorer people from centrally located valuable land to more peripheral locations. These new neighbourhoods removed families from their social networks and the mixed-use public spaces that sustained them. Flanagan contrasts the profit-oriented and carefully sorted projects created by the dominant male establishment to smaller projects and proposals by female activists, particularly Octavia Hill in London, which were more sensitive to the needs of actually existing communities. Curiously, Flanagan does not cite Dolores Hayden's and Gwendolyn Wright's work on housing and house design in the United States, which would enrich her discussion of houses and gender, nor Marion Robert's Living in a Man-Made World, which convincingly argues that the removal of working-class families to estates on the urban periphery divorced women from the part-time work that was essential to their economic well-being and social power.

The juxtaposition of four case-study cities provides a preponderance of evidence, making it clear that, in spite of their differences, the same underlying patriarchal planning ideas shaped all four cities and, by implication, other Anglo-Atlantic cities. However, because each case-study chapter focuses primarily on similar manifestations of patriarchal decision-making – notably the provision of public restrooms for men only, housing based on middle-class male ideas of the domestic ideal and grand planning that ignores the everyday needs of women and the poor – they can become repetitive. The themes of bathrooms, housing and grand plans are strung together in each chapter like a checklist, leaving the reader to make connections between their manifestations in each city and between these different elements of patriarchal planning.

Constructing the Patriarchal City makes an important contribution to the history of planning. Connecting abstract planning principles with concrete results on the ground in four cities, Flanagan persuasively demonstrates the sexism implicit in the ideals of order and real-estate-based economic growth that have often governed planning practice. However, she often elides the distinctions between classism, racism and patriarchy, subsuming all forms of prejudice within the larger umbrella of patriarchy, rather than examining how they interact and reinforce each other. In addition, by focusing largely on planning rather than the built environment of Anglo-American cities more broadly, Flanagan short-changes the question of women's varied experiences of the patriarchal city. Incorporating information from the plethora of feminist histories of women as shoppers, workers, reformers, diners, moviegoers, in short as denizens of cities, would enrich our understanding of not only the consequences of patriarchal planning and of women as domestic beings in need of good housing, but as complex urban citizens: workers, consumers and members of the public realm.