While archaeologists have long been fascinated with the cities of the ancient world, and with the origins of urban society more broadly, “modern” cities present a number of particular challenges for study. They are heterogeneous, with a built environment concealing complex palimpsests of dense deposits and a rich documentary record potentially available as counterpoint to the material remains. A disproportionate amount of contemporary urban archaeology has been driven by the contingencies of compliance, with information buried in technical reports with brief research designs but voluminous artifact inventories. Contemporary Archaeology and the City is a refreshing attempt to push the theoretical boundaries of archaeologies in and of cities. Many of the works included defy disciplinary boundaries and productively push the definitions of what an archaeology of the city might entail. While those expecting laundry lists of artifacts and pie charts comparing functional distributions may be a little disappointed here—there is not an MNI or MCD to be found in the 12 chapters of the body of the work—the volume provides a number of examples of insightful and innovative approaches both to the materiality of cities in all its forms and to the ruins, absences, and erasures that inform the contemporary landscape.

Detroit forms a backdrop for the chapters here, with most of the contributions having roots in a Wenner-Gren workshop at Wayne State University, organized by Ryzewski and McAtackney. The volume takes an avowedly international perspective on postindustrial cities, and while examples are skewed toward the broader English-speaking world, contributions focusing on Berlin, Istanbul, and the cities of Brazil enrich the work considerably. McAtackney and Ryzewski's editorial framing of the collection is itself one of the strengths of the volume; they explicitly “make no attempt to define and delineate the city” (p. 9), with sites that range from artists’ studios in Berlin, to public parks in Melbourne, to the rural hinterlands that provide water for New York City, themselves subject to ruination driven by urban growth.

The strongest chapters of the work are those that engage most directly with the material aspects of the city. Graff's work on the reuse of ruins and relics in Chicago highlights how such fragments help to materialize an imagination of the city that is inevitably about social relationships in the present rather than about the reconstruction of the past, while Mullins juxtaposes the preservation of a German officers’ club in Finland with the almost complete obliteration of an African American neighborhood in Indianapolis to consider how public memory can be sustained in ostensibly emptied spaces. Indeed, public memory and memorialization are themes that run through many of the chapters as well. Shanahan and Shanahan emphasize how memorials in contemporary parkscapes in Melbourne legitimize official narratives but also can serve to undermine or contest them, while Mc-Atackney's chapter situates murals and public art in East Belfast as being about not just “The Troubles” but the broader consequences of deindustrialization and impoverishment. Finally, González-Ruibal's work on the aftereffects of boom-and-bust capitalist economies in the “ruins of the South,” focused here on Brazil, is a reminder both of the creative possibilities embedded in the ruins of the city and of the occasional myopia of those who work in the global North.

Creativity and political action are concerns throughout the volume, with many of the essays linked to social justice, equitable development, and public memory. It is perhaps ironic, but also somehow appropriate, that the most effective examples of this theme draw much of their impact from the intersections of archaeology with other fields and disciplines, particularly in the arts (White and Seidenburg's study of artists’ spaces in a gentrifying post-Wall Berlin; Russell's examination of the “Museum of Innocence” in Istanbul; Ernsten's use of the “Land” project of the Gordon Institute of Performing Arts to address the erasures of District One and District Six in Cape Town, South Africa) and music (Ryzewski's “Making Music in Detroit” project, an attempt to document sites associated with the city's musical history before they are destroyed in revitalization and redevelopment efforts). These all serve as reminders that, if archaeology is to maintain critical relevance and is to truly engage with a broader range of publics, it must expand its reach outside of the discipline's traditional boundaries.

If there is one criticism of some of the chapters of this volume, it is perhaps that, in the focus on broad processes of deindustrialization and ruination as a consequence of neoliberal governmental policies, the intimate, human aspect of the city gets lost. Singleton's work on the materiality of homelessness and the construction of home space is a reminder of the possibilities for an archaeology of the contemporary city in which the people who live there remain at the forefront, even when the ruins of the city hide them.