This is a magnificently produced and – thanks to support from Belfast City Council and the Royal Irish Academy's Historic Towns Atlas project – a reasonably priced volume. The format is ‘coffee-table’ but the content is research-based analysis, with almost 300 helpful diagrams and illustrations. Until Emrys Jones, who appropriately enough has contributed the Foreword to this volume, published his Social Geography of Belfast in 1960, there had been little academic study of this remarkable city, which was the fastest-growing of all the leading UK cities in the century down to 1914, but the most bitterly divided on ethnic grounds. Social, historical and urban geographers were very much the trail-blazers in serious analysis of the city, and still predominate. Both of the editors and over half of the eighteen contributors are from a geography or planning background. Other dimensions included are history, sociology, education, literature, public health, transport and the economy.

Stephen Royle provides a concise history of the first 300 years as Belfast developed from plantation town to industrial metropolis, showing how ethnic conflict and segregation grew in parallel with economic growth. The rest of the book examines the economic decline which characterized the twentieth century, while conflict and segregation grew unabated. No generation since 1813 has escaped lethal inter-communal rioting, but the worst years have been 1886, 1920–22 and 1969–71 – the latter followed, of course, by a quarter-century of organized terrorism and counter-terrorism. Paul Larmour describes the building and rebuilding of the city and Austin Smyth examines the transport system, especially the surprising but damaging over-dependence of a relatively poor city on the motor car. Mark Hart analyses the roller-coaster economy, which has gone from enormous dependence on linen, ships and engineering through a classic decline of staple industries and a conflict-induced blight to a service-dominated economy. Fred Boal provides an overview of the city's population development, explaining how the city proper has been contracting for half a century but, with the outer suburbs and wider metropolitan area added, accounts for an ever-expanding proportion of Northern Ireland's population. He also explains how ethnic residential segregation has increased with every eruption of conflict and is now at its highest level. Likewise, Russell Murray gives a succinct statistical and cartographic analysis of the troubles of 1920–22, 1935 and 1969–94. Jonathan Bardon gives a survey of the ups and downs of city government over the century, and also contributes a chapter on the city's popular culture.

The ethnic division so characteristic of the city also features in many of the other chapters. John Brewer, Margaret Keane and David Livingstone write on the religious history of the last century, analysing buildings, beliefs and changing practices in what they describe as ‘an environment of politicised faith’. Nuala Johnson assesses the ways in which the Great War has been remembered – a war which became central to Protestant identity even though, proportionately, more recruits came from the Catholic community. Alun Evans surveys the problems and development of public health across the century, showing that class-related inequalities still remain, while E.J. Creighton provides a parallel account of education policy for the period, analysing the sensitive relationship between religion and schooling in a city where religious belief and ethnicity are so closely intertwined. Patricia Craig describes the impact of the city's inter-communal rivalry on the literature of place, showing what insights into the division novelists and poets have been able to provide and how the recent protracted conflict, so destructive in so many ways, stimulated an explosion of literary talent.

The modern history and contemporary development of planning are especially well covered, with chapters by Bill Morrison, Fred Boal and W.J.V. Neill. These cover the impact of violence, from loyalist and republican paramilitaries to the Nazi blitz of 1941, on visions of the city's development; the range of strategies considered for regeneration, in many ways a typical problem for the post-industrial city, but with a special twist added by the ethnic division; and the fall and rise of the River Lagan as a feature of the city's existence. A final chapter by Marie-Thérèse McGivern, reviewing contemporary planning strategies, concludes that the immense improvements in the city's economic and physical infrastructure since the end of large-scale violence in 1994 amounts mainly to catch-up, and that Belfast compares unfavourably with other Western European post-industrial cities in its long tail of unqualified workers, its relatively poor and under-developed public transport structure, its weakness in R & D and evidence of entrepreneurship, and its over-dependence on the public sector. Overall the book is a valuable summary of the current state of research in most areas of urban studies, the one gap being in the area of political history, which is covered only at the municipal level: neither Joe Devlin MP (1871–1934), the most prominent public figure of the Catholic minority prior to the present generation, nor Brian Faulkner (1921–77), the last prime minister of the old Stormont regime, appear in the index.