As direct federal outlays to cities have decreased while demand for their services have increased, city officials and elites have been forced more and more to rely on entrepreneurial attempts to bring investment into cities in the hopes that this investment will translate into more resources and a greater ability to provide social services to residents. But in devising these attempts, a significant number of residents have been left behind. Jason Hackworth addresses both the larger ideological context in which these shifts take place and the types of policies that emanate from the new neoliberal ideology that governs American cities, while Julie Sze takes a much narrower approach, analyzing the activities of four organizations (the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition, West Harlem Environmental Action, the Community Alliance for the Environment, and the United Puerto Rican Organization of Sunset Park) in New York City in her study of a campaign against environmental injustice. Hackworth's book offers much to scholars of urban politics, racial politics, and black politics, while Sze's book, though it offers a careful and informative account of New York politics, is not quite as theoretically ambitious or important.

In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey (2005) defines neoliberalism as a theory of political economic practices that argues that the best way to promote individual freedom and liberty is through the market. State involvement in market practices should be minimal. Among other things, the process of neoliberalization involves a selective “rollback” of Keynesian policies that seek to use government institutions to regulate the allocation of goods that should be private (like “public” housing), and a “rollout” of neoliberal policies to replace them.

Hackworth's work tackles this process. Within the American context, this process does not occur at the same rate, nor does it take exactly the same shape in the various places in which it is embedded. Cities like Detroit and Baltimore have a different set of fiscal and political hurdles to overcome than cities like Chicago and Dallas. How do these differences influence both the rate and the way neoliberalization takes place? The Neoliberal City is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the “choice” of cities to pursue a neoliberal route and the material consequences of that decision. Part II deals with the changes in the material landscape of cities, focusing on real estate investment at four different levels (the metropolitan region, the city, the neighborhood, and the site-specific megaproject). In Part III, which Hackworth acknowledges is the least developed section of the book, he devotes time to consider the effects of neoliberalization on activism, and the possibilities of a post-neoliberal future that emanates from activism.

Hackworth uses an array of cases and data to show the diverse paths that the neoliberalization process takes. In one chapter, he presents a series of timelines to compare the pace of urban development in Scottsdale, AZ, and Phoenix, AZ, and in another chapter he plots rates of real estate valorization and devalorization on maps of 20 different metropolitan regions. Moving among the neighborhood, city, metropolitan, and national levels can be daunting, but Hackworth did so without losing me once, in just a shade over two hundred pages.

There are a couple of critiques that I would make of this book. Hackworth spends little time analyzing the role of race in the neoliberalization process. People and places labeled as “not working” according to the neoliberal framework tend to be nonwhite, just as the pace of neoliberalization is likely related to the racial composition of the city's constituency, if for no other reason than that “blacker” cities tend to be poorer cities. He also, understandably, spends less time examining alternatives and attempts by local organizations to stave off neoliberalization.

And it is in these areas that Sze's work succeeds. Noxious New York is a partial history of the racial politics of pollution and garbage, and it is also a descriptive account of the various attempts of working-class people of color to organize and fight against environmental racism. Sze does not spend much time dealing with the neoliberal context explicitly. However, she makes it clear at the outset that neoliberalization is one of the central reasons why New York officials used environmental waste sites as a way to generate revenue. Furthermore, through an examination of the tactics and strategies of the South Bronx Clean Air Coalition, West Harlem Environmental Action, the Community Alliance for the Environment, and UPROSE, she also makes clear that it is possible to resist the neoliberal rollout. Through a combination of tactics involving protest, lawsuits, electoral politics, and down-to-earth rhetoric designed to combat the rational language of pro-waste scientists, the organizations racked up impressive victories.

Just as Sze's work succeeds where Hackworth's fails, however, the opposite is also true. Sze's work has neither the methodological sophistication, nor the theoretical organization of The Neoliberal City. And as a result, Noxious New York suffers significantly. Although she says that the book is about presenting an overview of the four organizations and their attempt to organize against environmental justice, she only really devotes one chapter to their tactics, strategies, and results—one chapter for all four organizations! Particularly given her interest in documenting their actions, she should have spent much more time dealing not only with their formation and their similarities but also with their differences. Some of the organizations were more effective at using electoral politics than others—was this in part because of differences in community voter turnout? Some of them were multiracial, while others were uniracial. How did this influence the various attempts to build the “imaginary community” so necessary for political organizing? Whereas it was a simple task to see the differences between sites and where these differences came from in Hackworth's book, doing so in Sze's was not. While part of the difficulty is that Sze chose a single city for her work, and it may have been harder for her to trace the differences because the organizations worked in the same political and ecological environment, part of it is also because Sze did not appear to be as interested in ferreting out differences as was Hackworth.

In the end, both books have a place on the shelf of those interested in urban politics and racial politics. But perhaps they should be used in tandem given their complementarity. While Sze presents a careful account of local politics on the ground, Hackworth delineates the broader political economic contexts in which such politics unfolds.