In his book, David Imbroscio offers a bold, thought-provoking contribution to academic discussions of urban regime theory and to the development of solutions to contemporary urban problems that might transcend the limitations of corporate-centered growth and modern social liberalism. His two central constructive goals are “progressive urban regime reconstruction and the amelioration of urban problems” (p. 134). This work was provoked in part by the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster, an event that Imbroscio recalls left him “enraged that such a horrible thing could happen here, in my country, with its fabulous wealth and profoundly democratic pretensions” (p. ix). Urban America Reconsidered combines fresh critical analyses of prevailing approaches to urban economic development and policy in the first two sections and a more speculative mode in the remaining two, where he makes the case for a left progressive approach to urban problems.

Imbroscio offers a compelling, and overdue, critique of urban regime theory, the dominant approach to thinking about contemporary urban governance in the United States. A major flaw of conventional regime theory, he notes, is an acceptance of the traditional division within state–market relations proffered by classical economists. In treating state–market relations as static, and the market side as given and beyond the reach of meaningful political intervention, regime theory is, as he argues, incapable of seeing the many alternative paths to urban economic development, strategies that might yield a more just distribution of wealth and resources. In response, the author calls for the construction of a progressive urban regime built around an economy of “rooted, highly networked small businesses” and predicated on the cultivation of the use value of capital—“social relations of trust and cooperation and the experiential knowledge of specific production systems” (p. 49)—rather than the exchange value of land that animates corporate-centered urban growth politics. He also sees this progressive urban regime as a more desirable alternative to social liberalism.

Imbroscio delivers a perceptive critique of two manifestations of liberal expansionism—metropolitanization and the dispersal consensus. For the past few decades, urbanists have pursued an “outside game,” the annexation of suburbs and the creation of metropolitan governmental forms. This strategy stems from the “shaming of the inside game,” which he describes as a rejection of “the place-oriented, community development approach to addressing urban problems, as well as the internal policy actions and institutional capacities of central cities themselves” (pp. 53–54). He explicates a key problem with the liberal approach to urban problems, the contradiction between its redistributive aims and the conservative, suburban, class interests that are produced by liberal expansion, for example, the perennially unsuccessful attempts to enact a commuter tax in Washington, DC.

One of the more brilliant chapters in this book examines the dispersal consensus, the strategy of deconcentrating zones of hard-core poverty, namely, through the demolition of tower-block public housing and the creation of mixed-income developments or resettlement of the urban poor to suburbia. Republicans, Democrats, liberals, New Urbanists, and some affordable-housing advocates have embraced this approach over the past two decades, and this strategy gained renewed legitimacy in the wake of the Katrina disaster. The poverty deconcentration logic is predicated on an underclass mythology, and rests on the underlying assumption that physical dispersion and middle-class role modeling might facilitate behavioral modification of the poor, instilling a work ethic, time discipline, and other values that enhance economic mobility. However, as Imbroscio meticulously details, the academic research that undergirds the dispersal strategy is marred by a number of methodological and intellectual flaws, such as misconceptions regarding freedom of choice and the tendency of some purveyors to impute choice to the urban poor, overselling evidence that supports the benefits of dispersion. He sketches out promising alternatives to corporate-centered development and liberal expansionism.

The most persuasive and readily impactful of these alternatives is the use of the public balance sheet, or social cost–benefit analysis. Conventional economic theory treats social costs as externalities, “costs that stem from market processes but are not experienced by market actors,” while the public balance sheet reorients decisions about divestment and new developments in a manner that more carefully assesses the longer-term impacts of economic decisions on public health, the environment, employment, local infrastructure, and public needs. Imbroscio touts the public balance sheet as a means for achieving a greater accountability of private firms and as a guide for public intervention. As he points out, there are many instances where cities already engage in “lemon socialism,” public ownership of economic assets where public costs outweigh the benefits, but the use of the public balance sheet might encourage publics to undertake local economic alternative development strategies (LEADS) instead.

LEADS are predicated on collective ownership, democratic control, and local orientation, and the book's discussion of these remedies expands on Imbroscio's earlier work with Thad Williamson and Gar Alperovitz, Making Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era (2002). He examines a range of existing activities, some with long-standing histories, that might form the framework for a more progressive urban movement. Such creative, promising remedies to economic underdevelopment and stagnation include local currency systems (e.g., Ithaca HOURS), public ownership, community ownership, worker-run firms, consumer cooperatives, community development corporations, and the progressive use of eminent domain.

Although the author weighs the desirability and feasibility of LEADS in the closing pages, this discussion does not broach the more pressing matter of how these relate to ongoing struggles to transform American cities and whether such economic development strategies are a priority among various urban constituencies. In other words, how do these remedies square with existing movements and campaigns against inequality and, for that matter, those that are consciously against corporate-center development? There are certainly places where these ideas connect to current struggles in meaningful ways. For example, the Central Advisory Council of Chicago's public housing tenants recently included the establishment of worker cooperatives in its 2012 strategies and recommendations report to the Chicago Housing Authority. Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether the pursuit of the LEADS strategy should take precedence over battles against budget cuts, privatization in public education, crime and violence, policing, and so forth.

Perhaps some international comparison could have been helpful in making the case for LEADS. The most well-publicized and celebrated instance of worker democracy in recent years has been the evolution of the movement of recovered factories in Argentina following that nation's 2001 economic crisis. The pursuit of factory occupations and autogestión in that country's urban centers was supported by a motley group of social forces that included the piquetero movement of the unemployed, some unions, existing cooperatives, Peronistas, anarchists, communists, and various other sectarian-left political parties, as well as sympathetic politicians.

There are moments when Imbroscio's critical reading of social liberalism and the decline of the New Deal coalition gives way to political cynicism. Suburban conservatism is neither universal nor immutable, and while union membership may be on the decline, organizing in some sectors has rebounded, with public-sector unions often serving as a firewall to the imposition of austerity measures. The author should identify the potential social bases of the progressive urban movement he anticipates.

At various turns, Imbroscio offers poignant criticisms of the way in which corporate power diminishes meaningful democratic governance, and how market dynamics undermine the common good, but as it is currently proposed, LEADS is only a nominal alternative to this state of affairs. Without some broader political project to transform the market economy, it would seem that this LEADS strategy is susceptible to many of the same criticisms once leveled at “guild socialism,” which was, for some critics, no socialism at all. It is also not altogether clear what distinguishes the limited worker democracy, locally grounded consumer niches, and decentralization of the LEADS strategy from the participative-management schemes of the corporate mainstream, the revival of artisanal “small batch” production that flourishes in gentrified urban zones, and the policy devolution and privatization that defines our times. Imbroscio could do more to distinguish the emancipatory content of LEADS from these modalities of neoliberalism.

Urban American Reconsidered poses the right questions and will undoubtedly inform how urbanists think through matters of economic development for years to come. For scholars and activists who care about cities, Imbroscio has given us much to think about and a set of tools that may well fix some of the problems that endure in too many places.