As Arnold Hirsch, Thomas Sugrue and Robert Self have illustrated in groundbreaking works on, respectively, Chicago, Detroit and Oakland, California, race and racism were deeply embedded in the relationship between US urban decline and suburban growth during the twentieth century. In Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City, historian Colin Gordon defends this stance, and makes a convincing case for why St Louis, Missouri, located near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, was itself a bellwether of post-World War II politics of race, metropolitan space and housing.

‘St. Louis is a telling (and understudied) setting for understanding the broader patterns of modern urban history’, Gordon argues (p. 8). Adopting the nation's first home rule charter in 1876, St Louisans freed themselves from state and county government, but hemmed themselves in with fixed city boundaries that prevented future growth. The result was a dizzying proliferation of surrounding municipalities, fragmented and competing urban agendas, the shifting of political power and commercial development from the central city, and the insulation of suburban tax bases from St Louis. This tragically foreclosed the possibility of regional economic planning. Racial exclusion was the defining feature of these processes. Zoning and taxing powers, federal housing legislation, and private real-estate policies confined African Americans to the ageing urban core, and sorted white St Louisans by race and income to an expanding frontier of suburban single-family enclaves. Because the city had a long-established black community, white reaction to black spatial ‘encroachment’ was earlier, and harsher, than in many larger urban communities. In 1916, St Louis became the first city to pass a residential segregation ordinance through popular referendum. The law was later rendered void by a US Supreme Court ruling; yet, white St Louis realtors and homeowners pioneered other methods of apartheid in local housing markets, including restrictive covenants and residential security ratings coded by race. Although St Louis became the scene of major legal challenges to residential segregation, as in the landmark rulings in Shelley v. Kraemer and Jones v. Mayer, fair housing opponents reinscribed the St Louis region's racialized urban geography by other means. In the byzantine politics of ‘blighting’ and urban renewal, meanwhile, commercial redevelopment triumphed over residential rehabilitation, intensifying the black working-class poverty of the central city.

Knowledgeably argued, exhaustively researched and accessibly written, Gordon's book also employs the latest in digital mapping technology. His extensive statistics, maps and tables at times overwhelm the work, making it less than ideal for many social historians and general readers. As is true with Hirsch and Sugrue, historians of the African American experience may lament the scarce details about black St Louisans’ organized responses to exclusionary urban policy, and Gordon's overall lack of description of the black community. For brick-and-mortar urban specialists, however, Mapping Decline is nothing short of monumental.