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The title of Richardson Dilworth's edited book suggests a conversation between two sets of scholars who have not much spoken with each other. Students of cities seem adamant in their resistance to engaging methodological and theoretical advances in the study of politics. There are exceptions. Long-standing institutional constructs of machine and reform have been rethought; scholars of voting behavior have made immeasurable progress away from the hoary concepts of private-regarding and public-regarding voters. That said, few if any are formal theorists, only a scattering of scholars are in the American political development (APD) camp, and concepts introduced to improve qualitative research are not much in evidence in writing about cities. For their part, students of APD seem almost unanimously uninterested in urban politics.
The essays in The City in American Political Development join the two subfields in a variety of ways. Two authors recast and broaden our general understanding of city politics by linking familiar narratives about city government to the language of APD. Clarence Stone and Robert Whelan offer the best remapping of urban scholarship since Robert Salisbury posited, in 1964, a "new convergence of power" in city hall. Salisbury recognized systemic changes in urban governance attendant on urban renewal. Stone and Whalen see those changes as a durable shift in governing arrangements across many cities, involving multiple orders--government institutions, political coalitions, relations between economic and political elites, racial hierarchy, and the boundaries of civil society and politics. Similarly, Michael Jones-Correa shows that although observers long claimed that urban riots were without consequences beyond the damage they inflicted, riots are better understood as critical junctures. The riot reveals social and political maladies with new clarity and force, and so provokes medium and long-term changes in policy and public institutions.
Clarissa Hayward explains the importance of geography within the city. She argues that space is not simply the location of events; rather, space "significantly shapes social and political relations...