Michael B. Katz has been one of the most prominent and insightful Americanist urban historians for a generation or more. He has also been one of the most astute historians of twentieth-century American social policy for at least as long. He brings both strains of his expertise to bear in addressing the current state of urban studies and its object, American urban life, in this rich and nuanced rumination on urban inequality, its sources, and its evolution.

Katz grounds his narrative on the crystallizing experience of his participation as a juror in a 2006 murder trial in which both victim and accused were black men who worked in the informal economy in an impoverished section of North Philadelphia. He takes their lives as an entry point for reconstructing, and humanizing, the complex trajectories of urban and metropolitan development since the beginning of the twentieth century and of their intersection with the dynamics that have reproduced racial inequality over that same period. Although the decision to treat the murder case as the narrative thread does humanize the book's account, it serves less well to tie together its discrete essays—the first three chapters had been published elsewhere previously—into a coherent theme. Nevertheless, the essays work together as discrete engagements with key issues bearing on race, inequality, and the meaning of the urban experience.

Among the most basic of these issues is what we mean by “urban.” As Katz indicates, the city/suburb juxtaposition, which has oriented the field for most of its history and which remains a resonant metaphor in the broader culture, no longer accurately describes the demographic, economic, or cultural organization of metropolitan regions in the United States. He notes that the image of the nucleated city, inscribed by Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), has largely lost its usefulness as a frame of reference for thinking about urban life. “Although still separate legal jurisdictions,” Katz notes, “it no longer makes sense to talk of suburbs and cities as if they were separate; they are economically and ecologically joined in a new kind of human settlement, the city region” (p. 41). As he observes, he is not the first to make variants of that point. His distinctive contribution in this regard is that he presents an account of the evolution of the city region that ties it to evolving metropolitan racial demography and provides a conceptual bridge to link that dynamic, in turn, to the changing character of black inequality.

The three chapters that constitute the heart of the book—“The New African American Inequality,” “Why Don't American Cities Burn Very Often?” and “From Underclass to Entrepreneur”—take stock of the sources, reproduction, and management of urban inequality and approaches to mitigating it. One of the most helpful contributions Katz makes in those chapters is his troubling of conventional accounts of black inequality by examining it through five “lenses”: 1) “participation—the share of African Americans who worked; 2) distribution—the kinds of jobs they held and the amount of education they received; 3) rewards—the income they earned and the wealth they accumulated; 4) differentiation—the distance between them on scales of occupation and earnings; and 5) geography—where they lived” (pp. 50–51). The main benefits of this approach are that it helps to break out disparate trends within the black population and that it enables a focus on specific dynamics that may be only indirectly linked to racial discrimination.

In this connection, for example, Katz challenges the familiar ecological narrative that attributes increasing economic inequality to blacks' arrival in cities as they were deindustrializing; he notes that only 12% of black male employment in 1970 was in the blue collar industrial sector, and by 2000 that had fallen to 8%. Instead, he argues, the retreat of the public sector and reductions in public sector employment have had a greater impact on black male employment. The most instructive conclusion of this account is that the black American population has become significantly more differentiated since 1940 with respect to occupation, income, and economic security. He puts the matter succinctly:

“It was through this process of differentiation—the accumulation of many small and not so small distinctions—that black social structure came to increasingly resemble whites' and that black inequality endured despite individual and group mobility.” Understanding these processes of differentiation can help us to tackle the “paradox of inequality: the coexistence of durable inequalities with individual and group mobility”(p. 75).

The chapter from which the book takes its counterfactual title is conceptually interesting but does not cover much new ground for political scientists. The answer to the chapter's question hinges on a combination of incorporative and coercive mechanisms that manage marginalization, five of which he considers crucial: “selective incorporation, mimetic reform, indirect rule, consumption, and repression and surveillance” (p. 86). His account of the interaction of these mechanisms to generate and sustain quiescence in the face of increasing inequality is fairly standard. He brings the historian's sensibility for nuance and complexity to an argument about how the different mechanisms play out in practice among the poor and reinforce one another. He notes the limits of minority political incorporation, but he does not consider the extent to which the emergence of the new black and Latino politics that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s is itself a dynamic element in those processes that maintain quiescence. This aspect of the phenomenon stands out especially in light of indictments and/or convictions of high-profile minority public officials, such as former mayors Kwame Kilpatrick and Ray Nagin, and former congressmen Jesse Jackson, Jr., and William Jefferson.

The book's last substantive chapter examines the evolution of what Katz characterizes as technologies of poverty work, by which he means “research on the history, size, demography, behavior, and geographic distribution of the poverty population, as well as the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of antipoverty programs and policies” (p. 113). He indicates that since the 1980s, market-based approaches to the mitigation of poverty have become increasingly prominent, ultimately commonsensical. That is consistent with the more general proliferation of market-driven public policy over that period, and Katz examines several of the most prominent antipoverty initiatives, including Enterprise and Empowerment Zones, microfinance, and individual asset-accumulation strategies. He finds those interventions generally not up to the task of alleviating poverty in the United States. This assessment is not surprising, as those approaches stem more from faith in market forces than consideration of poverty's sources.

One quibble concerns the author's contention that the imagery of an urban underclass, mired in self-reproducing cultural pathologies, has been displaced by this market-based perspective. I suspect a more accurate view is that the underclass imagery has become so deeply embedded as a commonsense understanding of the nature and sources of poverty and inequality that it is now an unarticulated normative premise on which the market-based initiatives are constructed. The latter are touted as much for their psychological as their economic empowerment. This understanding is as true of microfinance and asset-building strategies as it is of privatization schemes such as charter schools and the HOPE VI “mixed income” housing program that “deconcentrates” poverty while advancing the objectives of publicly supported rent-intensifying development. This is a small point, but it is significant because it shows that market-based and moralistic perspectives on inequality are not incompatible. Both assume that poverty stems from poor people's deficiencies and equally impel discussion of remedial action toward correcting or compensating for those deficiencies. Rhetorically and ideologically, each interpretation can depend on the other for commonsense verisimilitude.

For political scientists in particular, Why Don't American Cities Burn? underscores the importance of historical perspective in the study of urban politics, racial transition, and inequality. Katz's book joins a historical scholarship that includes Beryl Satter's Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (2009) and Robert O. Self's American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (2005), as well as his colleague Thomas Sugrue's earlier, foundational study The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (2005), in examining the complex interplay of social forces and concrete interests—ideological, institutional, and programmatic dynamics that have shaped and constrained postwar urban and metropolitan development.